SlideMagic Blog

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).

For the analysts who are in the trenches crunching the numbers behind slides (often after 18:00).

Presentations of financial data often evolve. You start with a relatively naive model, create some slides and iterate the numbers. Slowly, your team starts understanding what actually matters and discovers with drivers to focus on.

Instead of the exact numbers in your spreadsheet, your manager asks you to group this, that, and that into one number, quickly offline. Then another scenario, put that number in, quickly off line. Then another one.

In each round, you re-run your model, take out a calculator, scribble the summarized numbers, and update your slides. This takes a lot of time and is prone to errors.

Instead, build a quick layer on top of your ‘old’ model that spits out the required numbers quickly. In fact, make it a habit that every number in your presentation is pulled directly out of a cell in a spreadsheet.

My financial models would usually have these layers:

1. Data dump: straight copy-paste of raw input data, or data entered straight from a financial report without thinking, make sure the total is correct at the bottom. You get a new set of data: simply overwrite the entire worksheet, or add a column.
2. Model engine, this one does the hard lifting and runs your analysis
3. Bridge: this worksheet pulls numbers out of the engine and produces the required numbers for the charts (relevant to the scenario I described above)
4. (Optional) Slides. A small box that matches exactly every page in your presentation, with the exact numbers that appear in each slide. Useful if you need to run periodical updates of your presentation (weekly, monthly, quarterly results for example).

Most presentation experts (me included) describe the ideal slide layout as something similar to what Steve Jobs used to use in his big product announcements. Super minimal.

This type of slide works in auditorium or conference room settings. People sit relatively far from the screen, and the slide is competing for attention with the physical speaker (gestures, eye contact). Glance at chart, understand it in 5 seconds, focus back on speaker. The speaker and the slide are probably about the same size for someone sitting in the back of a conference room.

In a video call , the setting is a bit different. The slide is “in your face” on the screen, and the presenter is usually a small “talking head” in the corner of the screen (if present at all). Maybe the slide can carry a bit more information than the words “1.5 billion installs”.

I am not arguing to bring back the dense bullet points. The audience can read them faster than you can present both in a live setting and in a video call. But a Zoom call does open the way for slides that carry more information. Breakdowns of financial data, matrices with competitors plot in them, pros and cons tables.

Consider building them up in multiple slides to slowly add detail to support your story.

Image credit

At McKinsey in the 1990s, we used ‘Solo’ presentation software to make slides. It was far ahead of its time (before PowerPoint became the standard). It had a very advanced template engine that enabled you to recreate charts in the McKinsey style. The software required some skill, and charts were usually created by professional graphics designers who took hand-drawn charts as an input. Back then, Solo would run on Macs only. Which was the reason that McKinsey issued Macbooks to their staff at the end of the 1990s, so that consultants could edit (and create) their own slides if they had to.

Ultimately PowerPoint was the end of Solo. Not because of its capabilities, but because McKinsey’s clients would have this installed on their machines, and these clients wanted to edit slides themselves. And with the advent of PowerPoint, the slide format became less consistent in McKinsey. (Both the result of a less sophisticated template library, and the reduced influence of professional graphics designers to create the slides).

I checked this morning, and Solo is still around, here is the web site: https://www.axoninc.com/. Support has ended in 2020 though. I tried installing the demo on Mac, but failed. The PowerPC engine no longer works. It does work on Windows 10 though, but I had to click a button 587 times because the license of the trial version expired 587 days ago (on 7 February 2022). Those clicks were rewarded with some good memories though, I have added some screen shots.

This vintage ad explaining the benefits of aerodynamics is making the rounds online. It is promoting cars by Czech manufacturer Tatra, which at that time, looked dramatically different than other vehicles.

Tatra could have been a very different car manufacturer today if the communist government did not force it to switch to building trucks…

A great resource for vintage advertising is the Vintage Ad Browser, careful with copyright though.