Grading the Fortune 1000’s online annual reports
Dec 03, 2009
Feature-rich online annuals having a renaissance despite tight budgets
In 1999, when Nina Eisenman first produced an ‘Online annual report’ (OAR) report, she was thrilled to discover a lot of pioneering interactive annuals. Soon, however, PDF annuals or mildly interactive, automatically generated versions such as Mobular annuals became widespread and the young art of the multimedia annual report was ‘crushed’.
Now the interactive annual’s time has come again. Since notice and access rules first began to be adopted in 2007, few retail shareholders have been requesting hard copies. Print annual reports are being scaled back to the point that many companies may no longer be designing reports that can be turned into Mobular-like versions. Meanwhile, printing and mailing savings are freeing up budgets that could be spent on better online reports.
With the notice and access rule now in effect for all companies, 2009 was the turning point, says Eisenman. While a lot of companies are still putting up just a plain PDF or Mobular version, many are doing a lot more.
So Eisenman, CEO of Eisenman Associates, a Manhattan-based graphic and interactive design agency, teamed up with Elaine Palmer, PepsiCo’s retired head of corp comms, to resurrect her OAR report after a long hiatus. The new report examines the online annuals of the whole Fortune 1000 list of US companies.
Eisenman and Palmer were especially impressed by the use of video, with many companies progressing from talking-head videos to more narrative ones. Some have repurposed existing videos, such as recruitment videos, and adapted them to their annual reports.
Eisenman emphasizes that her and Palmer’s letter grades aren’t judgments. The report sets out the criteria that differentiate reports ranging from F for plain 10Ks, to C for documents designed for the web, to A for video.
It’s plain that the bigger the company, the more likely it is to have all the bells and whistles: the top 500 companies in the Fortune 1000 get 22 As, including nine for the top 100, compared to five for the bottom 500.
Eisenman was impressed at the number of creative elements. ‘Despite restricted budgets, we found that there were still quite a lot of companies that produced high quality 2008 web-based annuals with video and interactive features,’ she says.
Some of her own clients are naturally early adopters. Land O’ Lakes’ latest online annual had a CEO video along with videos about the company’s different businesses. Curtiss-Wright posted excerpts of recruitment videos to support the narrative section of its annual. For Maidenform, which prints a scaled back 10K wrap, Eisenman produces an award-winning online annual with lots of extra information. AFC Enterprises, the parent of Popeyes restaurants, uses its TV ads to emphasize its annual report messages.
The complete PDF report and a separate list of letter grades for the online annual reports of every Fortune 1000 company can be downloaded from eisenman.com/corporate/oar. They’re full of examples, both good and bad, with links embedded in the documents.
By Neil Stewart