Stephen Gamble - Visual Content Marketing: Leveraging Infographics, Video, and Interactive Media to Attract and Engage Customers

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Copyright 2016 by Stephen Gamble. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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I would like to dedicate this book to whoever is or had been placed in a role where an exciting offering or approach is in play but nobody, including your clients, the marketplace, and perhaps even the staff, is getting it. You are not alone, and this book is your rallying cry and plan and inspiration to get your audience to a point of understanding and engagement.

I would like to start with my family and my mother, Betty, and my father, Fred, for laying the foundation for me to pursue my career and passions wherever they may lie. I would like to thank my son, Adrian, for always being a sounding board and always bringing his keen intellect to whatever point intellectually or professionally I might be advancing. And for my three-year-old son'Dylan'I'm thankful that he brings a sense of wonderment as we tackle life's big problems like whether a dinosaur is stronger than a tiger. I would like to thank Dean Proessell, who in my philosophy graduate days drove me into the deeper waters of issues around philosophy of language and metaphysics over extended and spirited debate tables at our local coffee shop. I would like to thank Peter Bulko, who introduced me to the complex world of technology and Wall Street and softened my entrance to the nuanced layers of technical applications and business functions as well as the corridors of Manhattan itself. I would like to thank Joseph Singh, with whom I have had the opportunity to work along side of at three companies and to learn the fine craft of consulting and the difficult path of navigating professional services delivery with go-to market excellence.

And finally, I would like to thank Katerina who, besides providing me the privilege of being her life partner, has been a steady rock in making Frame Concepts operational and a sounding board for every new idea we come up with in the always changing adventure of tackling pressing business communication challenges with visual solutions.

For the last six years, Stephen Gamble, as the founder and CEO of Frame Concepts, has been solving the most pressing business communication challenges for some of the most complex offerings in the world. Stephen began his career as a mechanical engineering technologist in the 1980s and returned to complete a master's degree and doctorial studies in philosophy, focusing on philosophy of language issues as well as teaching philosophy and business subjects at City University of New York and the Metropolitan College of New York.

Stephen returned to the business world as lead corporate trainer in a large marketing agency in the 1990s and then focused on technical communications and marketing financial applications in Wall Street. Stephen jumped head first into the fresh startup movement in the late 1990s into the 2000s as the lead marketing resource and chief marketing officer for a wide array of technology startups that focused on a wide range of challenging and technical subject areas, including Linux-based operating systems, global IT lifecycle management, electronic bill presentment and payment, meta-data architecture, mobile trading applications, cross channel social marketing applications, B2C and B2B ecommerce platforms, cross-border data privacy, information lifecycle management, and business intelligence solutions. In all of Stephen's career and academic experiences, he has been in the trenches face-to-face with the burden of explaining dense and complex subject matter and provoking audiences to engage with a point of view or offering being advanced. Such wide and deep experiences makes Stephen uniquely poised to write this book.

The content of this book in layered in three parts. Part 1 presents argumentation that there is in fact a business communication challenge and information design and that visual solutions are the most effective way to overcome these challenges. The arguments presented in Part 1 are partly to convince the reader about the viability of visual solutions. However, given that the reader has purchased this book, he or she may already be a visual solution convert and is looking for a sustained argument to overcome management and the budget office to enable his or her organization to leverage visual solutions.

Part 2 assumes everyone is onboard with a visual solution and provides practical advice on the different type of visual solution providers, how to scope in the projects, and how to manage the creative process.

Part 3 is a visual showcase to show through example how a variety of industries, professions, and organizations are putting visual solutions into action. The hope is that it may drive ideas for their own practices and also be a compelling argument, in light of its sheer magnitude, that visual solutions have a part to play in business communications.

All of the visual samples in this book were created by Frame Concepts, so I thought it made sense to say a word or two about Frame Concepts. Frame Concepts is a visual solution agency formed in 2010 by the author of this book. It boasts arguably the most comprehensive suite of visual solutions dedicated purely for business communications. At first it focused on infographics, but quickly spread to interactive solutions, process pictograms, and animated infographics. It then blossomed into data driven applications, including a nuclear spare parts visualization tool, a global financial interactive risk map, and a multimedia interactive Accounting Association timeline, to mention a few.