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PowerPoint gets a bad rap for boring people senseless. But it’s just a tool. As Charlton Heston might have said: PowerPoint doesn’t bore people. Bores bore people.
Used properly, PowerPoint can be perfectly captivating. You just have to unlearn the bad habits of a million presenters that came before you.
I’d suggest you start by analysing trashy magazines. Stand near the supermarket checkout magazine rack, and tell me you aren’t interested to learn more about “Angelina’s Hot Tub Romp Shocks Brad”. That’s a bullet point, and people lap it up. Sure, it’s juicier subject matter than yours, but you can adapt their techniques to add zing to your presentation on indexed fund returns or cat food.
Great communicators think about the subject from their audience’s viewpoint. How will your material make each person more successful or popular? How will it save them pain or stress?
So you can change a line like this:
“New fund products will generate outperformance of 3% over industry equivalents.”
To this:
“Average person $3750 a year better off.”
Or change this:
“All staff will be required to have Blackberries switched on 24/7 to ensure customer response best practice is adhered to.”
To:
“Mobile communication means less need to stay at office late.”
When you’re writing tabloid headlines, every word has to justify its existence. A headline writer would be sacked for writing “Angelina’s Hot Tub Activities Came As a Major Shock To Brad. Pictures of It Inside!”
Short words are always better. Write in the active voice (“We hope the program will be a success”) rather than the horrible passive voice, beloved of corporate bores (“It is hoped that the program will be a success.”)
So you can trim this:
“All new products will be rolled out in all state markets commencing in January.”
To this:
“January national rollout of all new products.”
The job of a good bullet point is to arouse their interest and make them want more. In the tabloid mag, you read the cover headline and want to see the scandalous shots inside.
You can do a similar thing with a presentation by not putting the whole story up on the screen. The whole point of a presentation is to focus the attention on you, not on the slides. So use the bullet point to pose a question that you can answer verbally.
Instead of:
“The top 5% of sales achievers in our company attribute their success to our new interactive pad demonstration app.”
Tease them with:
“The secret sales weapon of our Top 5% achievers.”
Build up a bit of tension as you read out the line. Let their curiosity focus the attention on you. Then tell them the answer. If you insist on handing out printed copies of your presentation – and for the sake of the planet, don’t, because nobody ever reads them – then create an amended print version with all the information included.
Not graphs. Photographs. Replace words with images, and talk about them. It adds the important dimension of realness to your message. Words can lie, photos usually tell the truth.
Take your own. Hunt through Flickr, there are currently 24 million shots in there that can be used under an attribution license – they’re free as long as you acknowledge the photographer.
Get in the habit of taking photos while you’re working. They don’t have to be pro-quality to bring your subject to life.
Follow these four simple strategies, and you can whip any flabby presentation into a lean, buffed object of audience desire. You’ll have the audience in your hot tub in no time, at least metaphorically.
Ian Whitworth leads a double life as co-owner of audiovisual group Scene Change, and principal of creative marketing consultancy A Lizard Drinking.
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