by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

One of the most powerful ways to move an audience to action is to quantify your value proposistion in a way that stirs the imagination. To understand this principle, consider these two statements:

1. We should all turn our computers off at the end of the day to save energy.
2. If everyone in America turned off their computers at the end of the workday, it would save $2.8 billion and 20 tons of CO2 per year, and enough energy to power the Empire State Building inside and out for 30 years.

Both statements are true (the latter coming from a recent report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy), but only one makes you seriously consider shutting off your computer today before you go home.

The American Issue Project recently ran an ad campaign critical of the federal stimulus bill with this use of quantification:

“Suppose you spent one million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born and kept spending through today. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.”

What these quantifications do is make an abstract concept concrete, even visual in the first instance: you can almost see the Empire State Building lit up like a Christmas tree in the night. That’s the power of quantification.

It’s March, that time of year when tens of millions of Americans fill out their NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament brackets. They compete against office mates and total strangers on the Internet to pick the eventual champion or earn the most points in a scoring system that is now part of America’s collective unconscious. The estimate of up to $4 billion in workplace productivity lost due to bracket maintenance doesn’t seem to bother too many folks either.

Then there are the hundreds of millions of dollars wagered on this three-week event. So what in the world can get a guy from New Jersey remotely interested in the California State University Northridge Matadors? It’s the whole bracket thing, this interactive, highly visual view of the tourney that requires a simple series of binary decisions—yes/no, win/lose—leading to a champion. It is engaging because of its visceral tangibility.

Interestingly, it is this same visceral tangibility that has fueled the populist outrage at the AIG executives’ bonuses. Politicians in Washington are mortgaging our grandchildren’s future with trillion dollar deficits, and most folks find these staggering figures incomprehensible, and therefore unreal.

But with the mental image of an AIG executive getting handed a million dollar check, made possible by all those IRS deductions on your paycheck, things get very tangible, very fast.

Well, whether we take our cues from the NCAA or from AIG, these brackets and bailouts have the one thing in common that marketers need in order to to sell their products, services and ideas: visceral tangibility.

Here’s the formula, the secret sauce of marketing:

Something That Creates an Emotion + Something That Can Be Visualized = Something That Generates a Response.

It’s why benefits sell better than features.

It’s why storytelling always kills PowerPoint.

It’s perhaps why, if the government bailout had called for the AIG executives to play a tournament of one-on-one basketball to see who gets the full $165 million, nobody would mind too much. We’d be too busy filling out our AIG brackets.

Below is an ad that appeared in WIRED Magazine recently:

No, it wasn’t a fake ad from the The Onion or Saturday Night Live.

This was some misguided marketer’s idea of finding some obscure virtue in a deadly, addictive product.

What was surprising is that it appeared as a special heavy-weight paper bind-in ad in a magazine read largely by savvy, young, technically adept people who hopefully saw the same macabre humor in this that I did.

But I’ve been wrong before, so this may have been a really effective ad.

One can only hope it failed miserably.

Time’s lethal effect on closing a business deal is conventional wisdom. It’s truer in some industries than others. But in nearly all cases, the longer it takes to close a deal, the more that gets negotiated away.

Time gives the buyer (whether of a new house, an engineering contract or a new television) more time to re-think the wisdom of the purchase.

The current recessionary economy has people taking much longer to make consumer and B2B purchasing decisions. This slows cash flow and often creates a downward pressure on price.

In a brisk economy, time is more valuable than money. In a slow economy, the opposite is true.

This principle could be visualized as follows:

Is there any way to beat this principle? Or is there some way to leverage it?

Beating the Time-Kills-Deals Effect

Time can be an ally in relationship building. Just as parents found out a decade or two ago that “quality time” with kids is no replacement for “quantity time,” so can business make use of the additional quantity of time between pitch and purchase.

This longer courtship can be used to share more ideas, collaborate on solutions, maybe even break purchases or contracts into smaller, more economically digestible bites while still arriving at the same destination. It puts a bit more “give-to-get” pressure on the seller, but it may be worth the risk.

Leveraging the Time-Kills-Deals Effect

Example: Taiwanese netbook computer-makers have realized huge profits by creating a computing device that does 90 percent or more of the tasks for which most people use their larger, more expensive laptop computers. As shoppers slow down and rethink their actual computing habits, they realize that a computer can access nearly every program imaginable remotely: email and web browsers, of course, but also office document production and photo retouching can be accessed for free without buying any boxed software. The time that consumers are taking to rethink computing is creating a huge market for a smaller, lighter netbook computer that costs a fraction of a power-hungry, feature-laden laptop.

So as the time-money continuum bends in favor of buyers over sellers, opportunities are ripe for harvesting by creative, generous companies ready to shape-shift to new economic realities. Small and midsize businesses will be more successful at this than big corporations, as smaller companies are more nimble.

And besides, they won’t be getting a big stimulus check from the government any time soon.