Advertising Primer 9: Media Planning

Media planning and buying involves researching and selecting the best media outlets through which to advertise, and then scheduling and purchasing the ads or airtime that will best fit the advertising strategy at hand.

Media Selection

Let's take a look at the major media vehicles available to advertisers:

1. Television:

Despite it's relatively high cost, TV is considered to be one of the most effective advertising mediums. Video is the most captivating format of delivering advertising messages. TV reaches larger audiences than any other media format. However, the popularity of TV advertising is its greatest downfall: so many ads appear on TV that it's often hard for your ad to get noticed among the clutter. Still, television is unquestionably the king of media outlets. This doesn't mean it's perfect for every ad message, just that it's the most popular in terms of advertising dollars spent.

2. Internet:

The first thing to note about online advertising is that this list is in order of most advertising dollars spent per medium. Yes, that's right: more money is now spent on internet advertising than for any other media format except television.

The internet is really a hybrid of existing media formats. Originally it was very newspaper-like as most web content was just text and photos. Today, it's a strong competitor to TV and radio for audio and video content as well. Internet continues to explode: a recent study showed a quarter of users sacrificed eating or sleeping to spend more time online. Since internet access is now moving to TV boxes and mobile devices, its pervasiveness and versatility will only increase.

Research shows that online display ads (banner ads and the like) garner higher brand recognition than radio or TV advertising.

The low cost of online advertising combined with it's many targeting options are by far its greatest advantages. Search advertising (Google text ads, for example) has an extremely low cost of entry and advertisers don't pay for impressions but only for clicks. Almost no other form of advertising allows you to pay only when your ad gets results. Further, internet advertising—in particular search advertising—allows for very specific targeting of audiences. By selecting keywords, topics, and even geographic regions where ads will display, advertisers can zero in on the audiences they wish to reach.

3. Newspapers

Poor newspapers don't get any good press lately. We're constantly hearing of their demise, but while it's true their circulation numbers have dropped substantially, they're probably not as bad off as you'd expect. Today, around 50 million newspapers are distributed around the US. That's off the 60 million or so for newspaper's high water mark, and the industry is certainly struggling, but newspapers still command a strong 3rd position among advertising media.

Newspaper advertising has two big advantages. First, research shows newspaper readers are more likely to be looking for something to buy vs. consumers of other media. TV viewers tend to be looking for entertainment and they find television ads distracting and annoying. Newspaper readers, on the other hand, often buy papers to view the classifieds and other ads.

Second, newspaper readers tend to view ads with more credibility. Newspapers are typically perceived as a more serious media than television, internet or other outlets. Studies indicate this perception actually carries over to ads displayed in newspapers.

Among other benefits of newspapers for readers is that they can hang on to ads and look at them again later (not as easily done with TV and radio), and of course this tends to benefit advertisers as well. Another plus for advertisers is that newspaper ads can contain lots of text listings (grocery or auto ads, etc.). Also, ad space can be reserved very near the last minute. Finally, newspaper readership tends towards older adults which is perfect for certain products and services.

4. Direct Mail:

Often easy to forget, direct mail is one of the largest and most effective methods of communicating with prospects. The cost for a large mailing can be high, but direct mail has the advantage of precise targeting through internal or external lists. Many companies offer paid access to mailing lists that can be very specialized and allow advertisers to precisely target their audiences. Direct mail tends to have low respect (let's be honest, when we say "direct mail" the consumer hears "junk mail"). However, response rates for direct mail are relatively high. No doubt this is in part because direct mail pieces are most frequently opened by a household's primary decider of purchases.

5. Magazines:

The magazine industry shares many of the same benefits and risks as the newspaper industry, but there are also a few distinct differences. For one, magazines have a longer shelf life. People tend to hang on to magazines for a weeks or months and refer back to them several times, whereas newspapers are thrown out in a day or so. Magazines are also of better quality so they allow for higher production standards and more visually appealing ads.

Magazines allow for better targeting than newspapers since they tend to focus on specific topics like hobbies, health, technology, etc. However, as with newspapers, ads in magazines are usually viewed with greater credibility by consumers vs. ads on TV or radio.

Disadvantages of magazine advertising include the high cost of ads and the long lead time required to reserve advertising space and submit ads.

6. Radio: If you have a very limited budget but still want to run a large number of ads for maximum repetition, radio may be your media of choice. While radio's heyday quickly faded with the rise of television, radio didn't go away. It transformed into a mobile medium. People tend to listen to radio in their cars or while picnicking or jogging (though that last use has declined with the advent of portable tape, CD, and MP3 players). However, radio listeners tend to be more distracted with other activities than TV viewers or print media readers.

Because radio is an audio-only medium, people tend to use their mind's eye to fill in the missing visuals, something that can actually increase their personal connection to an advertisement. Unlike other media, radio has the added benefit of being able to schedule or edit close to airtime.

7. Directories: Like direct mail, we often don't think about directory advertising, but advertisements in directories have several benefits. First, people browsing directories like phone book Yellow Pages are specifically looking for a source to buy a product or service. Second, around 90% of people who do make use of the Yellow Pages subsequently call, visit, or make a purchase from the listings they find. In fact, for every dollar spent on directory advertising, companies see at least one dollar in return.

8. Outdoor: This category includes all billboards and posters in public areas. It's the cheapest form of advertising and it's a good choice for branding campaigns. Billboard advertising is quite literally in your face. However, while outdoor ads can really stand out, viewers are often distracted with other activities. Studies show that unless a person consciously thinks about an advertisement for at least 15 seconds after they see the ad, the image will not be transferred to their long-term memory and will be forgotten.

Media Scheduling

Key to scheduling advertising is selecting the best time to promote your product or service to the target audience. Aperture is the term marketers use to define the moment in a person's day, week, month, or year when they are most likely to be receptive to ads for a given product. In other words, just before dinner time is a great moment for pizza and restaurant ads. Near tax time is a great time to advertise tax preparation services, and so on. For ads to be most effective, they need to be timed at these "Apertures" when audiences are most ready to respond.

Reach is the percentage of people in a given market who see an ad at least one time. Frequency is the average number of times people in that market see the ad. Television, for example, tends to have high reach because a larger percentage of Americans watch TV. However, TV is costlier than radio which means an advertiser might achieve greater frequency via radio using the same ad budget. Effective frequency represents the magic combination of frequency and reach at which people respond to an ad.

To be effective, TV ads must be viewed by individuals at least 3 times or more. Rarely will an advertisement have it's intended effect when it is only seen one time. One way advertisers maximize their ad dollars is by splitting ad exposure across cheaper media with high frequency and more expensive media with high reach. Selecting multiple media outlets for an ad campaign is called a media mix, and it's a crucial part of the media planning process.

One thing to watch out for is wasted reach: spending ad dollars on expanded reach to audiences that aren't interested or don't constitute your target market. Wasted reach is actually wasted money because no amount of advertising to these audiences will increase sales.

The actual number of times an ad is viewed (or heard) is called the ad's impressions. This is not exactly the same as the number of times the ad appears because impressions specifically count how many times people actually see or hear the ad. This means a newspaper's impressions could be smaller than its circulation if some of the newspapers are discarded and the ads are never seen. It also means the impressions could be greater than circulation if on average more than one person reads each newspaper.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) is a frequently used measure of cost efficiency for advertisements. It is simply put the price paid by the advertiser for every 1,000 ads that reach a target audience.

The length of time an ad will be run is called duration. In general, the longer an ad runs, the more response it will get until a certain point when the audience tires of seeing the ad. This point is called wearout. Like wasted reach, wearout should be carefully avoided as an overused ad can actually harm the brand by annoying and irritating audiences.

Continuity refers to whether ads are run at regular intervals (a continuous schedule) or if they are shown in bunches. A pulsing schedule means ads are shown at a certain minimum level at all times with ad frequency temporarily increasing during certain periods (usually during peak purchase times). A flighting or bursting schedule means ads are shown in bursts with periods of complete inactivity. These strategies are typically employed to extend an advertising budget and increase campaign effectiveness over time.

Avoiding Ad Clutter

One of the greatest difficulties facing advertisers today is the problem of creating and displaying ads that stand out against all the other ads on a given medium. Ads are enormously prevalent in our lives. So much so, that we have learned to tune them out. Advertisers must work hard to create ads that will capture (and keep) audience attention and then choose the media and scheduling that will most minimize clutter. Since all media suffer from too much ad clutter today, one way advertisers try to get around this problem is by sponsoring an entire hour (or more) of programming.

I can't stress enough how important it is for advertisers to put themselves in their audience's shoes and view ad concepts in light of ad clutter. When advertisers look at concept ads they often do it in a quiet meeting room or at their desk, staring at the ad for several minutes, discussing the ad, viewing it from different angles, etc. This is not how your audience will see your ad. In the case of TV, for example, audiences view your ad for 15-30 seconds sandwiched in between seven other ads and additional promos while they wait for their show to return. Or else they simply walk out of the room. Keeping this thought in mind will help you create and place better ads.

Advertising Primer 8: Defining Your Target Market

Rarely will an advertiser seek to reach every person or business in a given market. Instead, advertisers typically seek to break markets into segments using various methods. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a market into groups that share similar characteristics.

Targeting involves selecting individual segments to pursue with advertising and marketing efforts. These target markets are the foundation of any good marketing plan because they represent the groups of consumers (or businesses) most likely to purchase a given product.

Market Segmentation

Many different characteristics can be used to segment markets, including:

Demographics: Includes gender, age, education, income, race and ethnicity. These are generally the most-used characteristics of market segmentation.

Geographics: By grouping markets by region, geographic segmentation proves useful for advertisers who offer products or services in select areas.

Psychographics: This method of segmentation attempts to determine why certain groups of people make certain purchase choices based on their attitudes, interests, and opinions (AIO). By grouping people based on psychological factors, advertisers can reach segments that transcend traditional demographic or geographic areas.

Geodemographics: This is a combination method that groups demographic, geographic, and psychographic data to form more precise segmentation.

Benefits: The benefits segmentation method groups consumers based on the benefits they receive from a product or service. This method is similar to psychographics in that it attempts to gain insight from the needs and wants of the audience instead of innate characteristics of the market segments themselves.

Usage or Behavior: Often as few as 10% of a company's customers are responsible for as much as 90% of sales. Usage (or purchase behavior) segmentation attempts to identify these "heavy users" so the majority of advertising efforts can be targeted towards them. (Customers who purchase less often are called "light users.")

Business Segmentation

When marketing to other businesses, companies attempt to segment markets in similar ways. Like consumers, businesses can be segmented based on geographic location or product usage trends. However, businesses can also be grouped with such characteristics such as industry, business type, or business size.

Advertising Primer 7: Advertising Budgets

The Cost of Advertising vs. The Cost of NOT Advertising

So you've reached the perfect marketing strategy and created the perfect ad. Now you must decide how much you want to spend. Obviously, you (or your boss) doesn't want to waste money on advertising. The goal is to spend as little as possible to get your message out there.

But should this really be the goal? Frankly, most organizations work off the idea that advertising is an expense. They put this cost in the same column as janitorial services and utilities. And, if that's how one views advertising, it make sense to reduce that cost as much as possible.

Other organizations—usually more mature and more successful organizations—view advertising as an investment. They recognize that advertising is one of the few tools at their disposal to actually increase revenue and profits. And unlike utilities and other expenses, the more they spend on advertising, the greater their potential for growth.

Companies that view advertising as an expense usually put their money into promotional ads: the "buy now, call today" type of ads that position products as commodities and typically compete on price alone.

Businesses that view advertising as an investment more often turn to brand image advertising. They realize that the key to long-term growth is to build brand equity. Over time, they create strong, recognizable brands. Brands that develop deep relationships with their users. Relationships that result in customer loyalty even in the face of stiff competition or price wars.

Budgeting Methods

With that in mind, here are some common ways that businesses budget advertising costs:

What's-Left-Over Method: Also known as the "what we can afford" method, many organizations simply budget for all other expenses first and then allocate any remaining funds for advertising. Obviously, this method rarely results in effective advertising campaigns because no thought goes into the potential benefits of increased advertising.

Historical Method: This method merely assigns an ad budget amount based on the previous year's numbers, perhaps only increasing to account for yearly inflation.

Percentage of Sales Method: Uses the Advertising-to-Sales ratio (A/S) to determine how much to spend. The problem with this methodology is that it tends towards stagnation. Far too often, advertisers base sales predictions on last year's numbers instead of setting new sales goals and allocating ad dollars based on that projected growth.
 
Competitive Method: The competitive budgeting method bases ad spending on how a company stacks up against the competition. Specifically, this method estimates the company's relative market share vs. the competition's market share. Next, formulas are calculated to determine how much advertising will be required to increase market share a given amount.

Two percentages are considered here. First is share of voice (SOV). Basically, SOV is how much an advertiser spends vs. how much the competitors spend in a given product category or market. The second percentage considered is share of market (SOM), or share of mind. SOM is a measure of how much market share (or how much mindshare) is owned by each advertiser for the same product or market area.

These two percentages are then used to calculate how much advertising a given company needs to spend to increase their market share a certain amount. But here's the sticking point: research shows that advertisers must increase their SOV by three times their desired increase in SOM. So consider that your company has a 30% market share which you want to increase to 50%. This means that for a 20% increase in market share you will need to increase your ad spending by 60% (3 x 20%). The bad news is that advertising does come with a cost. The good news is that this cost can result in real-world growth.

Objective/Task Method: Where the competitive method looks outwards, the the objective or task method looks inwards. The advertiser using this method is concerned not with where the competition is going, but where their own organization wants to go. This approach can be rather sophisticated, with advertisers considering specific growth in specific sub-markets and formulating elaborate budgets to achieve those growth objectives.


Some content for this series was derived from course notes from Introduction to Advertising, UC Berkeley Extension.

Advertising Primer 6: Appeals and Executions

The title of this article may sound more like a criminal law topic than one about advertising. But we're talking advertising appeals and executions here, not criminal ones, and when the time comes to actually create your advertisement, these are two of the most central concerns. How you will appeal to your audience? What methods will you employ (or execute) to deliver your message?

In addition, you will need to consider what kinds of creative strategies will underlie your approach. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is the stage where you create the ad that will transform your message from concept to reality.

CREATIVE STRATEGY

So let's take a look at some of the basic types of creative (or "message") strategies. It's important to remember as you review these that rarely are most ads exclusively one type or another. Instead, advertisers often mix rational elements with emotional ones, or place promotional pitches inside brand-image advertisements, etc.

Reach the Head or the Heart?

• Cognitive Strategy: This approach to advertising seeks to convince the audience through rational argument. The advertiser is using logic and reason to convince the viewer. This is the "head" approach and it emphasizes features/attributes, differential advantages, competitive strengths, claims and proofs. Cognitive strategies often come in the form of comparative ads, hyperbole ("the best on the planet!"), and unique selling propositions. Ads with a cognitive approach are typically considered a "hard sell"; they may or may not be forceful in their approach, but they will certainly be direct.
• Affective Strategy: An affective strategy usually seeks to reach audiences on an emotional level. The goal is to touch the viewer through emotions and feelings. A resonance approach seeks to connect with people's experiences. Either method will make use of emotional appeals. These ads are considered "soft sells" because they are indirect and instead attempt to make a connection with the heart.

Change Preferences or Stimulate Action?

• Brand Transformation Strategy: With this approach, advertisers seek to establish a brand identity or personality. Brand personality exists when a relationship is formed between the consumer and the brand itself independent of the actual functions or benefits of the brand. One way this is achieved is through the use of associations (with a type of person, a lifestyle or other characteristic). A good brand transformation approach will create attention, awareness, interest, recognition and recall. 
• Perception, or Persuasion Strategies: Here, the goal is to change attitudes about a given subject (perhaps a brand, perhaps not), and/or to create conviction and preferences. Persuasive ads often make use of unique selling propositions.
• Behavior (or Conative) Strategy: The goal of this strategy is to stimulate action. We are concerned less with what our ads make people think, but what it makes them do. Behavior ads will usually have a clear call to action, a point in the ad that directly asks the audience to make a purchase, call a phone number, visit a website, or take some other action.

Unique selling propositions

A brand's Unique selling proposition (USP) is the simply-stated benefit that a brand promises to provide the consumer. A good USP must truly be unique to the brand. That is, you can't advertise a feature that every one of your competitors also offers. It also has to be something the consumer actually cares about. Finally, an effective USP must be a feature or benefit that the audience finds believable.

The USP might be delivered directly in a purely information ad, but most often it's indirectly communicated. For example, the obvious (though not stated) USP of the Wendy's "Where's the beef?" ads was, "Wendy's hamburgers have more meat." Like the Wendy's ads, good ads leave no doubt as to the USP of the brand being advertised because they clearly connect the USP to the actual creative execution.

APPEALS

Appeals are specific ways advertisers connect with their target audiences. These represent the foundational channels of all human communication, but each kind of appeal is only appropriate (or effective) for certain kinds of messages. Let's take a look at the major types of appeals:

Rationality: Here of course we're talking about "head" as opposed to "heart" appeals. Rational appeals attempt to provide all the information the audience needs to make up their minds. Therefore, print media are often selected for rational advertisements because they are condusive to lots of text, charts and diagrams. Print ads also may involve the reader for several minutes, whereas a TV spot may be over in as little as fifteen seconds and have little time to convey much information.

It's easy to feel that all ads these days target the emotional side of consumers. However, while it's true that most ads have shifted from information-heavy content to soft sells, many products and services are much better served by rational appeals. Businesses-to-Business advertising, for example, frequently involves selling complex or technical products or services that would not benefit from emotional (or only emotional) advertising appeals.

Emotions: In the golden era of advertising, ads were all about convincing the consumer with long swaths of text copy. Today, advertisers realize that humans are emotional animals. We are more likely to use our emotional response than our intellect to make everyday choices, even when we think we are making decisions based on reason. Among other benefits, emotional appeals have been shown to grow brand loyalty. Emotional appeals create personal attachments with brands and these attachments can turn into long-term bonds. Even B2B advertising has increased the use of emotional appeals from as low as 5 percent to around 25 percent. Because video combines visual images and sound, this format is best suited to emotional appeals.

Humor: A great attention getter, humor is used in about a third of all advertisements. Humor grabs attention and helps the audience remember the ad. However, advertisers must be careful to tie the humorous elements directly to the message of the ad. Humor must also be carefully targeted and delivered to the appropriate audiences. We all know that some people have a greater sense of humor than others. Also, what may be funny to one group of people may be explicitly offensive to another.

Fear: Usually this appeal is more memorable than upbeat or neutral ads, but if too disturbing,viewers may turn away or tune out the ad altogether. I shouldn't have to mention that using fear—like any kind of emotional appeal—carries ethical risks. While it might be hard for a homeless shelter to overstate the plight of their clients, it probably would not be appropriate for a business to frighten people into buying an air purifier by telling them their children will get cancer if they don't.

Scarcity: This type of appeal is pretty self-evident. Scarcity appeals are meant to do one thing: create action because of the fear of limited time or availability.

Sex: For better or worse, ads often use sexual or suggestive appeals. And while it's almost certainly overused as an advertising appeal these days, sex is literally a fact of life, and we mammals have been using sexual appeal to communicate for millions of years.

Sex appeals range from merely romantic inclinations to outright nudity (rare in the USA, but more commonly in other countries). Turns out, ads with sex appeal do grab attention, but people tend not to remember the brands being advertised—they're too distracted by the sexually charged content, it would seem. They also tend to remember the visual components of the ad and tend not to remember audio or text content.

About the only time suggestive appeals are effective is when the product being sold actually relates to sex. (So sorry car part catalogs, those bikini babes are not helping you sell more wrenches.) Also, sexual suggestiveness may be more powerful than outright nudity since the viewer's mind is free to fill in the blanks or the situation presented in the ad.

Music: Musical appeals have been shown to capture the attention of viewers. In addition, they actually increase the rate at which audiences remember other ad content because the human brain often stores memories of music in long-term recall areas of the brain. Further, music in ads can make ad content more persuasive.

EXECUTIONS

Executions are certain common types of ad formats. Just as movies may be animations, dramas, or documentaries, there are many ways to present creative strategies and appeals. Here are a few of the more common executions:

Straightforward or Informative: This type of execution simply transmits information unfiltered and direct to the audience without gimmicks or drama. Straightforward ads are best suited to products that require "high involvement," that is, products that require lots of information and research before the customer buys. Business advertising often employs this format. One type of straightforward ad is the news format, in which a product is presented as new or original or in a newscast-type presentation.

Demonstration: Similar to a straightforward ad, a demonstration ad shows how to use a product or service, and how it can benefit the user.

Comparison: Usually also straightforward, comparison ads simply compare the product or service being offered with competing brands and show how the advertised brand is better. The comparison may be direct (identifying the competitor by name), or indirect (merely alluding to the competition).

Slice-of-Life: Slice-of-Life ads depict common situations that the target audience may find themselves in and shows how the product can help. These ads may also be called Problem Solution or Product as Hero ads. The corny and ever-popular "As Seen On TV" ads come to mind here ("Does your car have scratches? Are your closets disorganized? We have the product for you."). Businesses use this ad format to great effect as well.

Dramatization or Fantasy: Dramatizations are usually just more sophisticated slice-of-life ads, employing a more Hollywood feel to the presentation. Fantasy ads provide a framework for communicating difficult or risky messages, such as romantic or suggestive themes. Dramas sometimes use illustrative techniques like animation or computer graphics.

Related to dramas and fantasies is the concept of strategic alteration of reality, which is a fancy way of saying the ad twists a familiar situation or object(s) into something unusual or unexpected. This is done in such a way as to point out a unique feature or selling point in the product being advertised.

Authoritative or Spokesperson: A celebrity spokesperson appears in about 20% of all ads today. In fact, so many ads use celebrities front-and-center or as narrators that "regular people" are used with increasing frequency. Not all spokespeople are celebrities. Sometimes CEOs are used, or experts in the field. These individuals may not be well known (though a long-running campaign may turn them into celebrities). In general, celebrity endorsements are more convincing to younger audiences than older ones.

Obviously, it's not enough to choose celebrity based on fame alone. They must be likable, credible, trustworthy and somehow relatable to the product or service being promoted.

Testimonials: This is another advertising execution that is particularly effective with B2B marketing. Testimonials are also a good choice when marketing services since the spokespeople can help flesh out an otherwise intangible product. The idea behind testimonials is that they add credibility to brands because the sales pitch is coming from a happy customer instead of the advertiser.

Teasers: These ads do something dangerous: they don't actually give enough information to identify the product or brand being advertised. However, they are great at generating lots of interest and curiosity about a new product and are usually followed by ads that reveal the product at or near the time of launch.

Shockvertising: This creative execution employs loud, outrageous, or controversial deliveries to arrest audience attention. This type of technique carries obvious risks and should only be used when it can complement the product or service being advertised.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON CREATING EFFECTIVE ADS

Visual elements are more easily remembered than text or dialogue. However, viewing an image doesn't require as much brainpower as reading or listening to words and then creating an image in the mind's eye. So whenever possible, try to coax the viewer into creating their own mental image of the scene—this will establish a more personal connection with your ad and your audience will remember it longer.

Vampire creativity or borrowed interest occurs when an ad is so creative that people remember it, but don't remember or associate the brand being advertised. In my opinion, this is a huge problem with national brand image ads today. I can't tell you how many ads I've seen and can remember in detail except for exactly what the ads was promoting (jeans? beer? a car?). Again, be careful to always connect the creative concept with the brand itself.

Last, here are some general guidelines for creating powerful ads:

• Keep your ad simple.
• Select and clearly identify a primary selling point.
• Repeat your tag line or primary selling point several times in the ad.
• Make your ad visually consistent.
• Run your ad long enough to be seen more than once or twice.
• Vary your ad's content and outlets. Don't lull your audience to sleep. Create variations to your ad so it's not identical every time the audience sees it. And complement ads in one media with similar ads in other media. 

Some content for this series was derived from course notes from Introduction to Advertising, UC Berkeley Extension.

Your Website May Be Invisible to Millions

The American Foundation for the Blind estimates 10 million Americans are blind or visually impaired. Other research indicates at least 11 million are deaf or hearing impaired.

Nearly everyone faces vision and hearing difficulties later in life. In America, as with most developed countries, our population is aging and thus our vision- and hearing-impaired population is growing. So if you operate a website, you can be assured that your website has been visited by someone who has trouble seeing or hearing.

Sadly, many websites don't bother to consider the millions of users with disabilities. There are innumerable examples, and below is just one, taken from the BlackBerry website. This text has been enlarged to illustrate how very tiny the original text was. The gray text in particular was so small that lowercase letters were only 5 pixels high! Plenty of young eyes can see this well (though strain kicks in for them too after awhile). Older eyes or people with visual impairments simply can't read text this small. And of course, this page offered no way to enlarge the type.



Some countries legally mandate accessible design for websites. In fact, the US government requires all federal sites and those who receive federal funding to meet minimum standards of accessibility. This could some day be extended to all commercial websites. For now, it's a good idea for all site owners to ensure that their sites meet the minimum Section 508 guideliness (of the federal Rehabilitation Act).

You may ask how you can possibly build a website that can be viewed by blind users. Special software is used by blind or vision impaired users that reads aloud on-screen text. However, these "screen readers" only work if there is text to read and many websites use images to display headlines, logos or other text. These blocks of text are not actual digital letters but rather images of letters. Therefore, screen readers can't interpret them unless the web developer inputs hidden code to describe the image.

It should be pointed out that accessibility does not equal usability. It's perfectly possible to create a site that meets the basic level of Section 508 standards but is not easy to navigate or use. This is why it's so critical for organizations to consult with a professional designer who has a sound grasp of typography, composition, layout and information architecture, etc.

Our firm works hard to ensure every site we build meets the minimum level of accessibility standards. Most of our clients are nonprofit agencies and often many of the clients they serve have disabilities. However, businesses serve individuals with disabilities too and we can't think of a reason why commercial clients would want to build their site off-limits to a large percentage of the population. To us, it just makes sense to build accessibility into every website we create.

So what makes a site accessible? Without getting technical, there are really two basic principles needed to make a site accessible to users with disabilities. First, make sure images have "alt text," the hidden text that describes an image for users with visual impairments. Second, provide a plain text description of any content that is inherently visual or audible in nature. For a video, provide a transcript of any dialogue (for deaf users). For interactive modules, describe the actions and functions of the modules.

One other easy thing you can do is make sure the text on your website is easy to re-size. Some web browser software allow you to lock the text size. Other browsers allow the user to override locked text, but often the designer has coded the site in such a way that text disappears as the font sizes are increased! This may sound unusual but it's actually a common problem.

It's actually pretty easy to make your site accessible. Which is what's so frustrating about the state of the web: since building accessible sites is not terribly difficult, it's a shame more sites don't do it.

iPad Screen Resolution vs. iPhone 4

So was reading about how newspaper fonts don't display well on an ipad (at least if you just dump your print pages over as images) and it occurred to me: The ipad screen dimensions are barely more than the new iphone 4!

ipad:     1024 x 768
iphone4:   960 x 640

So that's .78 megapixels for ipad and "only" .61 megapixels for the new iphone.

This (iphone 4) really does have an insane resolution for any electronic display: over 300 dpi. It truly is incredible tech-wise but I'm not sure how much it will matter (meaning I think it's overkill).

If anything it will simply undercut the comparative utility of the iPad. Another weird design decision by Apple, in my opinion. I wonder if consumers wouldn't give up some of those pixels on the iPhone to save $50, or if they would be willing to spend $100 or so more on the iPad to get a better (HD maybe?) resolution.

I guess this is just another example of why people were shocked at the under $1,000 sticker price for the iPad but then generally underwhelmed in so many ways with it's technical specs.