Being on the receiving end of truly terrible technical talks is sadly becoming a universal human experience in the modern world.
It happens most frequently with those atrocious techy presentations consisting of far too many deadly dull – and overly wordy – PowerPoint slides.
You know the ones.
The presenter’s slides can look like this one below!
When you’re in the audience facing a battery of slides like this, it’s typically
made all the worse when there is someone at the lectern drivelling on with streams of unstoppable, unfathomable technical jargon that most can’t understand.
These audiences are typically so bored by this kind of experience that they usually fail to grasp whatever the presenter is seeking to impart.
They can even lose any desire to want to understand it!
And the presenter pictured next to the slide above does exactly this.
Alas the shocking news about this particular slide is that the presenter has DELIBERATELY designed it to look dull.
It’s by someone who is doing presentations – with really bad slides – on purpose, to seek to make a point.
He’s Chet Haase who is so concerned about terrible technical talks, he does a presentation called “Top Tips For Terrible Tech Talks.”
He’s seeking to send up typical terrible tech talks.
Chet’s aim is to show the perpetrators of bad techy talks just how atrocious their bad slides – accompanied by reams of uninterpretable jargon – really are!
I agree with his aim, though his method is painful.
One of my life missions for 2024 is to save humanity from the terrible tech talk experience!
Hopefully you are already aware that you should never, never, never inflict atrociously dull and overly wordy slides on any audience.
And here’s hoping you feel a moral responsibility to make sure that no one in your team ever does this either!!!
The guiding principle of making captivating slides which illuminate your audience comes from slide-making experts who advise that when creating top quality slides you should:
“Think movie posters; not documents!”
To illustrate this point, compare the terrible slide in the photo above with the movie poster below.
This image below is from an advertising campaign for what I understand to be a B-movie from the 1950s made before I was born.
The movie is called “ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN”.
The movie may well be as bad as the title suggests.
But at least the poster promoting it grabs our attention – just as your captivating presentation slides need to do!
If you would like to get an idea just how terrible the Chet Haase send-up tech talk is, click on the arrow for this video below.
I strongly suggest – for your own sanity – do not watch too much of it.
And for the sanity of others, please never, never, never model a presentation of your own upon this one!
The real solution for making slides for presentations that captivate is to book sessions of “Presenting With Confidence, Impact & Pizzazz” for your team.
Those attending can get to see how slides resembling a movie poster – such as this one below for the movie “Jaws” – can help you grab and hold the attention of your audience.
You can check out booking sessions on “Presenting With Confidence, Impact & Pizzazz” at:
http://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/presenting-with-confidence-impact-and-pizzazz/
The great news for those techy folk – and others – who take part “Presenting With Confidence, Impact & Pizzazz” is that, apart from being competence-enhancing and confidence-enhancing, the sessions are also fun!
Even techy people who are nervous about presenting have demonstrated that they can learn to communicate far more effectively with those who are less techy than they are.
They can even make useful points that are understandable to a non-techy audience.
Where required, we can also include a segment on “Great Answers To Blowtorch-On-The-Belly Questions – During And After Your Presentation”.
If you’re involved in a technology-based company, there is an additional way to help the sector improve a key element of its communications.
This is thanks to an agency which I have the privilege of working with to boost the presentation skills and media interview response skills of some of its clients.
It’s The Essential Agency which is a on a mission to rid the tech sector of what it sees as the often poorly performing – and sometimes “utterly beige” – material that sometimes gets sent out under the banner of “content marketing”.
The company’s straight-talking Managing Director, Sam Rudland, is seeking to turn this around – and you can potentially do your bit to help.
The Essential Agency is undertaking a research project in order to create a benchmarking report to help companies in the sector lift their game in this area.
So the agency is seeking out people involved in tech-focused business-to-business companies to take part in their survey about content marketing.
If this is you, there is a big incentive to take part in the survey.
Every survey-completer will get an entry into a prize draw with a chance to win a fantastic prize!
It’s a skiing holiday in April in a chalet near the picturesque French resort of Avoriaz.
You can potentially win the prize – by completing the survey at:
https://survey.theessential.agency/benchmark/?in_token=mdodd170124
You’ll also get a copy of the benchmarking report which The Essential Agency will produce.
Every step towards helping the tech world communicate better – in what it writes and how it presents – is a plus for humankind!