Get your presentation out there – but make sure it’s good

Posted by Peter Labrow on 4 October 2011

Get your presentation out there – but make sure it’s good

PowerPoint has something of a reputation – and not a good one. ‘Death by PowerPoint’ has slipped into our everyday language for a reason. The US military isn’t alone in debating ditching PowerPoint, because its use can “make us stupid” (Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps). No offence, but when a marine sayssomething makes you stupid, you’ve got to listen up.

But I’m here to defend PowerPoint – a little. But denounce its use – a lot.

So, in PowerPoint’s defence, here’s a presentation, created in PowerPoint, for one of my clients, e-academy.

So, here’s the story behind the presentation. I was asked by e-academy to create a company presentation that was ‘better than the average PowerPoint’ – but the rub was, I needed to use PowerPoint.

PowerPoint, for all its bells and whistles, is not a great tool. In a world where presentations need to be given on screens of different aspects, its only answers to displaying a 4:3 presentation in 16:9 ratio are to display it with big black bars down the side or to stretch everything uncomfortably – screwing up the layout up in the process. This is hugely lame – setting those bars to white, or having a resize in proportion option (no rocket science involved) would be a welcome workaround. And this is just one example of PowerPoint’s incompetence.

But PowerPoint isn’t really designed for people like me. It’s designed for people who aren’t professional communicators, to make the job of structuring and presenting their thoughts easier.

I’m not sure it’s fair to blame all of those dull, mind-numbing presentations on PowerPoint itself. Limited it might be, but it’s more limited by our imaginations and abilities than it is technically. (OK, fair enough, let’s go 50:50 on that one.)

In any event, PowerPoint was the only choice, since the client needed to edit the presentation without me being around and present it from their own PCs.

The structure of the presentation was workshopped between myself and the client’s marketing manager. It’s an important presentation – we spent the best part of a day on it. I guess this is where we’d started to deviate from the norm – many presentations are put down ‘as people think’ without too much debate around what the key messages are and how to structure them.

The next step was to undertake some research, which led to the inclusion of some key findings from a government report. This provided an anchor stone for the core message.

We didn’t create a script, but we did create prompts of key points which don’t themselves appear on the slides. A key failing of many presentations is that people rather pointlessly simply read from the slide itself.

The presentation, in PowerPoint format, has been well-received by organisations and government. I’m sure it’s not perfect – everyone has to work to a budget and there’s a law of diminishing returns against polishing even the most important stone.

Response was so good that I suggested we record it as a movie. This is simply a reuse of an investment, getting the most froma marketing asset. In doing so, it will allow us to take the presentation way beyond the boardroom – onto social media, to be sent via e-mail and so on, extending its use and value enormously.

We hired a professional to provide the voice, which we felt had to be Welsh to fit in with the company’s profile. We chose actress Michelle Luther, who’s appeared in Being Human, EastEndersand Lewis. Yes, it’s a cost – but there really is value. A non-professional seldom gives anything like the same confident delivery.

I prepared a script. It’s not a short presentation (and we didn’t want to edit the message) but we wanted to make it roll along fairly well. The end result is less than six minutes long. There’s an argument for creating a two- or three-minute version (which we could do from the digital assets we have) but there’s also an argument for pitching the whole story.

The whole thing was then assembled outside of PowerPoint to make the movie.

So, lessons learned here are:

• Plan well. Map the objectives of the presentation/movie and list the key points before you start creating slides.
• Yes, PowerPoint isn’t great, but it can be coaxed into being pretty good. (Given my time again, I’d do two versions, one for the client and one for the movie – the movie would have been better.)
• Don’t use a script in the boardroom, but do know the key points well and rehearse, preferably in front of colleagues or a camera to get feedback.
• If you’re converting a PowerPoint into a movie, use a good voice, professional if you can. Nothing kills a movie presentation dead faster than ums and ahs.
• Write a tight script – better still, get a professional copywriter to do it (you would for a brochure and this might reach a wider audience). Read it many times to make sure it flows vocally.
• Some professional stock photography and video goes a long way. Don’t use clipart.

A movie of a company presentation can provide great value and mileage. You can embed it on your website, LinkedIn profile, send links to clients, use it before meetings – the list goes on.

Here’s the PowerPoint trap – create a typical Death by PowerPoint presentation, get it out on the Web and it doesn’t matter how long it is, it will still bomb. The difference is easily worth the investment.

Often, the key to a great presentation isn’t to do something totally different – but just to do it really, really well.

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