Present like a rockstar

How to capture your audience’s attention through effective visual presentations

Whatever your industry, we've all been there – the dimmed conference room lights, the awkward fumbling with errant laptops. That first crowded PowerPoint slide appears on screen, riddled with bullet points as the presenter stumbles their way through an incoherent explanation. You've zoned out in the first thirty seconds and by the time it's over, you can't remember what it was for.

“There is a lot of debate around what makes an effective presentation,” says Dave Meyer of idiosyncratic presentation strategists Missing Link. Dave is the company's tattooed Head of Strategy, wired and perpetually animated. The fast talking 31 year old is charged with helping clients figure out what it is they're actually trying to achieve and then finding the most effective way to do it.

Put Dave's way, Missing Link “take a pretty good grounding in science, understanding how an audience's minds work, roll it up in years of experience making boring presentations significantly less boring, sprinkle it with amazing and functional design and deep fry it in awesome. Any presenter can present like a rock-star, and it's our job to make sure they do.”

There are two external factors that are important to consider when planning presentations besides the actual delivery of your speech.

1.       The size of your venue. It is not wise to put small audiences in a huge room. Not only does it feel like you’re in a cave, it loses its intimacy, and creates distance between you and the audience – which you don’t want. The inverse is also true. Don’t jam too many sardines into a can. They’ll spend more time trying to avoid the fat person next to them and trying to find pockets of air to breathe than listening to you.

2.       Lighting. For smaller presentations it is preferable to use a room with windows and natural light. People feel more at ease, less claustrophobic, and therefore far more willing to listen, comfortably, to you.

Helping people understand how a presentation should work isn't always as easy as just pointing out where they're going wrong. “The reality is that a presentation is only effective if the audience does what you want them to do at the end of it. Missing Link see presentations as the 'use of a message to change some sort of behaviour or to create an action', so if that doesn't happen, it wasn't effective.”

So, we agree that any presentation is all about the people listening to it, right? So your style should suit them, too, right? Cool, then ask yourself who they are and what they as individuals enjoy. Hard task, isn't it? The only thing we can work out is what content will be relevant to them. But the way in which that content is presented should suit the presenter. It should be an extension of who you are. “I do presentations that have 4 letter words and naked women in them, regardless of the audience (bankers, marketers, accountants, EXCO), and they all love it, because I customise my messages to them, but present it in a way that's unique to me,” says Dave.

So, in order to create an effective presentation, you need to both understand the content you have to work with and clearly understand exactly what you want the audience to do after your 15 minutes of fame (super, super important). Some possible actions could be: 

- I want them to agree to giving my team more budget

- They need to agree to the importance of this project, so I can get the go-ahead

- I need the team to understand exactly what's expected of them with the new direction we're taking

- The company I'm speaking to need to agree to a follow up meeting, where we can discuss the details of the sale in detail.

Once you have that desired end result, you know where you're going. Otherwise, metaphorically, you're setting out on a road trip without no destination, which rather logically, effects you reaching any destination.

It is advisable to write down an objective for the presentation in this style: 'I want to talk about ________, in order to get the audience to ___________ at the end of it'. Don't cop out and write the easy answers. Be very specific. Then stick it on your wall, your desk, the back of the toilet door, or your secretary (whatever you see more of). And then create your presentation structure and style that will meet your objective.

The one thing we recommend above all else is that a presenter presents as themselves. Overall, the audience should enjoy the presentation, regardless of seriousness of topic. However you get them to do that, is up to you. As long as you understand your audience, you can do that in a way that suits you.

According to Dave, success owes a lot to perspective – your audience's, not yours. “Presenters rarely think about where they're trying to take the audience so they add whatever information they want to talk about, as opposed to what the audience wants to hear. Which means you end up with a presentation with no direction, no conclusion, a heap of useless information and an audience that sits back at the end with almost no idea of what they were listening to.”

That's just the narrative overkill most presenters indulge in but there are two sides to any presentation: the story that needs telling and the visuals that explain it. Putting it mildly, Dave feels particularly strongly about this. "To everyone reading this, say this with me: "My visual aids are not a cue card." Visual aids are there to help the audience absorb and retain your message through visuals. Half the problem would be sorted out if everyone just remembered this small point.”

Video has the ability to invoke powerful emotions in your audience and there are things that linear presentations, guided by a speaker are good at, and there are other times when video does a greater job. Either way, they need to be chosen for what you are trying to accomplish. Want to get some emotion going or smack people harder in a launch? Make a kick-ass video. Want to tell a story, and get the audience in the palm of your hand?  Presentation is best here.

The aim is to get the 'about me' over as soon as possible, but you still need the audience to buy the credibility of you/your company as soon as possible. So, we create a powerful introductory video. This also ensures that anyone who presents will never be able to get the 'who we are' stuff - a critical story - wrong. Beats the heck out of a 'credentials' slide, doesn't it?

Another great thing about videos is they break up the information you're presenting into chunks. Not only does this add more dynamics to the presentation but there's also a psychological reason - people can only pay attention for so long, regardless of how good you are.

There's a reason that rock-stars perform like, well, rock stars. They have the basics right (talent, skill, audience understanding), and because of that they've learned confidence, to make their style unique, and to really blow audiences away at every show. It's the same with presenting. Get the foundations solid, then build off that and you can change the world!