Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When James Thompson started his job as Diageo CMO, he tallied the number of presentation slides he was exposed to in his first two months of meetings. The final count — more than 12,000.

I read in AdAge that he started a PowerPoint ban in some Diageo meetings to “just talk to me please” and help convey that the team doesn’t have to be “totally buttoned-up all the time.”

“It stops conversation. It makes people feel secure the’ve communicated what they wanted to. But, in fact, it doesn’t move anything on … We just want people to be at their best, and that is usually when they are able to think and respond and build rather than sell.”

Marketers as a general rule suffer from PowerPoint-itis. We tend to use presentation slides as a crutch. As soon as we have a marketing idea, we rush to create a lengthy PowerPoint or Keynote or Prezi about it. Rarely do we have a meeting without a slide deck. As a result, business conversations turn into dueling sales pitches.

Of course, PowerPoint-itis is not the fault of the tool. It’s how we habitually use presentation software in a way that gets in the way of communicating ideas....