Florence Nightingale was born in 1820.
At that time women weren’t allowed to go to university, there was no point. So Florence Nightingale’s father educated her at home.
He taught her history, philosophy, Latin, Greek and, most unusually, mathematics.
She grew up as a confident, determined woman and took medical training. Then she formed and trained a unit of 38 volunteer female nurses. And in 1845 she took them to the Crimean war.
What Florence Nightingale found at the military hospital horrified her.
Wounded soldiers were dying in droves. Not just from injuries, many times more men were dying from disease than from battle wounds. Typhus, typhoid, cholera, dysentery and malaria killed over 4,000 soldiers in her first year working at the hospital. Most of it caused by defective sewers, malnutrition, overcrowding, and lack of ventilation. Conditions civilians wouldn’t live in but were thought good enough for wounded soldiers.
She decided to do something about it.
That’s the part of the story most people know: ‘The Lady with the Lamp’.
Here’s the part of the story most people don’t know
She came back to London to lobby Parliament to change the conditions.
She had masses of data but she knew that whatever she wrote, most MPs wouldn’t even bother reading it.
It would be too long and detailed for their attention span. They were bored and lazy.
She was an intelligent woman. She knew her audience.
She needed to deliver the information in a simple, powerful, hard-to-ignore way.
She needed to show data, facts and figures, but she needed more than that.
She needed Impact. She needed Communication. She needed Persuasion.
So Florence Nightingale invented a form of pie chart.
A simple circle showing the number of soldiers in the army. Then a wedge of pie cut out showing the number killed by the enemy, and another wedge showing the number dying from disease and infection.
Poiliticians didn’t have to read anything, no boring facts and data.
For the first time politicians could clearly see most soldiers were dying from filth and squalor, we were killing our own men faster than the enemy.
Her pie chart was so powerful it swept through Parliament like a bolt of electricity.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was briefed to design a new hospital immediately.
Staff were trained according to Florence Nightingale’s methods. And the death rate from disease and infection was cut.
From 42% to just 2%.
Thanks to Florence Nightingale’s pie chart, the Crimean war was the last war in which more British soldiers died from disease than enemy action.
Mainly because she was an intelligent woman and she understood her audience. And she used a powerful, simple, graphic presentation of data.
The learning for us is: it’s not enough to have the right statistics, the best strategy, the correct marketing. All the clever thinking amounts to nothing if no one reads it.
That’s why, the three main ingredients of a marketing campaign are: Impact, Communication, and Persuasion – in that order.
And that’s why Impact is far-and-away the most important, the sine qua non.
That’s what all clients, all media depts, all strategy depts, and all creative depts need to recognise.
Nothing happens without Impact.
That’s why it’s crucial to work out the environment your ad will be running in and the audience your ad is supposed to communicate with.
Clever thinking in limbo won’t do anything.
In the words of Bill Berbach, “If no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic.”