Marcom A to Z — P for Presentation

If you have complicated or intricate information to present to a challenging audience, is it better to create a text-driven or image-driven PowerPoint? In other words, if a picture is worth a thousand words, could we eliminate hierarchical bullet points from slides and still gently lead the audience to the undeniably correct conclusion we need them to believe?

If you Google “rules for great PowerPoint presentations“ and read a sampling of results, you’ll reach this conclusion: the right way to present is to limit text, limit presentation time, maximize powerful imagery and learn your material. Easier said than done.

What the experts say
Seth Godin (marketing guru extraordinaire, author of several best-selling business books), in a blog post called Really Bad PowerPoint, provides rules “to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

• No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
• No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
• No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
• Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built into the program…
• Don’t hand out the print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.”

Supporting a similar opinion, Guy Kawasaki (venture capitalist, columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, best-selling author), in a blog posted called The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, says:

“It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Challenge
But most of us work on teams to create the perfect presentation, and not everyone on the team supports the theory that pictures or phrases can deliver the message. In fact, just last week, I gave a presentation with a group of colleagues that included heavy-text slides because we were agreeing on specific verbiage of key messages. (Would Seth and Guy say that that kind of activity should be done with a handout?)

Some people believe that you have to spoon feed all information to an audience (hence text-laden slides with bullet points, and decks that total 50-plus slides). It’s difficult to feel confident that an image (chart, graph, arresting photo) will provide the same level of detail that can be conveyed by 20 to 40 words, for example.

Also, more often than not, time is not a presenter’s friend. A slide with an image and little text forces the presenter to know his or her material cold — to present, talk to the audience and accurately represent the material to support the image on screen. That takes time. And skill.

A reason to change your habit
Here’s an interesting statistic about information delivered in multimedia presentation: we remember 10% of what we hear, 35% of what we see and 65% of the information we hear and see. If this is true, a presenter will have more impact with less copy and more images.

Presenters accustomed to using PowerPoint to present copy rather than emotion and dynamic ideas, this may be a difficult transition. But I, for one, vow to step out of my comfort zone and test the experts’ rules.

Will you?

This series discusses marcom concepts by the letter — from A to Z.