In many ways, infographics are the oldest form of human communication and advertisement. Every cave-painting we find of beasts with spears sticking out of it is, fundamentally, simply how an early hunter chose to brag about his skills.
We’ve always found pictures to be one of the simplest and easiest ways of spreading our ideas, and that concept really hasn’t changed. It’s just evolved alongside us. The infographics video is the newest extension of this concept, and as it continues to grow in use, it’s becoming poised to be one of the important new communication tools of the future.
Here are just a few of the reasons that infographics video is on the rise, and likely to continue rising in the future.
- They communicate a lot of information in a viewer-friendly format. People are often put off by pages of charts and numbers. Putting your data into an infographics video allows you to convey a huge amount of raw information, while still presenting it in a way that people will want to watch.
- They’re cost-effective. Infographics video animations can be put together easily by a single person working on a common desktop computer. Unlike traditional animation, they don’t generally require difficult (and pricier) creative tasks such as detailed character design.
- They’re low-bandwidth. With the rise of mobile devices as Internet access points, bandwidth matters again. An infographics video can be compressed much more than a live-action film, allowing it to be more easily transmitted to people on limited data plans.
- They can be interactive. By using Flash or more recently HTML5, truly interactive infographics can be produced, even out of traditional video elements. These allow visitors to explore your information at their leisure, or mix and match data elements to find the trends they’re looking for.
- They’re generally culture-neutral. Modern online businesses have to be looking at a worldwide market, and that usually means avoiding advertising that’s too culture-bound. Infographics avoid being bogged down with culture-specific elements which might be alienating to foreign customers.
- They can often be produced without a heavy reliance on any language, or by using multi-lingual text.
Key takeaway: in short, infographics videos are a presentation format that’s perfectly suited for an online business looking to leverage the power of the Internet. Ignore naysayers claiming that infographics are on the way out. They’ll be with us for a long time to come.
