By, Andres Aguirre
The media landscape today is evolving at an extraordinary rate. The ways in which we create, perceive, process, and interact with information are fundamentally altered almost faster than we can realize. Whether it’s the new mobile computer technology such as tablet computers, or discovering a brand new use for an old apparatus, technology itself and the vast amounts of content that it brings are able to be structured, purposed, and formatted in virtually limitless styles.
The way in which the content is structured has much to do with the way in which the information can be used. Sometimes content on the web can be very broad and open-sourced, enabling cooperation and expanding creativity. It can also be streamlined and dispersed for a wide audience, or vice versa, funneled or filtered, and personalized to match a specific user or viewer depending on the intended purpose of the information itself.
The truth is whatever the intent, there’s an absurd amount of information out there, and because of this, getting your information into the right hands is quite complicated. If the intention is to sell, then simply placing your message ‘out there’ is not going to cut it. The chances of someone coming across your ad, clicking through, and then deciding to purchase are extremely slim, so as a result content structuring has become user-centered and highly personalized. People are constantly searching for ways to organize and simplify the content that they care about. The internet learns a lot about you and what you like, so it can filter and display relevant content based on your previous browsing patterns. Some examples of this are applications such as Flipboard for the iPad. It takes content that you and your close circles of friends are interested in, and it arranges and presents it to you in a coherent magazine-like format. Facebook and YouTube also feature algorithms for filtering and displaying only the content that is similar to the content that you have previously engaged in.
For advertisers, this user-centered tendency of organizing content means that you can have enhanced targeting online. You now have a better guarantee that your message will be relevant and more effective online. Yet, users will also become wary of this fact and you still have no guarantee that the user will engage in what you have to say and that it will transform into some sort of interaction with your business.
This is where Structural Graphics comes in. A highly engaging and interactive piece is hard to ignore. People will remember that 3D book cube with lights that popped out from a holographic folder, and the morphing roller with sound. Chances are highly likely that they will keep it, show it to friends and thoroughly digest that content because it’s not online, and it’s not competing for their attention in cyberspace. Instead, it’s completely demolishing those competing envelopes containing bills.
