Hot Dating Tips for Marketers

by Phil Couling on 2009-03-01

Why aren’t more marketers using ISO 8601, the international standard for date and time formats?

Everyone with a marketing role has a need to eliminate ambiguity from their communication, and this is such a simple thing to fix that I am always surprised to see highly localized and ambiguous formats for dates used in materials being designed for international and multi-cultural audiences.

For example, 01/03/09 represents a date. However, 01/03/09 is ambiguous. Which of the following legitimate interpretations does it mean?

9th of March 2001
3rd of September 2001
1st of March 2009

Fixing the year, by making it 4 digits long helps a bit, but is still ambiguous:

01/03/2009 (January or March?)

You may try to improve the situation by spelling out the date as in the three examples above, but they are also local formats that won’t mean much in non-English speaking countries.

What’s more if you want to use dates like this elsewhere, in filenames on a computer for example – the computer will be unable to return any meaningful sorting for those files based on the filename, as either the day of month or the month will be the main sort key.

ISO 8601 prescribes a simple date format: 2009-03-01 with the year first, which can be easily and unambiguously understood around the world.

A huge added advantage of this format is when collating or sorting materials – computers interpret that date properly, even when it isn’t recognized as a date.

For example, the following filenames which include ISO dates will sort properly just about anywhere:

Marketing Plan 2008-02-02 - final.doc
Marketing Plan 2009-01-20 - draft.doc
Marketing Plan 2009-01-24 - draft.doc
Marketing Plan 2009-02-05 - final.doc

Not one of the other popular formats would produce a useful ordering from such a sort.

It is probably one of the easiest things you can do to remove ambiguity in your communication around the world.

Further reading:

Wikipedia has a very approachable entry for ISO8601, and you can find out more about the benefits of using ISO8601 on the web at the W3C.

ISO 8601:2004 - Data elements and interchange formats — Information interchange — Representation of dates and times

Martin

March 1st, 2009 at 19:34 · Reply

I’m definitely a fan of ISO8601 date formats too, and use ISO8601 format in many places.

In programming, ambiguous date formats can also cause significant problems, and using a non-ambiguous format when displaying/processing/parsing dates can definitely help.

Quote

Phil Couling

March 1st, 2009 at 21:18 · Reply

Thanks Martin. I didn’t even touch upon the technical benefits of the standard as that would have made it a very long post…

Robin Capper

March 2nd, 2009 at 01:23 · Reply

Thanks for writing about the standard. I use this format all the time but didn’t realise it was “official”. One of my most used ActiveWords is “date”, I type it then and the current date is entered wherever I’m typing, file name, document, Internet form whatever.

2009-03-02

http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/activewords/index.html

Dawna Vallance

February 13th, 2010 at 01:41 · Reply

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web design

February 25th, 2010 at 23:14 · Reply

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