Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The surest way to stifle an idea is to write a long-winded presentation deck about it.  PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi are powerful tools, but the power comes in how they’re used.  A weighty presentation deck can get in the way of the idea itself.

The classic Mark Twain quote applies equally when writing a presentation — “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Born out venture capital work as a recipient of many of PowerPoint deck, Guy Kawasaki has been advocating the 10/20/30 Rule for a decade. 

Beware if you are still creating slides full of bullet points!

Very soon, you will find audiences leave the hall in disgust or hold a placard in protest “No Bullet Points, Please.” Already you will find them moan in pain as soon as they see a bullet-ridden slide. That’s not surprising. The audiences are intelligent enough to know what will follow that boring slide on screen: a far boring talk with presenter reading the slides and audience figuring out whether to listen to the presenter or read the slides.

Such is the bullet-point terror in the presentation world that cognitive psychologist Chris Atherton writes, “Bullets don't kill, bullet points do.”

What are you supposed to do as a presenter then? All presentation experts will advise you to keep 1 message per slide. So if you have 6 bullet points on a slide, you can simply make 6 slides and save the audience a headache. But what if you do not want to follow this advice. What if you wish to keep those 6 bullet points on your slide.

Perhaps you are not presenting your slides on a stage. You want to send the presentation as an attachment to one of your prospective clients. You would therefore need descriptive slides in such instances. Or maybe you have a slide full of steps and you do not wish the break the process into multiple slides that’ll make it complicated for you as well as the reader. What to do then?...

According to one recent survey, the top two reasons why people loathe PowerPoint presentations so march are that "the speaker reads the slides" and uses "full sentences for text." By now everyone should know not to read whole blocks of text to audiences verbatim. But it’s not enough to just convert them to bullet points, then present slide after slide of those, either.

If you really want to engage your audience and enhance your message, you need to use PowerPoint to tell a story—and you need to tell it as visually as possible. The good news is that you don't need to be a professional graphic designer (or even necessarily hire one) in order to do that. What might not look particularly sleek or aesthetically compelling can still be effective. Here's how to use imagery to get your point across and maximize your narrative impact, even if you aren't the most visually minded person....

How to Start your Presentation or Story...

Some recommend to tell the 'agenda' of the presentation right away. That might work is some specific situations (urgency)… 

But there's a better and much more effective way to start your story....

PowerPoints are awful. Long and uninteresting, they are the corporate drone of visual media—synonymous with endless meetings, academic conferences, and corporate retreats.

For graphic designers, however, slide-based presentations like PowerPoint are synonymous with "client decks," and they're necessary for pitching a design to a client or potential client.

These are not your typical boardroom slide show presentations. They can be impeccably designed and visually engaging because, if done right, they'll persuade the client to go the direction the designer wants. Presentations can be a designer’s best tool for selling an idea.

Admittedly, it’s not graphic designers' favorite part of the job, but there is a lot that others can learn from how they do it. We asked five designers from four top studios and agencies for tips on creating slide-based presentations—whether on PowerPoint, Keynote, or some other program....

Microsoft has enhanced each version of PowerPoint with killer features and visual elements like templates and themes. However, the inbuilt themes and stock templates may seem inadequate for some users.If you’re among those users looking beyond the routine, then we have a list of resources that will add visual flair to your slideshows without pinching your pocket....

Lemme guess: you are looking for the best PowerPoint presentations to inspire you.

You know, the ones that’ll get your creative juices flowing and break out of your comfort zone.

The ones that will: Give you ass-kicking PowerPoint design ideas, tips and resourcesTeach you the fundamentals of marketing so you can bring more sales to your businessHelp you become smarter, or more productive, in just a few minutes...

Someone once told me that most PowerPoint presentations have neither power nor a point. I cannot recollect, in 30 years of work, a single PowerPoint presentation I saw or gave that altered the course of anything. Yet in meeting after meeting around the world, PowerPoint is the medium of choice. In fact, according to Microsoft, there are over 30 million PowerPoint  presentations given every day.

When someone chooses to use PowerPoint or any other slide deck program, the choice has consequences. It establishes a power structure that is less relevant in today’s networked world, with the subject matter expert speaking at the front of the room and the audience passively receiving information. It keeps teams indoors, in closed rooms, in a seated position for prolonged periods which, as Mayo Clinic reports, increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and shortens life expectancy. And, most unfortunate, PowerPoint places technology at the center of the room with a heavy weight toward text, charts, sound bites, and bullet points.

When I helped start a social innovation organization called Civilla, in partnership with Adam and Lena Selzer, we gave ourselves an operating constraint: There would be no PowerPoint. None.

But saying no to something is easy. Figuring out what takes its place is harder....

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....

Tufte writes, “Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest amount of time with the least ink in the smallest space.” These are words to live by for the slide designer.

I thought I would share five lessons I’ve learned from Tufte over the years that could easily contribute to more effective presentations.

While he emphasizes simplicity and clarity in his graphics, he focuses on the importance of balance and complete, accurate presentation of information. This allows the audience to form opinions and make informed decisions about what they see....

At a glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Sway is a new tool that lets users string together images, text, and bullet points in a visually arresting way. In other words, Sway creates presentations, much like PowerPoint. It’s even part of the Microsoft Office suite, having just shed its "Preview" designation after 10 months of private and public testing.

But as Pratley points out, Sway isn’t meant for the same exact audience as PowerPoint. It’s a much simpler program, with far fewer controls, and most of its formatting is automatic, so each Sway can adapt to any screen size on a PC, tablet, or phone. The fact that you can’t tweak things down to the individual pixel, as with PowerPoint, is by design. "Anything where you’re building a complicated layout, that’s really a PowerPoint scenario, and not a Sway one," says Pratley, who is Sway’s founder and general manager.

(Microsoft isn't the only company taking this approach, as Sway is competing with other new-age presentation tools like Prezi andHaiku Deck.)

Sway also diverges from Microsoft’s traditional approach to developing software, especially Office. Instead of building most of the product and collecting a bit of private feedback before launch, Microsoft asked users to get involved early on, giving them a fairly minimal product and adding feature requests over the preview period.

The approach is reflective of a company that wants people to feel warmer and fuzzier about its products. Sway is unlikely to be the last example of Microsoft working this way—even if it sometimes means telling people that they’re wrong....