SlideMagic Blog

A very interesting background story in the Washington Post how Zelensky changed seasoned politicians’ minds in a 5 minute video call

After a perfunctory debate, the presidents and prime ministers quickly approved sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and some of Russia’s biggest banks. Talk of barring Russia from the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT, however, stalled amid skepticism on the part of Scholz and the leaders of Austria, Italy and Cyprus, according to officials familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.

Then Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dialed into the meeting via teleconference with a bracing appeal that left some of the world-weary politicians with watery eyes. In just five minutes, Zelensky — speaking from the battlefield of Kyiv — pleaded with European leaders for an honest assessment of his country’s ambition to join the European Union and for genuine help in its fight with the Russian invaders. Ukraine needed its neighbors to step up with food, ammunition, fuel, sanctions, all of it.

“It was extremely, extremely emotional,” said a European official briefed on the call. “He was essentially saying, ‘Look, we are here dying for European ideals.’” Before ending the video call, Zelensky told the gathering matter-of-factly that it might be the last time they saw him alive, according to a senior European official who was present.

We can all learn from a presenter like this.

The current meme culture has created a number of stock photo heros that people may now recognize in the street. Cliche stock photos are bad, meme celebrities are worse. Time to double check your sales decks and web sites. Some of your older colleagues might not be aware of these yet…

iStockPhoto

Here is the background on the Hide the Pain Harold meme

iStockPhoto

Here is the background story about the Distracted Boyfriend Meme

Consistency between slides is important in your presentation. There are the obvious elements that need to be consistent: fonts, layout, colours, etc. But also pay attention to more subtle ones in images. Color vs B&W, and the style of images. Peaceful landscapes, busy ‘real’ images, threatening thunder clouds, stylised super stock photo model images, “funny” face expressions, etc. etc.

Modern movies are a good analogy. In the good old days, movies would be filmed on an actual location. The story is set in a city, village, a house, a place where characters roam around and visit places from multiple angles all the time. Bit by bit, you start to understand the space in which the story is et.

New technology allows you to create pretty much any movie background you want, projected behind actors saying their lines in front of green screens. The result is that that sense of place is lost. The movie is set against a series of random backgrounds that do not seem connected. High resolution screens emphasize the disconnect between characters in the foreground, and the backgrounds. Something does not seem right…

Interestingly, I do not find this effect with classic cartoons, with totally artificial backgrounds, but the whole story seems cohesive

English has become the default language in business. I would recommend anyone designing a deck for an external audience to use that language for the slides, but still present in your local language if that works for the people you are speaking to.

• Your business might be dealing with local contacts at the moment, but that could change in the future.
• Building on this. Increasingly, people use remote talent for certain tasks, having your documents in English helps these people getting on board
• People have gotten used to English text in advertising. A presentation in Hebrew (weird characters, written right-to-left, even looks strange to Hebrew speaking investor audience here in Tel Aviv.)

And there is another benefit. If you slides are in English, but you need to tell. your story in another language, you cannot easily fall back to just reading the text on your slides. Instead, you need to make it your own story.

The presentation’s look and feel says a lot about you… Here are some examples of look and feels that I encountered over the years.

• “I don’t care” bullet point slides in the bare opening format of PowerPoint, but actually written in a smart way. Basically a text document from someone who focuses on building her business rather than making pretty slides.
• That same bare format, but now with a presentation that clearly cost a lot of time and effort to make. A few randomly placed pictures and colorful shapes to add some spice.
• The management consultant deck full of theoretical and irrelevant frameworks and buzz words
• A super cutesy deck (curly graphics, pastel colours, quirky language) that pitches a company in a traditional engineering market
• The corporate deck consistent of slides that were harvested from multiple presentations, in slightly different formats, and for which all the paragraphs and footnotes have been extensively edited, and signed off by the CEO (including placement of commas)
• A super polished (and expensive to make) deck that looks like a 5 star hotel brochure that pitches a product that only exists in PowerPoint (the PowerPoint you are looking at).
• A set of system architecture diagrams, or the clinical trial results data
• A business plan template filled out literally, including slides and boxes that don’t really fit the product
• Web site has the new logo and colours, deck still has the old one
• Big and bold images, every slide has a visual analogy that sometimes is a bit stretched, no coherence between the slides
• Logos, graphical elements, confidentiality disclaimers, slogans take more space on each slide than the content itself

In business school we learned how to write a business plan and which slides go with it: market size, competitors, business model, etc. etc. The resulting slide deck is usually the first “presentation” of the company and often used as the basis for an investor or sales pitch deck as well. (Same happens when the last Board strategy deck gets recycled into a sales presentation for a more mature company).

Board presentations and business plan presentations are well, sets of slides that serve Board and strategy meetings. A sales or investor meeting requires a sales or investor presentation.

If you noticed that you always deviate from your slides when pitching your company, you might have the wrong slide deck in front of you,

I pushed a new update of SlideMagic yesterday with security patches. The app should update itself automatically on your machines. Let me know if you encounter any issues.

Exactly my view as well:

Videos and podcasts are sequential tapes, text is a hard disk where you can access specific sections instantly. The first is great for a story, the latter is better for a quick reference.

Think about this for your pitch presentation as well, both have different advantages

• A short introduction video (sequential):

  • Gives a glimpse of who you are as a person/CEO, especially useful in the absence of personal meetings
  • Enables you to re-record your elevator pitch until you get it absolutely right, live presentations are a one-shot game
  • Eliminates storyline hiccups and tangents that you might not spot when shuffling slides in a deck.

• A short pitch deck:

  • Is the “graphical business card” of your idea, the look and feel
  • Enables people to skip through your story very quickly, especially useful for investors who are deeply specialized in a particular field
  • Allows quick repeat access to reference slides: key metrics, team bios, current investor profiles, etc.
  • Can be viewed on mobile devices on the go without the need for audio

The COVID pandemic has put big performances with live audiences on hold. Some companies continue to produce them: big sets, with spectacular music, light effects, and eager presentation hosts, just without the audience. A good example are the launches of the new 2022 Formula 1 race cars that are happening now. Big drum rolls, no audience. The space in which the presenters are sitting (huge production hall), and in which the audience is viewing (small room) do not match.

The opposite is true for a number of YouTubers that have moved beyond the ‘kitchen studio’. For example: online guitar teachers. They create a simple but highly professional video background environment by carefully selecting objects and lighting. The result is a setting that matches that of the audience. You are sort of sitting in the same room.

It is difficult to communicate a complicated message to a large audience, and once something sticks, it is hard to change it. Like trying to change the direction of a fully loaded oil tanker at speed. The COVID pandemic gives some good examples:

• From no human to human transmission, to, yes there is
• From just wash your hands, to the disease is airborne
• From natural immunity works to only zero COVID works to only vaccine immunity works
• From where masks everywhere, to masks are only useful in places without ventilation
• From we are flattening the curve, to we are protecting you, to we are protecting the elderly
• From masks protect you to masks protect others
• From kids don’t get very sick to kids are the driver of infections in the overall population (including vulnerable people)
• From the new variant is really dangerous, let’s ban all flights, to it is actually less dangerous
• From boosters are not needed to boosters are essential
• From we need green passes to stop infection, to vaccinations don’t really stop infection, no green passes needed

Personally, I love to dive into statistics and read the most recent research and am perfectly fine with changing my mental model about the disease instantly. But the vast majority of people are not.

The public is confused and frustrated:

• Governments are incredibly slow to pick up new information and don’t spread their net wide enough, by ingesting information of countries that are further along the curve. Well-informed citizens see that the government is “wrong”. Once you lose credibility it is very hard to regain it.
• Policy ‘borders’ (national, state, city) are useless in pandemics. People move frequently in and out of different areas, and are confronted by different policies everywhere. (EU countries, US states).