69. Speaking to an Audience of a Thousand
The Big Tent
New product launches, trade shows, annual industry conferences, user group meetings, and similar large assemblages have become the rule rather than the exception in the business world today. Many companies, in their competitive drive to keep up with the Joneses, attempt to outdo each other with increasingly elaborate productions that rival the glitziest of Las Vegas spectaculars. As this tidal wave of extravaganzas sweeps forward, it threatens to drown the poor businessmen and -women who present at these events. Businesspeople are professionals at their jobs, but they are not performers.
How then to survive and thrive in this hypercharged environment? The short answer is to put yourself in the capable hands of the professional event planners, production supervisors, and technicians who manage these events. An entire subculture of experienced specialists has emerged to handle the increasing complexity of these mega-presentations. However, because these people are experts in the technical and production aspects, you must take responsibility for providing your own presentation script, slides, and demos.
When the size of the audience gets into the triple, quadruple, and even quintuple digits, the technicians begin to show up en masse bearing their forest of lights, miles of cables, wireless microphones, High Definition cameras, high resolution projectors, and gigantic screens. Note that I’ve pluralized “screens.” As these events become more and more elaborate, the producers add more and more screens. Jon Bromberg, the former Senior Director of Events at Microsoft, once produced a sales conference with 15 large screens arrayed across the stage.
Image Magnification
Typically, some of the screens display PowerPoint support slides, some of them thematic images related to the subject of a speech—monetary symbols, people at work, high tech gear, and so forth—and some of the screens show the presenter. The latter is known as Image Magnification, or as the technical people call it, “I-Mag.”
In a venue where the audience can number in the thousands of people, the presenter appears as a mere speck. That is when the production team trains a battery of video cameras on the presenter and projects an enlarged close-up image onto one or more of the mammoth screens. And that is where the advice you read in Chapter 34, “Misdirection,” no longer applies: When you are on I-Mag, do not turn to look at the screen where your PowerPoint slides are displayed.
If your magnified image turns on a giant screen, it appears as an abrupt disconnect from your audience. It also produces a distracting enlargement of your ear. Therefore, speak only to your audience.
How then to get the prompt that your slides usually provide? Your trusty production technicians will come to the rescue with large flat panel monitors that are strategically placed in front of you, at the foot of the stage. These monitors will be in your line of sight so that, when you glance away from your audience and down to the screen, your eye movement will be barely perceptible.
In this configuration, you get your prompt, you get your valuable pause, and your audience, their own eyes drawn up to the giant screens, will barely notice the minute shift of your eyes.
Actions, Speaking, and Words
These Big Tent events are theatrical productions, not presentations. Your role is subordinate to that of the technology; you function as a Master of Ceremonies rather than as a presenter.
In that role, you will be the bridge and/or the voice-over to a diverse array of technical elements far more complex than PowerPoint and decorative graphics. These elements can include prerecorded video clips, product demonstrations, satellite transmissions, or live closed circuit feeds, each of which must be integrated into the agenda with exacting precision. Therefore, all your actions and words will have to be tightly choreographed and scripted. To use terms familiar to professional performers, accept your role, learn your lines, hit your marks, and do it all on cue.
But keep in mind that all presentations are a series of person-to-person conversations. Even if you can only make direct Eye Connect with the people in the front rows, work your way around the large arena by speaking to points in the distance. Remember, too, to be conversational.
Best of all, you needn’t fear committing an error. If you do, every man and woman in your audience will understand. They know that the Demo Demons (whom you will meet in the next chapter) can strike anyone, anywhere, or anytime. If the Demo Demons strike you, every member of your audience, who has been there and done that, will understand.