AS CORPORATE reporting moves increasingly to the web, annual report designers are learning that it’s incredibly difficult to create attention-grabbing online communications.
We often see their feeble attempts in the form of online annual report splash pages, covers or homepages. If you’re lucky there’s some dancing text and flashing video, but most often even these attempts to engage fall flat.
The exceptions are few and far between. There was Westpac’s tomato throwing animation in 2001 (still makes me smile), and PepsiCo’s “eat, drink and be merry” opener in 2000, which is still online if you’re interested.
Now there’s Wienerberger AG, the big Austrian brick maker, professing that it doesn’t give a damn about its 2007 annual report. The company explains why in a section of the report called “Investmentstory.”
And it isn’t lost on me that it takes a company with such a boring product to be the most creative company we’ve seen all year.
Go see for yourself (tip: let the page drive itself)
Update, April 15: I’ve heard from a couple of people who say the screens transition too fast and they cannot read the text on each screen. I agree now that I’ve tested it on a computer with a smaller screen. Goes to show how difficult it is to do these things in a way that works for everyone.
IRWebReport.com was founded by Dominic Jones in February 2001 to promote best practices for online investor relations communications. All articles on this website are unpaid editorial. We do not take freebies of any kind and we do not write about any company with which we have a business relationship without fully disclosing that relationship in the article itself. IR Web Report accepts sponsorships from those companies identified as sponsors in the right sidebar. Anyone is able to see our sponsorship rates. Without sponsors, we will not be able to continue publishing IR Web Report on a regular schedule.
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