A few months ago I was sitting in the ‘green room’ behind a stage waiting to deliver a keynote speech to an audience of entrepreneurs and business leaders. I couldn’t see the person speaking on stage ahead of me, but I heard the audio feed. I began taking notes because his talk was so interesting. Later that night I had dinner with some of the attendees.
“Good thing the guy ahead of you didn’t follow your presentation,” one person said. “Why? He was great,” I responded.
“Didn’t you see his PowerPoint? It was old-school.”
While I was glad this attendee didn’t consider my presentation “old school,” I felt sorry for all the speakers who don’t realize that the presentation world is changing. Most audiences—Millennials, especially—want to see something new, fresh, and visually interesting.
In no way am I suggesting that you ditch PowerPoint. It’s a fabulous presentation tool that’s used by more than 90 percent of business professionals. I recently spoke to the marketing director of a large construction company. The company had won an $875 million contract using many of the techniques in this Forbes column…and all in PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not the enemy, but a lack of creativity in displaying your story can kill an otherwise strong message.
Some of you have asked, “Carmine, what about charts and bar graphs? My clients expect the data.” Then give them the data, but deliver the information visually.
The secret to bringing “old school” PowerPoint into the new age of presentation can be found in the concept of “picture superiority.” Information is easier to retain and more robustly processed by a person’s brain if it is presented in text and pictures. Deliver information verbally and your audience might retain 10 percent of the information. Add a picture and retention soars to 65 percent. Here are three examples of how to visualize data.
The first example is a photograph from a presentation I delivered to a large audience in Paris. Note the slide on the screen behind me. It’s an animated slide that displays the data I just told you about it—10 percent vs. 65 percent retention. Since I only want the audience to remember two numbers, there’s no need to clutter the slide with extraneous statistics.
What about bar graphs or pie charts? Think visually about the content you wish to present. For example, the following two slides are courtesy of the designers at Empowered Presentations. The first slide is one of the most visually attractive “bar graphs” I’ve ever seen. It simply displays the rising cost of college tuition, but does so using textbooks instead of a standard excel grid.
The second example is a new take on the “old school” pie chart. It’s meant to show the growing population of China compared to the rest of the world.
Most people create bar graphs or charts in excel and import the data into a PowerPoint slide. If you want your presentation to look exactly the same as your competition, then keep doing what you’re doing. If you want to stand out in a sea of dull PowerPoint presentations, then start thinking visually about the story you’d like to tell. Your audience will thank you and, more importantly, will remember what you told them.