Sample Campaign for Fictional Data Breach

Infographic:

Digital Presentation:

Video Pitch:

OPM Security Breach

58.25 Seconds

Word Count: 739

Talent	Narration	Visual	Timing (seconds)
Female newscaster	The Office of Personnel Management revealed this morning that two cyber security breaches occurred in April and May, affecting some 4.2 million employees.	Newscaster is standing outside Theodore Roosevelt Building, headquarters of the OPM. Ensure lighting is sufficient; if not, use supplemental lighting but do not move interview indoors: we need the majesty of the OPM building in the background as an anchor. The location is all-important (Cooper, 2013). Ensure that dark gray address block (image here) is behind the news reporter, taking up about a third of the frame to the right.1 Reporter should be dressed in blue as well but with yellow2 accents.	0:00–7:60
Beth Cobert	Personal data were accessed by as yet unknown persons. So far, we haven’t found that the data have actually been used in a detrimental manner, but the OPM is working steadily to ensure that our employees and their families suffer no negative consequences as a result of this breach.	Shift camera angel to include Cobert in view but try to keep the address block behind either Cobert or newscaster. Ensure Cobert is dressed in a medium or dark blue suit3 with white blouse4; any jewelry should be understated. “Acting OPM director Beth Cobert” appears at bottom left of frame—include extra information without adding to the video length (Hunter, 2018). At “steadily,” cut to 5-second pre-recorded footage of call center agents at OPM Crisis Call Center, then to 5-second pre-recorded footage of investigating agents interviewing federal employee and family; no audio on either except Cobert’s voice-over. Pre-recorded footage is being used to illustrate Cobert’s assertion that the OPM is actively working with affected families.	7:60–22:08
Female newscaster	What about future breaches?	Cut to only female newscaster.	22:08–23:86
Beth Cobert	I’ve launched an aggressive review of our IT. And we’re working on preemptive monitoring services for all federal employees so this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.	Cut to have only Cobert in the frame, centered but turned slightly toward news reporter.	23:86–31:15
		Scene cuts to federal employee in a house. Living room scene, should be slightly cluttered with the debris of a young family; wife sitting next to him on neutral couch, children crouched playing with the family dog on the floor in front of them on a dark rug. Ensure all four are wearing plain, neutral clothing so as not to detract from the message (Cooper, 2013).
Federal employee	We were very concerned. Social security numbers, credit cards, bank statements…	Camera close-up of only employee.	31:15–35:37
Employee’s wife	When John called to tell me, I spent the next hour on the phone with the special call center the OPM set up. They were very helpful and had all our information ready right away.	Camera cuts to close-up of only wife.5 At “special call center,” cut to 1.5-second pre-recorded footage of female call center agent nodding understandingly while perusing information in front of her, then cut to 3-second pre-recorded footage of employee’s wife’s information scrolling on agent’s computer screen. Ensure that text is blurred to prevent information from being disclosed, while ensuring that profile photo of employee’s wife is visible and recognizable but slightly blurred as well.6	35:37–43:09
Federal employee	And if something does go wrong, they’ll take care of us.	Camera zooms out to encompass both employee and family.7	43:09–45:59
Female newscaster	The OPM is partnering with the FBI, Homeland Security and the Department of Defense in a government-wide, interagency review. If you believe that you or anyone you know may have been affected by this breach, contact the OPM at the number below for details.	Scene change back to female newscaster in original situ: in front of OPM building with address block encompassing right third of frame. OPM online resource website URL and general public-facing telephone number8 scroll across the bottom of the screen to supplement call to action (Cooper, 2013).	45:59–58:25

Production Notes:

1. Dark gray of address block is similar enough to black to convey authority, prestige, metaphorical weight. Purpose and primary goal of this video is to reassure and persuade the general public that their government can keep them safe.
2. The color yellow denotes positivity (SNHU COCE Assistive Technology, 2015), which the OPM sorely needs at the moment.
3. The color blue denotes trustworthiness, dependability, and responsibility (SNHU COCE Assistive Technology, 2015); since the goal of this video is to reassure the general public and prevent them from losing faith in their government and also in the current Obama administration, non-verbal cues such as color will be helpful in presenting a trustworthy image.
4. The color white represents nobility and purity, both qualities that the OPM needs to project (SNHU COCE Assistive Technology, 2015).
5. Secondary goal is to preserve the image and reputation of the federal government, and therefore the current administration.
6. Pre-recorded footage is meant to illustrate the OPM’s measures already in place to mitigate the effects of the security breaches for families affected.
7. Video presents breach information in a new way by showing the public that even though the breach happened, it was caught and blocked in a way that prevented the use of said information. It also provided the opportunity to enhance employment benefits (ongoing identity and fraud monitoring for all federal employees), and to reinforce IT architecture by upgrading to more secure technologies.
8. The telephone number is meant to allow the audience to access the OPM general-public-facing content even without access to the Internet.

References

Cooper, P. (2013, April 12). Top Ten Tips for a GREAT Corporate Video. Retrieved from Bailey Cooper Photography and Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tc7LBx7XzE

Hunter, K. (2018). Module 6 Overview, COM-610-X3062 Communication by Design.

SNHU COCE Assistive Technology. (2015, October 29). COM-610: What Do Colors Mean in Logo Design? Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t5QmqlJkxo

Memo: Visual Elements and Underlying Methodology

Research-based techniques and sound visual communication principles have been employed in the crafting of the infographic, PowerPoint presentation, and video script contained in this toolkit. The purpose of this memo is to provide you with an overview of the visual communication principles and methodology that have informed the various elements of this toolkit, and to provide justification for the design decisions made.

Infographic

The rhetorical situation (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011) comprises the following elements:

• Audience: the infographic is developed for journalists. While it is possible that the targeted journalists may include those outside the United States, it is far more likely that “internal” concerns such as privacy and (a relatively obscure branch of) the federal government will fall to a domestic audience. As such, the design decisions described below assume, for the sake of past experience (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011), that the audience is American and can be expected to follow Western design protocols (SNHU COCE Assistive Technology, 2015) and conventions (as opposed to Eastern traditions).
• Purpose: As it is imperative that the federal government “write” the story and therefore control the narrative of the security breaches, the communications team feels that delivering a polished, fully formed infographic that journalists can absorb the pertinent facts from quickly, with a link to the full press release for further information that they may require, is a superior option to simply providing the journalists with the full press release, from which they may extract those facts which would be detrimental to the OPM’s reputation. The purpose of this infographic is to persuade the journalists—who in turn will persuade the public—that though the OPM suffered a significant setback, we have matters well in hand, are responding to the crisis vigorously and appropriately, and furthermore, are taking care of our federal employees. These three elements will naturally be extrapolated to speak to the ability of the federal government as a whole to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our citizenry.
• Context: the infographic will be released as a digital vector file with working hyperlinks; the file can be scaled up or down as necessary for the individual journalist’s method of dissemination, and can be printed out and displayed on screen as desired. The text and graphic elements of the infographic have been designed to be quickly and easily absorbed, and to be distributed using a variety of media without needed to be significantly altered.

Infographics are a quick, concise and very targeted way to share information with an identified audience. An infographic is not intended to relate a “whole story” (Skerik, 2011, paragraph 6), but instead to summarize thatstory to catch the reader’s attention. It is easily scannable—as Ahad and Fauzi point out that in general, people don’t read so much as they scan information (2014)—and easy to understand.

            The typeface used is Cooper Hewitt, a “contemporary sans serif” font (Jenkins, 2014); while the OPM’s style manual (http://www.governmentattic.org/16docs/OPMstyleGuide_1993.pdf) suggests the use of serif fonts for better readability, a sans serif font is more appropriate for the context as the latter looks more objective (Kostelnick and Roberts, 2011, p. 138), which is a tone we are striving for to avoid the implication that the OPM is canting the facts one way or another and acting in a less-than-transparent fashion in doing so.

            The color scheme of the infographic is deliberate: as this is a presentation for an internal audience, and as the OPM already has established guidelines as to color schemes that reinforce its branding, the specific shades of gray-blue (#bcd1d8) and burgundy (#7a5962) were picked directly from the OPM website using a hex color picker and used to form the infographic’s (as well as the presentation) basic color theme. This ensures that the OPM’s branding is reinforced, and suggests that the OPM stands behind the information presented even if negative.

            The specific colors were chosen for metaphorical impact. Burgundy was chosen for its relation to red, which is used to gain attention (SNHU COCE Assistive Technology, 2015), and the blue derivative to denote trustworthiness, dependability, responsibility, and security. Gray (near the header) is a subtler, background derivative of black, which denotes prestige. These are all qualities the OPM must exude at this challenging time.

            As the imperative is to transfer a significant amount of information in a limited space, the communications team made extensive use of graphics and icons to convey meaning without the use of text. All images and graphics contained in the infographic were sourced ethically and responsibly: all images were obtained from Pixabay.com, Pexel.com and Unsplash.com under the CC0 license, Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, and the public domain in the United States (as a work of the federal government).   The infographic shows discrete grouping patterns, where grouping was achieved using background color (white and blue-gray) and graphics. The repetition of the background colors is a pattern that preserves continuity and keeps the reader’s focus on the infographic, whereas the grouping allows the reader to move from one set of information to the next (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011).

PowerPoint Presentation

The rhetorical situation (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011) comprises the following elements:

• Audience: the audience for this presentation is internal to the OPM. Specifically, the presentation is tailored to a team of customer service agents that the OPM is training to address the concerns of their federal colleagues who have been affected by the security breaches.
• Purpose: to provide a high-level overview of why they are being trained, what information they will be disseminating and the specific tone (of reassurance and support) they will be using in their one-on-one conversations with those of their colleagues who call in. The secondary purpose is for the c-suite to persuade the customer service team that though they themselves may have been affected by the security breaches, they too are in good hands, and they too have access to numerous resources to safeguard their information, their families and themselves. If the customer service team—who, as federal agents, may well have been affected by the breach—are persuaded to be reassured that they are being taken care of, then they may be better able to reassure their colleagues calling in, and provide factual information.
• Context: the customer service agents will be watching the presentation on a large screen in Meeting Room F, and the presentation will be conducted by a member of Kellie Riley’s staff. As the Chief Privacy Officer (U.S. Office of Personnel Management), Ms. Riley’s staff has been “in the trenches” with regard to the security breaches, and will be able to provide the most up-to-date information available to the call center staff, and will also are in the best position to answer questions and assuage concerns.  The team will already have received their training schedules, and will be handed a hard copy of the training manual that HR has put together as they leave the meeting room. They will not be given a copy of the presentation to refer to, so it is important that the information on the slides be easy to understand and quick to digest.

As with the infographic, the color scheme for the slides was deliberately chosen. As this is a presentation for an internal audience, using the OPM’s own color scheme reinforces the reputation and branding elements to the audience, lending familiarity, credibility, and authority to the presentation (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011).

Additionally, as the customer service agents are federal employees, one can reasonably assume that they are U.S. citizens or at least permanent residents, and not non-U.S. citizens or those on temporary visas (USAJobs). One can further assume that most OPM employees were either raised in Western society or have spent sufficient time in the U.S. (especially in the case of permanent residents, for whom a residency requirement to spend a certain amount of time in the country each year exists) to have been exposed to Western cultural norms and traditions pertaining to colors and fonts. Color and design conventions, therefore, adhere to Western conventions and not to Eastern conventions (SNHU COCE Assistive Technology, 2015).

The background of the slides is blue-gray to once again invoke familiarity and authority (of the OPM), along with the OPM seal, which will be familiar to OPM employees. This branding lends credibility to the presentation, therefore persuading the customer service staff that the OPM is in control of the security breach. The use of this specific shade of blue-gray, however, does invoke issues with Gestalt principles, specifically the reduction of figure-ground contrast (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011) and may therefore affect legibility; in order to circumvent this issue (and to preserve the OPM branding), the communications team opted to use a larger proportion of graphics in the storytelling, rather than straight text. This will also have the added benefit of being faster to grasp and to retain (Skerik, 2011, paragraph 12).

The presentation also makes extensive use of layout patterns to deliver the necessary information effectively (Ahad and Fauzi, 2014). The F-Pattern, Rule of Thirds and the Gutenberg diagram are all used; a specific example comprises the last two slides. The Gutenberg diagram tells us that the terminal area is the best place for a call to action. The penultimate slide features calls to action places as closely to the terminal area as possible without encroaching on the OPM seal; in the last slide, while not specificall a call to action, the final message of reassurance and support is also placed in the terminal area along with the OPM seal.

Best practices suggest limiting the use of text-heavy slides (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017), and so graphics and icons come heavily into play (but without animations, transitions and special effects) to ensure clarity and speedy absorption.

While this is presentation is a piece of customer service training, those being trained are also federal employees who may have been affected by security breach and who are therefore concerned about themselves and their families. In acknowledgement and for the purposes of sensitivity, the communications team believes it appropriate to use a selection of humanizing images alongside icons and line graphics, and to include a story about one of their own colleagues to bring home the urgency of the issue, and also to persuade them that the OPM understands the weight they are carrying on behalf of employees and families.

Note: All images and graphics contained in the presentation were sourced ethically and responsibly; all images were obtained from Pixabay.com, Pexel.com and Unsplash.com under the CC0 license, Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, and the public domain in the United States (as a work of the federal government). Attributions are given where required (and even when not required) under these licenses.

Video Pitch

The rhetorical situation (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2011) comprises the following elements:

• Audience: this is a video that will be distributed to the general public, the consumer audience. Given that this video involves a domestic branch of the federal government, it is unlikely that any international viewers will be involved.
• Purpose: the OPM has suffered a significant setback in its endeavor to protect the privacy—and personal and financial information—of its own employees. The purpose of this video is to persuade the general public that the federal government is acting on its behalf to safeguard said information, and to protect its own employees—and by extension the American citizenry that the federal government represents—from those with malicious intent.
• Context: this video will be broadcast on television news channels at prime time to lend gravity and importance to both the breaches as well as the government’s response and action steps, and also to reach as wide an audience base as possible (more Americans consume their news in the evening than in the morning, and use television in their consumption more than other media such as newsprint, the Internet, and the radio (American Press Institute, 2014)).

Once again, the various color themes and elements used in the production of this video pitch are deliberate. As can be seen in the production notes, the opening scene takes place in front of the imposing Theodore Roosevelt Building, specifically with the dark gray address block behind the newscaster. Location is critical in a video (Cooper, 2013), and the color of the address block lends prestige and majesty to the interview (SNHU COCE Assistive Technology, 2015) reminiscent of the reputation and authority of the federal government. The individuals’ clothing takes advantage of color theory as well: the reporter’s as well as Ms. Cobert’s blue denotes trustworthiness, dependability, and responsibility; Ms. Cobert’s white represents nobility and purity, both of which qualities that the OPM needs to projects; and the reporter’s yellow accents suggest positivity and optimism, again qualities that the OPM needs to project, but all the more effective in persuasion for being exuded by a neutral third party (as it is the media’s function to serve as an objective source of news).

Best practices suggest that keeping a video short, under two minutes preferably, is optimal (Follett, n.d.); a news channel will likely have even less time. We have kept the length of the video to approximately a minute. Follett (n.d.) also recommends that the main message be placed in the first thirty seconds of the video; therefore, the video begins by tackling the security breaches head-on. This grabs the viewer’s attention and thus lead to a higher chance of the reader watching the rest of the video.

Follet (n.d.) and Hunter (n.d.) recommend the use of a story to illustrate a point; we have included an interview of an affected family as well as pre-recorded footage to describe how the security breaches are affecting real, tangible families as well as to illustrate the steps that the OPM is taking to protect and support said families. The family of the federal employee also has a humanizing effect on the entire situation: not only do they represent those affected adversely by the breach, but they also humanize the federal government, representing the very people who are reaching out to others to help them, as opposed to a distant, faceless government entity.

Cooper (2013) advocates the use of a call to action near the closing of the video; therefore, the newscaster ends her report with direction to contact the OPM. Along with the telephone number, since video has the delightful—and thoroughly useful—ability to present a variety of information all at once, the call to action includes online the resource website URL scrolling across the (television) screen.

Ethical scripting is very much a concern in the crafting of this video. As there is ample room in a video to appear to be endorsing products or services, inadvertently or otherwise, the following precautions are being taken to prevent any allegations of unethical behavior:

• No mention of companies involved in credit monitoring or identity theft and restoration, nor of those involved in cybersecurity or those or develop cybersecurity apps and tools for the public will be included in this video pitch. This includes any incidental “sightings” of company names and logos in the background in any of the scenes. This precaution avoids ethical issues arising from a failure to clearly “identify a client/sponsor” (Wulfemeyer & Frazier, 1992, p.5).
• Another potential ethical concern is the guaranteeing of results or actions that may be beyond the control of the entities involved in mitigating the effects of the data breaches (Wulfemeyer & Frazier, 1992). The video and preceding materials—including the full press release—all state that numerous resources and avenues of help will be made available to those affected by the security breach, but care has been taken to avoid any implication that federal employees will be protected from all future breaches; or that those affected will not face adverse consequences as a result of the breaches.
• As the entire tone and messaging of the video lies with its producers and other staff involved in the production, Human Resources (HR) performed exhaustive reviews, in collaboration with the communications team, on the staff’s portfolios and prior work (along with the requisite background checks) to ensure that they are capable of ethical scripting and that there is no evidence of ethical concerns such as sub-standard fact-checking or lack of objectivity.
• Care has been taken to ensure that at no time have editorial tools such as special effects and software enhancements obscured pertinent facts or otherwise changed the narrative. While certain images were enhanced—to bring Cobert’s face into better clarity in sub-optimal lighting conditions—no enhancement was made that altered or fundamentally changed the actual story (Patterson & Wilkins, 2018).

References

Ahad, D. & Fauzi, Z. (2014, July 12). People Don’t Read, They Scan. Retrieved from Stampede: http://stampede-design.com/blog/people-dont-read-they-scan/#.Vcdv8EWEs4Q

American Press Institute. (2014, March 17). How Americans get their news. Retrieved from American Press Institute: https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/how-americans-get-news/

Cooper, P. (2013, April 12). Top Ten Tips for a GREAT Corporate Video. Retrieved from Bailey Cooper Photography and Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tc7LBx7XzE

Follett, A. (n.d.). How to Write a Killer Explainer Video Script. Retrieved from Video Brewery: http://www.videobrewery.com/blog/how-to-write-a-killer-explainer-video-script/

Jenkins, C. (2014, September 10). Cooper Hewitt: The Typeface by Chester Jenkins. Retrieved from Cooper Hewitt: https://www.cooperhewitt.org/open-source-at-cooper-hewitt/cooper-hewitt-the-typeface-by-chester-jenkins/

Kostelnick, C. & Roberts, D. R. (2011). Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Pearson Education, Inc.

National Conference of State Legislatures. (2017, August 8). Tips for Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations. Retrieved from NCSL: http://www.ncsl.org/legislators-staff/legislative-staff/legislative-staff-coordinating-committee/tips-for-making-effective-powerpoint-presentations.aspx

Patterson, Philip; Wilkins, Lee. Media Ethics: Issues and Cases). (2018) McGraw-Hill Education. Kindle Edition.

SNHU COCE Assistive Technology. (2015, October 29). COM-610: What Do Colors Mean in Logo Design? Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t5QmqlJkxo

Skerik, S. (2011, April 25). Tips for Creating & Using Infographics. Retrieved from Cision PR Newswire: https://www.prnewswire.com/blog/tips-for-creating-using-infographics-1349.html

USAJobs. (n.d.). Employment of non-citizens. Retrieved from USAJobs: https://www.usajobs.gov/Help/working-in-government/non-citizens/

U.S. Office of Personnel Management. (n.d.). Senior Staff Bios. Retrieved from Our People & Organization: https://www.opm.gov/about-us/our-people-organization/senior-staff-bios/

Wulfemeyer, K. T., & Frazier, L. (1992). The Ethics of Video News Releases: A Qualitative Analysis. Journal Of Mass Media Ethics, 7(3), 151.