Episode #320: Should I Go High Tech With My Presentation

I attended an online presentation recently and the presenter was from one of the HUGE social media companies and the presentation was very different from the norm. He was using his company’s internal platform to deliver the presentation, rather than using standard tools like PowerPoint or its equivalent. He could conduct comprehension tests of his content using a sophisticated timing mechanism, which would rank people in terms of who were the fastest to complete the test and do it the most accurately. It was quite snazzy and there were other little flourishes which were quite cool.

It was all going pretty hummingly, until he introduced his colleague who was going to add to the conversation with her experiences and views. This is when things came crashing down. Her delivery was done in a monotone, which had the effect of making me suddenly feel drowsy during the session. Her lifeless presentation was in complete contrast with the all the bells and whistles this company had been putting on display, before she was introduced.

This made me think about was that high tech presentation actually effective in terms of communicating the core messages? When I thought back to the guys talk, I realised that I had been distracted by the tech and hadn’t fully absorbed the points he was making. This is a distinct danger when presenting using “cool” tools.

I am not a fan of anything distracting from the speaker. Online presentations in particular are the refuge of scoundrels. While we are talking there are members of the audience who are completely distracted by doing their email or some other task and are not really taking in what we are saying. The first hint is when they won’t turn on their camera. This is a sign they don’t want to be involved fully in the meeting and are there, but not really.

Usually online, there is big screen real estate taken up mainly with the slides and a tiny little box, with a postage stamp sized image of the presenter. In this situation, it is super hard for the speaker to connect with their audience. If you decide to torture your audience by speaking in a monotone as well, then expect trouble. All we really have is our vocal modulation because they usually cannot see our gestures or much body language, including our facial expressions. We have to be working hard to make that vocal range compensate for all the other parts of the presentation tool box which are missing.

If we are online, we should try to turn off the “share screen” function as much as possible. Yes, it is a bit of fiddling around to get the slide deck back up, but on balance we are better to appear in a larger format on screen, rather than being trapped in that little postage stamp. The same applies when we are presenting in person. Most people start with the slide deck and keep it up throughout the whole presentation. Yes, we can do that, but why not hit the “B” button on the keyboard sometimes and send the screen into blackness, so that the only thing to focus on now is us. We just hit the space bar and the screen is back up again and this is so much easier that trying to do the same thing when online and operating in Zoom or whatever.

I am not a fan of using video in presentations. It is extremely rare that the video actually adds any value to the talk. It is often “filler” for speakers who don’t like speaking and want to reduce their bit as much as possible. They think that a glossy PR Department “high production values” corporate video will make up for their lack of delivery ability. It won’t. We as presenters have so much more high octane potential than a corporate video. If the video is too slick, we come off as second best and our messaging capacity is damaged. If the corporate video is rather ho hum (and that is usually the case), we have lost the audience and now we have to work so much harder to get them back with us.

Simplicity in terms of what we show on screen is good for us as speakers, because we are the star, not the slide deck and we need to keep it that way. Too much information, too many fonts, too many colours, too much animation, is a nightmare for us to break through with our message. Yet, we see presenters doing this to themselves, making their job as a communicator so much tougher than it already is.

“Go light on the bells and whistles gimmicks and be the bells and whistles yourself”, would be my advice if you want to get your message through. If you just want to project a high tech image and don’t care about getting your points registered with the audience, then knock yourself out and go for it. The only problem with this approach is it is so transitory and ephemeral, you have to wonder why you bothered in the first place. We go to all of this effort preparing our talk, so why not make sure our key messages are resonating with our audience, be that delivered online or in person.