As marketers, we spend a lot of time creating communications initiatives that help people to visualise an intangible concept (like quality or value) in order to get across the real benefits of our clients’ propositions. Those of us in the Protean camp who are copywriters often have to do this using words alone. We call it ‘painting a word picture’. So I was fascinated to catch a programme on BBC Radio 4 called the “More or Less” show this Sunday evening past. Radio presenters can’t use images, so for me it was exactly about painting a word picture to ‘unpick’ large numbers being bandied around the news. So not necessarily intangible but often difficult to imagine.
An engaging challenge for the team was to find a way to visualise the US National Debt, currently standing at $14.3 trillion. The solution was to have listeners compare debt to altitude, starting with a crisp, fresh $100 bill and then imagining these pretty-thin banknotes (each just 0.004 inches thick) stacked up. It went something like this:
When the stack reaches the relatively modest height of 3 feet 4 inches, you already have one million dollars. Construct a stack the same height as The Empire State Building and you’ll have $375 million dollars. So it takes just over 2½ Empire State Buildings for the stack to reach $1 billion. At the top of Mount Everest (about 5½ miles) the pile is worth $8 billion. So it needs a height of 12½ Mount Everests to make $100 billion. That’s a stack of $100 bills nearly 69 miles high – a place where meteors are active! The stack has to shoot much further into space to an altitude of 9,030 miles before we reach $14.3 trillion.
How’s that for a fascinating word picture? But there’s more…
If some lucky family had a personal net worth of $14.3 trillion, and they spent it at a rate of $1 million per day, they (or rather their heirs) would take over 38,500 years to get through it all. If we go back in history that many years, we’d find Neanderthals roaming the earth.
UK residents can catch the programme online via the BBC iPlayer for the next few days and hear other newsworthy numbers picked apart, including a comparison of UK National debt using £50 notes (just over 1,560 miles), the budget of the UK National Health Service and the ’27 Club’ – the statistical likelihood of pop stars (e.g. Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix) dying at just 27 years of age. Enjoy.
Steve Chapman, Protean Technical Director steve@protean.co.uk
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