So What?: How to Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience

CHAPTER 5WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM?

"WRITE YOUR INJURIES IN DUST AND YOUR BENEFITS IN MARBLE."—BEN FRANKLIN

Released in 1968, the groundbreaking movie 2001: A Space Odyssey showed us what life would be like in the twenty-first century. In one scene, Dr. Haywood Floyd, who is aboard the Aries Shuttle, wants to contact the Clavius Moon Colony to speak with his family. He does what any space father from the future would do. He uses the phone to call home. Floyd rings from a hands-free videophone with a 20” display that even takes credit cards.

In imagining the future, perhaps director Stanley Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay (along with Arthur C. Clarke), was inspired by the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where AT&T first presented its breakthrough ...