Opera is a narrative brought to life by music. There is a powerful simplicity to many operatic stories but it’s the music that gives them emotional complexity and makes them fly. Great visual aids, a little like the music in opera, can take your rhetoric and your argument to a higher level than if you simply rely on the spoken word (though opera lovers will probably shudder at this comparison). The one thing opera is not is understated. Nor should you be as a presenter. Those TED talks are all presentational arias and that’s why they work. It’s the same with blogs. In today’s world we’re into a short-form of engaging people.
Think of yourself as the focal point
Even if you don’t actually have any slides, don’t for one moment imagine that you are doing an un-illustrated presentation – if you have no visual aids, whether slides or other tools of presentation like video or tangible items, you have made a decision to make you yourself the illustration. How you look, your body language, what you wear and the way you behave will have even more importance than normal.
And as to whether you really need slides depends on whether you feel more comfortable with them and (critically) whether they will add to the story and make it easier to understand and engage with. This is a ‘you decide and only you can’ moment.
Bad slides slow you down
Curiously, some people seem to regard slides as a mere adjunct to a presentation – a kind of necessary evil, a last-minute add-on (‘Hey, Mozart, have you got the music?’). It’s most strange. Good and sharp visuals can help to drive a presentation, making it easier to understand and more compelling than if there were none, but poor visuals slow everything down; a bit like trying to drive with the handbrake on.
Poor visuals slow everything down like trying to drive with the handbrake on.
Equally, while anyone can cobble together some half decent, conventional kind of slides, many are full of words and fettered by bullet points – the presentational equivalent of sleeping policemen … Driving with the handbrake on over sleeping policemen, how much worse can this get?
Professional slides help
On the other hand, a really skilled operator can, with experience, make a PowerPoint presentation look wonderful. I used to work in advertising and there was one piece of advice I consistently gave clients: ‘Don’t try to do your own advertising.’ As with DIY surgery, the result will not necessarily be what you would wish.
By the same token, make sure that you get trained and experienced people to create or at the very least finish off your visuals if you want them to have great impact. Don’t try to do them yourself – unless, of course, the casual, amateur look is something you want to project.
Professorial vagueness has its place
Interestingly, many academics seem to be happiest with scratched, out of order and apparently frequently changed overheads. These create a very public denunciation of style. By remaining in beta there’s an engaging work-in-progress feel to the event. So far as they are concerned they are saying that substance and unfinished contemplation is all that matters.
Do we imagine that Newton would have had a very snazzy presentation with gorgeous shots of apples? Or would it have been on an old envelope? Or like those of the erratic genius called Robin Hankey, whom I knew at Oxford and who wrote his essays from west to east and then turned the paper round 90 degrees and carried on writing north to south over the previous text?
It pays to look and sound as though you are thinking about what you are presenting and would be happy to take questions.
We need to look at the context of a presentation if we want to decide on the most appropriate visual techniques and the amount of money we want to spend. But there is a lot to be said for looking as though you are thinking as opposed to reciting a pre-prepared presentation – especially if the subject is very topical.
Less is more
In presentations which are not constrained by lawyers, bankers and analysts, certain rules apply and need restating. I advocate a ‘less is more’ approach. Keep the number of slides down to perhaps one a minute and go for maximum focus and few words. Few words are key. Talk around a slide or at a slide, never over a slide or reading out a slide. This leads to your slides becoming ‘script on screen’, which is the ultimate audience nightmare.
Consider replacing words with pictures – but be careful. An account director at a major marketing agency described, with the horror that only an impending disaster can evoke, a presentation where the presenter said something like:
‘Last year looked difficult from the outset, though we hadn’t realised how rough, especially for some clients and competitors, but we aim to have a smoother passage this year with some great results and happy clients.’
The slides used are inserted in capitals:
‘Last year looked difficult from the outset [STORM CLOUD SLIDE], though we hadn’t realised how rough [ROUGH SEA SLIDE], especially for some clients and competitors [SHIPWRECK SLIDE], but we aim to have a smoother passage this year [CALM SEA SLIDE] with some great results and happy clients [APPLAUDING CROWD ON HARBOUR SLIDE].’
It was, she said, horrible [ACCOUNT DIRECTOR BEING SICK SLIDE]. No, sorry. Forget that last slide, that is me being silly and applauding because this illustrates so well how things can go wrong.
Consider animation. Include video if you can – for instance, talking about a retail outlet while watching a speeded-up video of it. This can work much more powerfully than looking at a sales graph. Consider big, bold, single word slides such as:
You have to concede it gets your attention.
A favourite idea of mine involved a presentation for a firm of accountants when we wanted to talk about the benefits of partnership – how working together, client and accountant, could achieve synergistic benefits. This was the slide that did that:
Being incredibly flexible
Increasingly as we see, conversations are becoming the norm. Kevin Eyres, European MD of LinkedIn, thinks business planning as we used to do it and as it’s still done by large corporates is preposterous. Things are moving too fast to write one-, three-or five-year plans. Margaret Heffernan, the expert on women at work, thinks these are things that Alpha males do for comfort. The impact of this trend shows up in the presentation model which is becoming more conversational and kite flying. And, however long it takes to prepare a presentation, be prepared to change it just before the event if there’s a change of thinking or events. Remember what J. M. Keynes said: ‘If circumstances change, I change my mind.
What do you do?’
Where words and pictures work best together
Mike Weekes is an NLP expert. He’s also a world-famous rock climber. At a big conference on ‘Performance’ at the Lord’s Cricket Ground conference complex he spoke about working with Jack Osbourne and getting him back in shape. He also spoke of climbing. The illustration stays with me now.
We see a slide of Mike negotiating an overhang – lying flat upside down with hands and feet connected to rock… That image stays in your brain as you stare in horror at the slide. He tells the story of him, a mere 19 year old in Australia, of his having a hangover (from weed and lager), of his doing this difficult climb with joy in its danger…
What happened then?
One foot slips…
The other foot slips…
And then a hand slips…
So Mike’s left holding on by one hand … above a 400 foot drop…
(‘I’m there with you, Mike, I’m there and I’m very, very scared’, I think)
He says in a matter-of-fact way that he thought was going to die…
(‘You are Mike’ I thought, ‘if you are normal.’)
And a voice in his head said…’
‘How do you know? How do you know?’
It was, he said, like the voice of God.
By then his arm was shaking with lactic acid and his last grip was slipping…
So he swung up his other arm and grabbed…
And got a grip…
And recovered a second handhold.
The rest is history.
There was just one slide up but there was a whole film and a funeral playing in my vertigo-ridden head while Mike spoke and this presentation vividly stays with me … and those words ‘How do you know?’
Product presentation
The master of product presentation is Steve Jobs. Holding the product up close to his face, he talks about it and praises it. He then has his team pass samples around … and shuts up.
Product demonstrations are an art. And the best ones are no more than 2 minutes long overall and within them no element lasts more than 20 seconds. They focus on one or two messages, make telling, simple, competitive comparisons and make a big point: ‘This is the best in the world because…’
Steve shows things on slide, of course, but he uses props too.
Use props. Hold up your product … lovingly.
How to use props
Use props: things you can pick up, throw, bounce, balance, examine, hand out. Props force you to relax and the audience to enjoy you. Use the whole breadth of the stage. Present or talk while someone skilled is doing something else relevant while you describe your key point: an expert table tennis player showing how alike table tennis and the internet are – like Marco Montemagno does; someone juggling while you’re talking about the complexity of management; dividing your audience into two groups of those agreeing or disagreeing with a proposition and letting debate begin … Anything is fair so long as it illustrates your point.
Not everything visual has to appear on a screen. Assuming it is relevant, you might put a packet of jelly beans on the seats in the auditorium, or a specially created agenda. Nick Horswell, ex-colleague and founder of the media company PHD, once did a presentation which climaxed (I’m not entirely sure that is the right word) in his walking off stage trouserless from behind the lectern having walked on stage fully trousered. I’m not sure how he did it, undoing his pants and still giving a decent presentation, but he did. Suffice it to say that trousers-down Horswell also brought the house down. His point? I imagine he was saying that just because you couldn’t see something, it would be rash to assume it wasn’t actually happening.
Don’t be trapped and one-dimensional. Nothing excites an audience more than magic … the magician getting another rabbit or whatever out of a hat. Every presenter is a magician being called on to reveal something new and surprising. So think about ways of revealing your punchline other than by just another slide.
- The pictures have to illustrate the story you are telling, not something else: Be clear about what you are saying, to whom and what you want to achieve. Showing pictures of Stormtroopers with the slogan ‘Let’s go get ‘em’ may not be that helpful in a presentation about partnership and stakeholder relationships.
- Your slides need more impact the bigger the hall: Establish, first of all, how many there are in the audience, how big the hall is, how smart and attuned an audience you have and whether there are language difficulties.
- Don’t be too corporate. Be you: I have a personal antipathy to corporate templates, which nearly always swamp the presenter’s good intentions in ‘corporate porridge’. Yet I am a lifelong advocate of brand values. I am a passionate fan of Heinz, with whom I’ve worked on many projects over the years. You don’t need to slam ‘HJ Heinz’ at the bottom of every slide with bullets shaped like the famous keystone to make it look like a Heinz presentation. Indeed, the best presentation I ever saw from them was done smartly without such constraints and yet it breathed that sense of ‘There’s no taste like Heinz’ or ‘It has to be Heinz’ in a way that a more mechanistic offering could never have done. If you are not doing a corporate but a more personal presentation, decide in a focused, almost feminine, way on your ‘look’. This involves font, colours, feel and style. There is a later chapter in this book that warns against using exotic and mysterious fonts in case in the transportation of a presentation from one computer to another the font is not recognised. I discovered such a font recently which, for obvious reasons, looked good to me on my computer – it is called ‘Poor Richard’ – but here’s how it appeared on another PC:
Avoid indulgences such as ‘Poor Richard’ like the plague – life is hard enough without being a presentational punk. - If you think of this as hard work and boring it will show: Enjoy doing your slides. Think of things from the audience’s point of view. Think about how to get them on your side, about colour, about simple points. Can you get pictures of any of your audience on screen? Or of the buyer of your product at Tesco? Something that speaks to your audience.
- The time spent finding the right picture is time well spent: Don’t forget – a picture is worth 10,000 words. But it has to be the right picture. If a presenter is talking about, say, productivity and a picture of a carrot appears on the screen then the audience is likely to be baffled. I recently did a presentation in China which, given the language issues, had to be predominantly visual. The key point is, of course, that finding great visuals that begin to tell a story is very, very time consuming. I and three researchers spent an indecently long time scouring the web to find exactly what I wanted.
- Sometimes you have to go for it: Do go for the tour de force. This is the sort of thing the ever-brilliant Richard Eyres, now a non-executive director at the Guardian Media Group, has used in presentations. I’ve seen him do a great presentation in which he talked, among other things, about the creation of the Capital Radio website (it had to be ‘not leading edge or even cutting edge – it had to be bleeding edge’ according to the designers). An executive from Pearson, as I recall hearing it told to me, did a very energetic presentation with a new slide every seven seconds or so. ‘Don’t do it’ begged the producers. But he did. And I’m told it was a complete wow.
- Variation of look and tone gets people’s attention: What can look like a neat, clear presentation as a booklet to be taken away can be the equivalent of a monotonic drone presented on the big screen. Presentation is theatre … with pauses … with lows and highs, fast bits and slooowwweeerr bits. The visual impact of your presentation can catapult you to the heights or, if it’s boring, act like the deadweight of a sea anchor. Don’t make it all the same.
- Briefing your slide designer will reveal to you what you can and can’t do and whether you have actually got your act together: Do compile a brief in cryptic words and pictures. Your designer can’t really be expected to read your script and immediately understand what you are trying to achieve. So get a few A5 sheets and create a series of simplistic charts with a thick felt tip pen. This is a trick Showcase, the presentation people, use to stop you putting too many words on a slide. No more than 10 words to a slide is ideal – the best creative directors in advertising used to claim no poster should have more than 6 words, so check some of today’s posters. See how you get on being this reductive. Then try it again seeing if you can spot opportunities for some visual fun. Then again to check that the slides tell your story. If you need special emphasis then indicate where this is. Now you are ready to brief your presentation designer.
Why avoiding slides can be wrong
There are many reasons why so many presenters are nervous of slides.
- Most people are used to verbal and written communication, not visual communication (except when they were under five).
- Most people wouldn’t know a good piece of visual communication if it bit them on the leg.
- The moment something goes on a slide, technology gets involved and people worry that anything can happen.
- It isn’t just technology, it’s about being in control. Some people say: ‘I’d rather have average PowerPoint slides I’ve done myself that I can change at the last minute.’ I know what they mean but they don’t really, really mean it? Do they? Not really. Because being average is not what an aspiring brilliant presenter wants to be.
A guy at Royal Bank of Scotland had rehearsed his big set piece presentation, which was being performed at a foreign location. He’d have scored A+ for preparation. But he went up on stage and the people running the show managed to let their computer go down. Blank screen – crisis! Fortunately he was able to chill out and stay calm. They rebooted and off he went again – ‘Whew!’ Do your knees feel weak? Mine do. I hate technology, except when it goes right, when I really love it.
It’s all a bit like former US president Gerald Ford, of whom it was said he couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. You have a lot to do and a lot to remember – you have your nerves to conquer, your words to say, things to remember and slides to pay attention to – something’s going to crash. Don’t laugh at that poor president, empathise with him.
Possibly the worst presentation (there are so many, OK, but one of the worst I ever saw) was when I saw a nervous ad man go off at speed pressing his own slide button … the wrong way. The final slide came up first and his ‘Welcome’ slide came up last. The slides and his words bore no relation to each other. Having been told never to look behind you at the screen, he didn’t, and so had no idea what was going on. There were quiet mutterings among the audience, and then laughter which he thought was at a joke and this just encouraged him the more. He speeded up – he shouted ‘Sales will grow’ to the accompaniment of a half-dressed girl lying on the bonnet of a car with the headline ‘Big Engines are a Turn On’. People in the audience stood up and shouted. He just got louder and faster. Someone approached the stage and tried to help but the presenter resisted, exclaiming ‘I shall have my say.’
Work with professionals to ensure your slides do you justice.
You are never allowed to be boring because life is too short for boring presentations, boring ads or boring people. We live in a post-boring world, one in which stand-up presentations are the norm. The standards are rising. What was considered to be a brilliant presentation 20 years ago is probably merely good by today’s standards.
Here are the must-haves in presentation illustration:
- have a few very good slides;
- use as few words as possible;
- include quotes (these are always good);
- enjoy your slides and props – they are friends, not hindrances.
Because, apart from anything else, the one element that has really come on over the years is visual design. All kinds of tricks are possible in this wonderful age of special effects. Understand that your slides complement your voice and if you really seek brilliance, you must pay attention to them and their production. Let the ‘visual voice’ have space and time for expression.
Done well, it will add a dramatic dimension to the other brilliant aspects of your presentations.