Well, I’m sure that title may have brought at least a few folks who cringe at the thought (rightfully so in most cases!) of including audio on your website (the kind that plays automatically whether you like it or not).
But actually, it’s a sentence from a book that seems to perpetually be on my desk at my day job: Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.
I was reminded of an intriguing section from that book while reading an article today on the Church Marketing Sucks website called Making Sense Without Sense. In that article, Brad Abarre writes about being on a treadmill at a gym and watching television without the benefit of the wireless headphones that the gym provides — in other words, only seeing the video but not hearing the audio.
Without audio, TV becomes in someways a web site on auto pilot. An array of moving images and graphics that come together to tell a story. I kept watching to see if I could put the story together without the sound. It didn’t always work, but when it did, I am sure the gods of advertainment rejoiced somewhere.
The principle I want to talk about in this article doesn’t relate entirely to what Brad is trying to say, but I did want to mention the way my thoughts progressed because the Church Marketing Sucks website is worth adding to your regular reading list. I don’t always agree with what they have to say, but their writing is certainly thought-provoking.
At any rate, Brad’s article did remind me of this passage from the Call To Action book:
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
