I was taken by Oracle’s Jeremy Ashley’s talk at DMI in Boston a couple of weeks ago.

At risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, of all the devices we use during the day, the one constant is a mobile phone.

In the world of communications, if you can’t handle mobile, you’re done for.

Have a look at Dave Trott’s book ‘One Plus One Equals Three’. It’s brilliant. Short, intriguing, factual stories which mean something and which you remember.

Dave’s work is perfect for this mobile world. Its content is bang on, you really want to read it and each chapter is short enough to work perfectly on a mobile phone screen.

How many businesses can say that of their communications?

Lawyers, engineers, insurers, banks all suffer from vast amounts of blurb they’ve slaved over that nobody ever reads. These are then overlaid with dull old images of people on the phone, office buildings and, in the case of banks, women smelling flowers or cycling.

It’s the laptop generation writing and designing for the mobile world.

Being brief and intriguing is the future of great communications, but then it always was. It’s what great advertising does so well.

Of course, the next challenge is how to make communications work on wearable devices. If my experience with an AppleWatch is anything to go by, even Dave Trott will have his work cut out.

 

Author: Richard Williams

Slide by Jeremy Ashley.