By Dominic Jones | Published: February 26, 2008 | 
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Acergy S.A. gets my attention, then squanders it
WE all have limited attention spans. Mine is about 20 seconds. Make an impression within those first few moments and I’ll give you more of my time. Squander it and I’m gone.
Harder still is to even get within my field of vision. There is so much information competing for my attention at any given time that I tend to be very focused on what I want to do.
I ignore extraneous rubbish, like banner adds and spam and PR pitches from people who think IR has something to do with infrared technology, which is curiously abbreviated IR (infra-red, get it?)
So when this company called Acergy S.A. caught my attention, it was something of a miracle. The odds were stacked against them and they still managed to get on my radar.
I don’t recall how it happened exactly. I was on Yahoo! Finance, doing something else, when the headline of their news release at 3:59 pm caught my eye:
“Acergy SA Annual Report and Notice of Annual General Meeting”
I clicked the headline to learn more and got a news release:
Usually, I wouldn’t bother, but that URL in the second paragraph held so much promise. I knew it would take me directly to the annual report, so what the heck. Let’s go see:
I don’t know anything about Acergy S.A. I think they’re Norwegian. And they might be in the oil services business.
I honestly have no idea. And I’m not going to bother finding out because I’m not downloading that PDF. I don’t have to.
Back. Back. Continue with what I was doing.
IR is a competition for attention. Acergy lost.
Their 20 seconds are up.
P.S. How much staff time and money went into producing that report? A lot, right? And the news release announcing the availability of the report costs more than the online version of the report itself! Doesn’t that tell you something about the quality of decision making at the company?
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February 26th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
and your point is?
February 26th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
The point is that it’s pointless.
To spend a lot of money on reporting systems, on writing, on design, and then to destroy it all at the “last mile” by putting zero thought into how people will interact with and consume the information is dumb. To spend more on the news release announcing the availability of the report than on converting the report for online use is dumb.
They might as well just not bother. It’s pointless.
February 29th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Are online AR’s over-rated?
Do IR departments have limited budgets?
The press release announcing the new AR would have cost maybe $300 (it’s a word-count short release). An online AR for us would run between $35,000 and $40,000.
You’re somewhat right. After spending a large amount of money and time on the printed version, it would be nice to be able to take it one step further and do an Online version. However, spending an extra $40,000 takes a huge amount of an already tight budget.
So where do you allocate your resources/funds? Augmenting the whole site, a re-design, more interactivity, or an online AR?
What I need are cold hard stats that tell me that there is a definitive business case for the online AR. Beyond the ‘idea’ that it would be good to have an online AR, and beyond the push for digital agencies trying to add another slice to the revenue pie, how many users would actually use and benefit from the online AR?
Yes, I am absolutely aware with usability and am a huge believer in it. However, cost vs. benefit has to come into play at some point.
Should we skip the online AR and simply invest those $40,000 into XBRL technology? Especially for a 200 page book like ours. Do people just want to ‘read’ the information or do they want to model and compare our data to peers or others in their portfolio? Form (visual) vs. Function (xbrl/data)??
As far as the pointless press release goes, sure we could debate the notion of RSS vs. traditional newswire. But really, it’s all about Integrated Communications. Reaching multiple audiences using multiple mediums. Kind of like the AR vs the Online AR. Some people can do both and some can only afford the basics.
I’m a one man web team managing 5 sites. Priority being the main corporate site. Point being, I can only do so much. I have to pick the things that will cover the most amount of users for the whole site, not just the IR section.
Point is, it is easy to criticize without knowing the whole story about a company’s website, budget, or capacity to maintain their website. Everyone is different. Trust me, it’s not easy keeping up, let alone get ahead with technology or sometimes even the basics.
Keep up the dialogue, it’s the only way everyone will learn and help each other on this crazy web road!
Cheers!
February 29th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Hi Mitch,
Thanks for adding some meaningful perspective. This post isn’t about what companies should do with their annual reports, it’s about landing page optimization and thinking like a user. But on the topic of HTML reports, I gave my views on the question of whether online annual reports are a waste of money a while ago. I don’t think they are, but it does depend on how much you spend and what you spend it on. I do not believe you need to spend $35, 000 to $40,000 to provide a useful online annual report in HTML. You don’t need bells and whistles, but I cannot get away from how important annual reports are to investors as a discovery and reference source. All the past and recent surveys support this.
In the particular example in the post above, I’d put the cost of converting the annual report to PDF at somewhere below $1, the amortized cost of the PDF conversion software. All of the cost to the company is related to preparing the document for print.
I never explained in the post what this company should or could have done, just that they didn’t do anything to optimize the landing page. There was a lot they could have done without providing an HTML annual report. The news release wasn’t pointless, it’s what it directed me to that was pointless.
For one person, you’re doing an amazing job, but you need more resources.
February 29th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Mitch,
I wouldn’t normally, but here’s a suggestion. Like many companies, your annual report is currently filed as a 10K with the SEC. Take that large HTML blob and convert it to a navigable HTML report that has printable HTML pages. Add a scoped search.
Here’s an example that was done automatically using a custom script, but I’d recommend something more manual. It’s not high-end, but it is practical and supports people who want to quickly retrieve a specific piece of information. It also supports those serious types who rely on filings for their research prior to making a decision. Estimated cost is $5,000, about the same as one of those unusable image-based documents.
You could do more to make this document a shareholder engagement tool as well, but it is primarily a definitive reference document.
March 1st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Hmm. It seems to me that if you have no patience to read my annual report PDF, I question how much patience are you going to have as an investor. I’m looking to increase my shareholder value by building meaningful relationships with long-term investors.
I have found that my investors, both institutional and retail, understand that they need to put some skin in the game - not be shallow nor have blind faith - they need to read and research investment materials.
Your comments… “I don’t know anything about Acergy S.A. I think they’re Norwegian. And they might be in the oil services business…And I’m not going to bother finding out because I’m not downloading that PDF.”… is a ridiculous critique. Why would you POSSIBILY be looking for anything on their investor section if you do not know what they do to begin with?
Lastly, get off the whole PDF blob thing. 5+ years ago, PDFs may have been more problematic as an online document ( they were invented origially as a common ground for send files to print shops) but TODAY, PDFs are excellent online, they globally accepted AND they LOCK and assure the content I offer online is EXACTLY what was approved by our insanely regulated content process . I don’t have enough time cycles as it is now.
Mitch is right. You’re too isolated. Get out of your den.
March 1st, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Fred (if that’s your real name),
Why did I arrive on their website? Because they invited me. They put out a news release, which I happened to see. That release included a link in the second paragraph, which I decided to click on because it promised immediate gratification. I wasn’t planning on researching this company, didn’t even know anything about them, but I was open to the possibility of learning more.
But when I followed that promising link, they presented me with an almost blank screen containing nothing but a PDF download. There is nothing on that screen that is attractive or informative. Nothing that hints that it might be worth my while to download the PDF. Which I would happily do if there was an incentive to do so.
But they don’t seem that interested in telling me their story or connecting with me. And as an investor, I have thousands of other companies competing for my attention and better things to do. And since I’m online and in control, and wasn’t really planning on researching this company, I’ll just leave, learning nothing. That is a wasted opportunity for the company. And it happens hundreds of thousands of times per week across tens of thousands of IR websites.
This company didn’t have to spend a lot of money on some fancy online report to get my interest. They just had to think. Just a little. Two minutes, a couple of sentences might have been enough.
This piece is not about PDF blobs or what you should do with your annual report. This is about being able to anticipate the experience people will have when they arrive on your site. But since you brought it up, to say that PDFs are what regulators require was the case 5+ years ago. Ever heard of interactive data? The web is moving on from the “page” to the web of factoids and relationships. That content locked up in your unstructured PDFs is useless in this new data-driven world.
But that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that the company gave zero thought to what people would see when they arrived on that page they linked to in their release. That’s like an advertising firm designing an expensive online ad and then not optimizing the landing page that people go to when they click on the ad. You’d never do that in advertising, so why is it OK in this case?
Why is it that you can’t, or won’t, see that? Put aside whatever problems you have with me personally and think about it objectively. And if you still think what this company did is just fine, then I’d suggest you stop reading this blog because there’s nothing you can gain from it.
March 6th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Any reason why you didn’t click on ‘About Us’ Dominic when you came across that page? That way you would have discovered all you wanted to know about the company AND spent your time thereafter debating something far more worthwhile. Thanks for the entertainment though.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Peter,
Add something useful. Educate us all. What proportion of traffic to an IR page like this goes to About Us? You’re in the biz, so I assume you’ve run the stats.
Look forward to your contribution.
March 6th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Really does vary from issuer to issuer Dominic so no hard & fast rules. That said, assuming most users are like me (probably a very dangerous assumption!)if they come across a company’s website they’re not familiar with, I would suggest they click on ‘About Us’ or similar to find out more.
March 6th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I just figured this would be something you’d have at hand since your company designs and sells websites. So you don’t do research or source it elsewhere before recommending a design, or am I not understanding what you’ve just said?