another advertising graph

I feel conflicted when it comes to the use of graphs in advertising. I like it in theory. But in practice, I tend to be disappointed with what I see. Almost like the designers couldn't come up with anything better, so they threw in a graph. Perhaps it's just my nature, but also when I see a graph in an advertisement, I'm immediately skeptical - it's like I start with the hypothesis that the creator is trying to mislead me. I'm not sure what drives that. Obviously, I like the use of graphs to communicate information; what is it about graphs in advertising that gets under my skin?

Last month, I enjoyed reading your comments on the vacuum graph. Last week, I came across another advertising graph in a fashion magazine:

I can outline specific things I would change in the above visual. But beyond that, it's interesting to me that my first reaction to data in advertising like that depicted above is skepticism vs. improved understanding.

What is your reaction to the Neutrogena graph? Have you seen examples of data and data visuals used successfully in advertising? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

how I would visualize this data

A couple weeks ago, I posted the following visual (prompted by a question that came up at a recent workshop), along with the challenge to come up with a better way to show this data.

Big thanks to everyone who spent time with this data and shared what they came up with (see full original post, plus comments linking to reader solutions here).

I found myself with some unexpected free time this afternoon (that hasn't been happening so much lately!) and spent a bit of it playing around with this data. There were a couple challenges I was looking to address in my solution:

1. First, the inclusion of Unaided Awareness. I can understand why it's important, but it doesn't seem to quite fit with the other categories, as many of the reader comments pointed out. Rather than complicate my visual with it, I omitted it entirely. Perhaps it belongs on another page of the deck that walks through this data?
2. The other challenge from my perspective is that the remaining categories are each a sort of subset of the prior category: those who prefer a given brand are a sub-portion of those who would consider the brand, which is a sub-portion of those who are aware of the brand. I think this means that it doesn't make sense to stack the bars, or to compare only a single category at a time across the different brands as some of the user makeovers suggested.

For me, the goal here is to get a quick visual understanding of how the three categories for OUR COMPANY compare to various competitors, as well as how the three categories compare to each other. The goal is for our bars to be big to the right. There are many competitors with bigger bars than ours. But the ratio of Consider to Aware is actually pretty good for us (better than many competitors). Here is how I chose to visualize this data:

It isn't particularly creative. But perhaps it doesn't need to be. In the original visual, the two main things I wanted to change were 1) the idea that you should compare only downward - the layout of the original charts left me wanting to compare competitor A to E to H (first column), whereas really I should be comparing OUR COMPANY to each of the various competitors (not only those within the same column); and 2) center aligning the bars as is done in the original makes the relative values hard to compare, so I wanted to align each element to a single baseline to allow for easier comparison both within a specific brand as well as across the brands.

To those who read this blog regularly, my choice of a horizontal bar chart here probably isn't a surprise. I use them a lot. I use them a lot because I think they are easy to read. Note that this example isn't totally complete - there's still a story to be woven around this data to make it relevant to our audience. Given that I've anonymized the example so much here, I decided to focus just on the data viz in this case.

I think this works here. What do you think?

In case you're interested, the Excel file for the above visual can be downloaded here.

how would you visualize this data?

I had a follow up session yesterday with a group that recently went through one of my custom workshops. It was really great to see and hear how participants have been able to put what we learned to use and to discuss where they are facing challenges and strategies to overcome them. One participant recapped what they took away from the session: enhance what's important, tone down what isn't, and question the question!

We also looked at some specific data they were having challenges visualizing and had some fun experimenting with possible solutions on the whiteboard. There was one that we didn't get to that I want to share here for input:

Click here to download the data in Excel.

A few comments on the data:

• In the original, "Competitor A," "Competitor B," etc. were actual competitor names, which I've generalized here (and in the downloadable data) to preserve confidentiality. 
• Unaided Awareness, Awareness, Consideration, and Preference are in regards to the given company's brand. This is sometimes known as the "purchase funnel". The data is collected through a survey; percents represent the percent of the total sample population. 
• Unaided Awareness is the % of people who know the brand off the top of their heads (for example, What brands come to mind when you think of shampoo?).
• Awareness is in response to a list of brands: Which of the following brands of shampoo are you aware of?
• Consideration is which brand a consumer would consider purchasing.
• Preference is which brand a consumer is most likely to purchase.
• Conversion (highlighted in title) is the percent of people who move from one funnel step to the next (what percent of aware people consider you, etc.)

The intent is to be able to compare the brand of "OUR COMPANY" along these dimensions to the various competitors, as well as get a sense of where our opportunity lies.

I think this could be done more effectively than it is here. I have a couple ideas, but am lacking time at the moment to try them out. So I thought I'd solicit your help. How would you tackle this visualization challenge? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

Note: please link to your visual if you create one; you can embed a link in your text comment with the following HTML (replace the parts in blue).
<a href="http://www.link_you_want_to_insert.com/" target="_blank" >text to link</a>