Bethany Statham: Hall of Fame: WPP’s Reader-Friendly Annual Report (with Slides for Classroom Use)

Long and complex reports, such as corporate annual reports, can place a heavy burden on readers. Publishing these reports online presents an additional set of challenges, because readers can no longer just flip printed pages to skim content or establish context. Fortunately, the Web also provides new opportunities for structure and navigation that can make online reports easy to consume, if reports are crafted with readers' needs firmly in mind.

The London-based holding company WPP Group is the world’s largest marketing communication services firm, with more than 150 component companies involved in every conceivable aspect of advertising and related business activities. All together, WPP companies have nearly 180,000 employees in more than 100 countries. Trying to report on the annual progress of an organization this complicated is no easy task, but WPP’s intelligent, reader-friendly choices make its online annual reports easy to navigate and read.

The attached slides show eight screens from WPP's 2014 annual report, along with helpful annotations and lecture notes.

You can view the full report at http://www.wpp.com/annualreports/2014/
(When the 2015 report is eventually published, we assume it will be found at http://www.wpp.com/annualreports/2015/)

Bovee and Thill blog – Hall of Fame – WPP annual report

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