36. Presentation Advice from Corona Beer: Peripheral Vision Counts

A delightful Corona beer video commercial, set in their now-familiar tropical seascape, makes a humorous but telling point about peripheral vision. A man and a dark-haired woman are seated in beach chairs with their backs to the camera, facing straight ahead toward the surf. The man is on the left, the woman on the right; between them is a low table on which two bottles of Corona beer stand, each topped with a wedge of lime.

After a moment, a tall and tanned, willowy blond girl wearing a tiny white bikini enters the scene from the right and slowly crosses to the left. The man’s head turns and follows the blonde until she leaves the frame. After she has gone, the man’s head returns to face front. After another moment, the brunette’s hand reaches up, takes the lime wedge from the man’s bottle, and squirts it at the man’s face. During the entire scene, her head never turns.

The commercial was so successful that Corona produced a follow-up. The setting and the positions of the man and woman are the same as in the first version. In this version, the beer bottles are sitting in an ice bucket and are capped. After a still moment, an attractive muscular young man enters the scene from the left and slowly crosses to the right. This time, the woman’s head turns and follows the young man leaving the frame. As she looks off, the seated man reaches into the ice bucket, picks up the bottle closer to the woman, shakes it vigorously, and then replaces it in the bucket. The woman’s head then returns to face front, but her arm reaches out to the ice bucket and takes the bottle closer to the man, leaving the shaken bottle for him. Then her arm reaches out again and extends a bottle opener to the man.

In addition to the classic jealous battle-of-the-sexes triangle, the commercial plays on the theory that women have peripheral vision, whereas men have tunnel vision because of our origins as cave dwellers. The widely held theory (you can find thousands of references on the Web) is also expressed in the book Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps: How We’re Different and What to Do About It, which posits that primitive men, as hunters, had to be narrowly focused on their prey, whereas primitive women, as nurturers, had to have a wider scope of vision for the safety of their children.

Be that as it may, all men and all women share one characteristic regarding their vision: the hair-trigger reflex of the eyes to visual stimuli. Whether in tunnel or peripheral vision, all human eyes react involuntarily to new images. This immutable fact plays a critical role in presentations.

The instant a new graphic appears on a presentation screen, the eyes of every person in every audience immediately dart over to look at it—involuntarily. At this very same moment, most presenters continue speaking. Because the audience’s eyes are more sensitive than their ears, they focus on the graphic and lose the presenter’s words. The audience stops listening.

If instead, the presenter pauses and gives the audience time to absorb what they see, the presenter maintains the audience’s attention.

Combine Corona beer with the classic Coca-Cola slogan, and give your audience the pause that refreshes.