SlideMagic Blog

Here is a strategy to sabotage new ideas in a meeting. Have a dominant personality. Be very loud. Make general statements. Distract attention from the point discussed. Avoid difficult questions. Shoot from the hip. Make personal attacks.

Such meeting dynamics requires careful presentation design. Identify all the key points you want to make. Make very bold, very simple, even simplified visuals to support each one. The objective is that the highly simple chart becomes a mental placeholder for the verbal discussion, its actual content is not that relevant (factual details can be in an appendix). Burying the sentence “Having 2 IT help desks in Luxembourg does not make sense” somewhere in a list of 7 bullet points does not help. Showing tiny Luxembourg on the map with 2 looming call center org charts will create that mental logo.

Now group all the discussion points in terms of importance and controversy. Then, create a final check list, overview map, pro/con table with a visual link to the mental place holders you created before. As soon as a random comment comes up, you can deflate it by pointing out that you already talked about it. As soon as someone tries to deviate the discussion you can point at it and say, we are now discussing this one.

Visual agendas can be more powerful than written or verbal ones to keep a discussion on track.

Whenever there is an innovation in visual communication, people initially struggle how to use it best. Hand-written text scrolls did not have page numbers, spaces between words, or sentences. The first ads were either paintings or primitive, poorly designed pamphlets. Color and photography took some time to be used properly. It took 10 years or so after the arrival of PowerPoint before Garr Reynolds had his insight and write Presentation Zen, and he is still busy convincing the world to kill the bullet points as I am writing this.

So here we have this iPad and the iBooks writing platform that enables anyone to create apps that incorporate touch and can be read away from the office chair. I have started to write an app on this platform myself and am constantly changing my approach. I started with the concept of a book in my mind (pages of text with images), but then discovered all this other things you can do: Prezi-like zooming diagrams, embedded slideshows, videos, Keynote presentations, questions. This is not a book writing tool, it is a software development tool. All these visual tools were available before on the web: zooming images, videos, data visualization. But somehow they never made it as the basis for the development of visual stories. I think the fact that an iPad can be used away from the office chair/screen will change that.

Nancy Duarte recently ported her book Resonate over to the iBook platform and the result is beautiful. And it gives some good examples of how new visual techniques are more than just making content prettier or more spectacular. Many of the effects in the Wired magazine iPad edition are just like poorly used animations in PowerPoint or Keynote: interesting, but they do not add to the story. When Nancy analyzes a speech by Ronald Reagan, it is just very useful to be able to watch the actual thing alongside.

Back in the early days, you had to use aperture, shutter time, and chemicals to create special effects in images. Then came Photoshop, and now we see a stream of apps written for touch-based mobile devices. The success of Instagram has taught the amateur how to apply simple filters with the touch of a finger.

I am starting to use these applications for professional presentations, usually not to recover a poorly shot image (most stock images are of excellent quality), but to harmonize images across a presentation with a certain look and feel that is consistent.

Photoshop is still great for removing backgrounds from images, and inserting a 2D image onto a 3D surface. However, its artistic filters are far too dramatic. And making quality adjustments is tricky. It requires a lot of skill to darken a background, lighten a foreground or vice versa. You had to familiarize yourself with alpha channels and the fundamental ways digital images are stored.

My favorite app so far is Snapseed. Next to the dramatic filters that I do not use, it has a set of easy tools that give great control over an image. Ambience to change the balance between foreground and background, sharpening to make images crisper, structure to emphasize texture without destroying the edges of a subject, and best of all, the ability to adjust these effects to part of the image. I find it easier to use and more powerful than iPhoto.

I was asked to mention common pitfalls in IPO presentations the other day. Here are some of my thoughts in random order

• Using an internal strategy deck as the basis for your presentation, rather than starting from scratch. Internal presentations are targeted at insiders, IPO presentations are meant for people who do not suffer from the Curse of Knowledge.
• Talking management speak, full of buzzwords. Institutional investors are sifting through investor pitches and data all day long, they are trained to cut out the noise. If you provide a lot of noise and padding, they automatically think there is no real substance to talk about.
• Over-structuring, repeating, repeating again. In a short investor pitch tell a story, do not try to get investors to remember key facts by drilling it in their heads.
• A generic investment thesis. Very high-level bullet points that could apply to just about any company: growth, profitability, etc. Diluting the core of what is special about your company with many, many other positives that are valid, but not that important. Like in marketing: too many benefits, no benefits.
• Avoiding the elephant in the room. institutional investors probably are pretty well informed about your company, and the key questions they have (often shared with journalists and bloggers) are pretty clear. Your presentation should address those, maybe not explicitly (here are our weaknesses), but implicitly. These questions are the only thing that people are worried about.
• Avoid the long-term growth options. There are legal restrictions to what extent management can provide business forecasts in an IPO filing, but that does not mean that you cannot educate investors on how you can think about valuing your business. Give a framework on what value components could be there for the long-term.
• Focus only on the company, not on trends in broader society. Sometimes the key driver behind the success of a company is a fundamental shift on how people are operating, how things are changing in the world. Your IPO is an opportunity for an investor to invest in that trend. If that is the main driver, discuss it.
• Confusing financial data. A 30 minute pitch is not enough time to go over the financial data in full detail. Still, there is no reason why you should confuse things instead. Give a good overall picture of the components of your company. Show how the revenue model is working. Show how the cost structure works.
• Forget the front line. Management talks about a company in terms of top line revenue, overall market share, but the real action is in the front lines. Give customer case examples, they are often a much more powerful illustration of the attractiveness of a business than top line figures.
• Recording your presentation in front of a camera, without an audience. Unless you are a professional TV host, people find it difficult to look natural in front of a camera. Invite a small audience when you are video-ing your tape. If that is not possible, maybe tape some images of people on some chairs in the studio/conference room so you can imagine talking to the people who are listening/watching you later.

I speculated a few years ago about the potential of having a projector with you in your pocket. By that time, it was not yet possible to run presentations off your smartphone. Things have changed now and devices like the Popvideo pico projector for iPhone (comic sans alert) might be on their way to becoming a replacement for the crappy VGA corporate overhead projectors in conference rooms (the keynote hall is still too much of a challenge). I think there will never be a real market for projecting confidential business presentations on the walls of public places such as cafes. It might spur a new generation of graffiti or performance artists though…

Facebook published its IPO video, you can watch it here. Some observations (in random order).

First of all, this video is so much more professional than the ones we saw before (Zynga, Groupon). Gone are the executives presenting their slides in slightly uncomfortable positions, and instead we see a streamlined performance of relaxed-looking people.

The videos work great to present the senior team, and to highlight case studies of selected clients (both huge corporations, and small businesses). Video is less good to present some of the extraordinary facts about Facebook. Making the point that Facebook is the American Idol final, times 2, but then every day for advertisers could be made stronger on a visual. But the video is loaded with these extraordinary statistics that could have been emphasized more, maybe at the expense of some of the product feature explanations (time line, news feed, etc.)

The video is also modest about putting Facebook in the development of the Internet. They could have claimed that Facebook is redefining the net, by putting a social layer on top of it. The video focusses most of the time on what Facebook is today. The investor wants to know what Facebook could be. The payment business for example, only comes out in minute 28 of the presentation. The legal council probably advised against speculating too much about the future of the company in an IPO presentation.

The financial section of the presentation is too short. Stats fly over the screen, and at no single point do you get a complete financial picture of Facebook. Growth, cost, margins. profits, cash flow. The designers of the video probably thought that the objective is to get people interested enough for them to seek out the detailed financial statements themselves.

When you start to write a college text book, or you are cutting up the project work for a team, you start with a structure: market, cost, competition, etc. When you start with a presentation, you start with the meat, the substance, the story, what you want to say. Big difference, often confused.

Sending big files as email attachments is increasingly cumbersome. Dropbox is an excellent alternative. It recently added a third option to share files with someone, it is my new favorit. Here are all 3 in a row:

1. Shared folder. The recipient needs to install Dropbox (a barrier) and gets access to an entire directory on your computer. If she overwrites a file, your file gets changed too. This option is secure.
2. Public folder links. You can send links to files in your public folder to other people. Anyone who has the link can access the file. If someone has your Dropbox user id, they could guess the name of a file, since the URLs are predictable. It is still hard, but not very secure. The recipient does not have to install Dropbox.
3. Link sharing, the new one. It is now possible to get a sharing link for any file in Dropbox, not just the public folder. The link is garbled and very hard to guess. People can decide to view the file online (useful for mobile devices), or download it. The recipient cannot change the file, but if you do, the link points automatically to the latest version. If you want you can remove the link from Dropbox and other people can no longer access the file anymore. There is no need for the recipient to install Dropbox. Very useful.

The details are explained here.

The other day I watched a startup CEO pitch, and his story sounded too good: “There are huge exits in my industry, a few IPOs, everyone uses this technology now, 5 similar companies in the world do really well and one is worth $1b”

“We started out 6 months ago and already have a great technology.”

While he convinced me that this is probably an attractive sector of the technology market to invest in, he also did not answer the elephant in the room question, “Are you arriving too late at the party?”

There are 3 levels in presentation design understanding:

1. Spotting that a presentation looks really good (99% of people can do this)
2. Spotting that a presentation actually does not look good (this is still relatively easy, although a surprising number of people, including some who call themselves designers, are unable to do this)
3. Creating something that looks good, this is the really hard bit

A bit of modesty here: I too find myself stuck in level 2 often with my own work, pulling my hair out why it just does not come out right. In the end it is usually good, but it takes effort.