Reach for the sky, don’t write in it

I spent a week in Orlando, and saw what may be some of the worst marketing ever.

Every morning, right around eight, a skywriter posted the same message above Disney.

GO TO JESUS.

I have no problem with the message, but it is not conducive to the medium.

Here are three concurrent pics. (Click on them for more detail.)

You really wouldn’t appreciate the ephemeral nature of this script, other than for me to say that with the naked eye, it was almost impossible to make out the “GO” while the first “S” was being curled out of the contrail. The width of the lines in the G and O were about 20 times as scattered as the fine lines of “Jesus.”

Let’s ignore for a moment whether people would even get enough actionable information from the sentence GO TO JESUS. You can’t even get the entire message into place in time for it to exist in a legible format.

Are you a Skywriter?

We’ve all done it at one time or another. We pick a medium that we think will have impact, but the message just doesn’t fit.

• If you’ve ever cramped so many abbreviations into a tweet just to get the message into 140 characters, you might be guilty of Skywriting.
• If you’ve ever created a PowerPoint presentation that had no fewer than four bullet points on every slide, you were a Skywriter.
• If you’ve ever had to script out your away message to record into your voice mail, you are a Skywriter.
• If you’ve gone back and changed the font size on a document to less than 12px, just to keep it to a single page, then you are definitely a Skywriter.

Skywriting Violates Space and Time

The above examples all had to do with the sin of cramming more in than was needed, but our Go To Jesus pilot made another crucial error: trying to cram an eternal message into a disposable medium. If you have something important to say, then say it in a manner that will be searchable and findable. (And don’t count on some smart-ass communications blogger to make your exhaust permanent.)

It’s fun to be clever on Twitter, but given the high volume of noise and content, what you write today will be forgotten in an hour, and lost forever next week. Sure, you can scroll back through pages to find it, but it’s a medium for messages with temporal importance. If you have something really profound to add, write it elsewhere and link back to it.

If what you have to say is even more important, publish it. re-compose it as a PDF, or as a presentation. Package in a way where it won’t be forgotten, and put it in a place where it can always be found.

People look to the skies when they pray, but they don’t find the Gospel there. Thanks to the Gideons, it’s in the dresser drawer, right there in the hotel room.