Starting in 1997, Microsoft users had to put up with a maddening animated paperclip icon – named ‘Clippy’ - which popped up when you started an Excel spreadsheet or a document in Word: “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” Unsurprisingly, most people opted for the ‘Don’t show this tip again’ tick box, and by 2002 Clippy’s short life was over. That didn’t mark the end of digital assistance however. Soon there were templates for the perfect website, and now anything that can be created on a computer has a ready-made format for the perfect whatever. Even your holiday photos can be treated with ready-made, easy-to-use filters. Time saving to be sure, but hardly stimulating: we select from the limited choice menu and hey presto, everything looks like everything else!
Have whitepapers suffered from standardization?
At some point did the template for the ‘perfect’ ICO and STO crypto project whitepaper also get standardized? Judging by the increasingly formulaic nature of whitepapers, the answer must surely be ‘Yes.’ Enterprises strive to tell us what is special and unique about their offering, but do this in a way so formulaic that it often seems simply cut and pasted from the last job done by the website agency. Surely the challenge is to match the brilliance of the content with a form which is every bit as exciting and engaging. Easier said than done of course. We hear phrases like ‘thinking outside the box’ all the time, but that’s actually damn hard to do.
The crypto industry is new and fresh, and yet many white papers look as if they've been turned out by a greeting cards studio (and not in a good way). Things have become as dull as the Microsoft paperclip, and just about as annoying. It's not just the design of sites course, it's also the challenge of saying new things in new ways, and that's down to both the start-up entrepreneurs, and the marketers who advise them. Sometimes daring to be different is one challenge too many: Hey we’ve already come up with a stunning concept for a product or service which will rock your world, and now you want us to convince you about it too? So the cliché drawer is opened, and all the handy, ready-to-use templates are laid out on the table. It’s almost as if the last part of the meal – the part where all the ingredients come together – doesn’t matter.
A few suggested embargoes
Clearly, we need to get some spice back into our communication, perhaps by starting with a self-imposed embargo on the phrases cutting-edge, seamless technology, and blockchain-enabled. Would it also be possible to hold an amnesty on the use of geodesic graphic backgrounds on websites, or digital countdowns to the ICO going live? Perhaps these devices were once ground-breaking (and there's another overused phrase), but now they are merely clichéd.
If the crypto world really is as exciting as we believe, shouldn't that excitement be reflected in the way we communicate? The word-of-mouth for a new movie is never: “You must watch this because it's incredibly boring!”
So why are our white papers becoming increasingly beige?