We spent a fair amount of time reviewing, crunching and analysing the numbers from the 2010 Business Presentation Survey…and then pulling together a webinar to explain to the hundreds of interested parties on quite what the results meant.

If you were one of the unlucky ones who didn’t quite get on the webinar invite list (we were over-subscribed – sorry!), then fret no more.  Using the wonders of PowerPoint Repurposing, we’re able to bring you the edited highlights of both webinars here on YouTube.

So grab a coffee, sit back and enjoy the show (we’d also respectfully recommend having a pen and paper handy as you’re likely to want to scribble down a lot of the findings and suggestions). 

But enough of my yacking – on with the show:   

Part 1

Part 2

From the high octane big pitch presentations (normally in conjunction with our partners, Sales Engine) through to slides for speaking engagements for authors and the like  (we’re in the thick of a project for a woman who climbed Everest at the age of 22…amazing story but more on that at a later date).

One particular type of presentation that seems to get our customers in a fluster is that of the CPD or Continuing Professional Development presentation.  There’s no getting away from it – these presentations are fraught with complexity and pitfalls.

But why?

The answer is pretty straightforward.  A CPD presentation needs to tread a very fine line:

It needs to be independent enough to satisfy the CPD assessors (they don’t want the CPD process to be a thinly veiled sales exercise) BUT have enough commercial content to keep the marketing department of the Provider happy (after all, it costs money to send people out to deliver these presentations!).  On top of all this, it needs to grab the attention of the audience who may just be there to pick up their CPD points and grab a free sandwich.

Like we say, it can get very complex…

The good news is that we’ve got ourselves a bit of a reputation for getting the balance just right with clients like Corus, Rockfon, SIG and Altro now equipping their CPD specialists with top notch presentations.

So pleased are we with the way things have panned out over the last couple of years that we’ve created a dedicated service just for CPD presentations.

We believe we’re the only company out there with a dedicated CPD specialist (the aforementioned vagaries of CPD presentations mean that this is pretty much a must in our opinion).  He’s called Roy and he’s very very good.

As part of the rollout of this specialised service, we’ve created a separate CPD section on our website.

For more details of the service, interviews with existing CPD provider customers and information on how to contact our CPD specialist expert, please click here or head on over to www.cpd-presentations.co.uk.

The teams across the business have been a blur of activity:

Project Management
If our PowerPoint geeky status needed any confirmation, we’ve found it.  It emerged over a coffee that Matt used PowerPoint to design, measure and calculate his fancy new garden decking.

Yes, that’s right…PowerPoint.  Don’t believe us?  Check this out:

Design
The Recruitment Machine has kicked into action with Liz and team furiously interviewing for additional members of the Design team here at Eyeful Towers.

Finding that special mix of brilliant design skills, PowerPoint expertise and the ability to make a good cup of tea is proving a challenge…but we’re getting there.

Consultancy
When they’re not creating groundbreaking presentations for our clients, it would seem they’re busy making babies.

Congratulations to Tim and family on the birth of their beautiful daughter Lucy:

We’re also slightly agog at the baby making prowess of Mike from our US office.  His lovely (but surely, exhausted, wife Anna) is expecting number 5.  What more to say..?

Finally, we noticed a rather spooky similarity between Sally, European Head of Sales, and Edna from The Incredibles.  Separated at birth?

Note – these are not Sally’s normal eyewear…although we think they kind of work…

As for me, I’ve enjoyed negotiating the latest expansion of Eyeful Towers (we like to call it the West Wing).  This currently bare room will soon be transformed into a heady mix of Finance and Account Management teams fighting over the printer and coffee rotas.  

Over in the far corner will be the all singing-all dancing audio studio, allowing us to increase capacity for all our presentation voiceover and music trickery.  Busy times.

Amidst all of this, we also managed to successfully roll out the inaugural Eyeful Webinars.  We’re delighted that the feedback and interest was so high (we were over-subscribed for the European leg – amazing!).  We’re now dusting ourselves down and preparing for the roll out a series of PowerPoint Amnesty webinars.  More of this very soon.

Hopefully that gives you a flavour of what we’ve been up to at Eyeful – babies, recruitment, expanded offices and lookalikes.  It’s all in a day’s work…

Panic not! 

This is not some clumsy, heavy-handed way of selling our wares.  If you’re a regular here, you’ll know all about the wonders of Presentation Optimisation, the glowing testimonials of our ever-growing customer base and the magic we can weave with the most basic of presentations.  Let’s not get into that now…

Nope – we’re talking about Repurposing PowerPoint.  Taking the hard work you’ve put into creating your masterpiece in PowerPoint and repackaging it for other mediums. 

From PowerPoint to Podcast…to video…to interactive PDF…and finally to web presentation.  The choice is yours.

To help explain how this works and the options available to you, we thought we’d repurpose one of our own presentations originally developed for a RIBA conference. 

It’s a case study in it’s own right…

We also think Pixar are nothing short of brilliant.  Wonderful films with compelling storylines, engaging characters and eye-popping animation techniques.

So what links these two with your corporate presentation?  Animation.

Mark has got himself hot under the collar about the growing trend of 3D cinema for a while now.  He’s sick of having aliens, cars and body parts “flying” out of the screen just because the technology allows.

We tend to agree with him.

It’s a bit like using every PowerPoint animation and transition available to you (even more in PowerPoint 2010!) on your slides.  Yes – it’s clever technology but frankly it’s distracting and not helping you tell your story.

Now onto Pixar’s Toy Story 3.  Mark loves this film for many reasons but the key one for us is that he didn’t notice the 3D.

It was there but did all the right things – helped the story along, engaged the audience and supported the characters.  But at no point did it detract by being used inappropriately simply because they had the technology to hand.

To paraphrase Mark, technology should enhance not detract.

And if the audience are so engaged with the whole experience that they don’t even notice the technology, pat yourself on the back.  Job done.

Next time you have to prepare a presentation try this – put together a slide deck that has a slide for every 10 seconds.

Sounds tough, I know, but try it. 

Think how little each slide can have on it – maybe one picture or one idea. Instead of 4 bullet points a slide could only have 1.

Now if you take this to it’s logical conclusion, you’ll have a 180 slides for a 30 minute presentation.  Each slide designed to share information, move your story along or simply underpin your message. 

That’s a lot of slides, a lot of content…and huge opportunity to mess up. 

If the presenter and their slides are not in sync, chaos reigns and the only message delivered is that the babbling madman on stage doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about!

OK, so the concept of a 10 second slide isn’t really that practical but it does highlight the need to have an enormous amount of synergy between your talk and the slides.

And by synergy WE DO NOT MEAN READING THE SLIDES (sorry to shout but we find that rather upsetting) – we mean working in tandem with the slide deck to support and punctuate your message. 

Get this right and PowerPoint magically transforms from a teleprompter into an effective presentation aid.

Get in sync with your slide deck – your audience will be forever grateful…and it may save you a few grey hairs along the way.

It seems like only yesterday that we celebrated our 5th Birthday…in reality it was back in October.

It doesn’t seem like 5 minutes ago since we moved to our fancy new offices, Eyeful Towers…in reality, it was back in April.

And it feels like we’ve just started working with the good people at Peak Software…in reality, it’s been over 3 years.

During that time, we’ve worked on any number of fun and engaging projects with Clive and his team, from audio packed product launch PowerPoints through to HTML Flash conversions. 

As with any relationship, we’ve worked hard to keep it fresh by offering new ideas and maintaining an enthusiasm for each new project. 

We’ve enjoyed every minute of it and it would seem Clive is of the same opinion…  To learn more, listen on.

Peak Software Testimonial v1

Voting has now officially closed.

We’re extremely grateful to the hundreds of you who took the time to complete it - your feedback and experiences have provided an amazing insight into how businesses approach presentations in 2010.

The task now ahead of us is to process the hundreds of responses and draw insight from them.  And then, as promised, we’d like to share the results and analysis with you.

• So is Death by PowerPoint really killing businesses? 
• Are new cloud-based applications like Slide Rocket and Prezi having an impact? 
• Does Apple’s Keynote software hold the key to a better presentation experience?  
• And are companies changing their approach to business presentations in line with their social media and online strategies?

All these questions and more will be answered in our webinars on the 3rd August (UK & Europe here and US & Canada here).  

We have limited spaces so please click here to register for one of the following events to ensure you have a front row seat as we share the results, provide the latest insight and offer analysis of how businesses really view presentations:

UK & Europe:.  3rd August, 3pm GMT – Register here

US & Canada:. 3rd August, 11am EST – Register here

If you have any questions or require further information, please drop us a line or give your local Eyeful office a call:

UK & Europe:. (+44) 0845 056 8528

US:. (+1) 773 770 6131

We look forward to sharing the fascinating results of this survey with you on the 3rd.

Now I have to hold my hand up and admit to “swerving” most conference invitations.  In my experience, they tend to be thinly veiled sales pitches by speakers who should know better to audiences with only a passing interest in the content.

This conference, however, was a little different…

Firstly it featured some notable and worthy speakers – Simon Woodroffe of YO! Sushi and YOTEL fame along with Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent Drinks.  Whilst these brands may not mean a huge amount outside of the UK, they are big news and much admired over here in Blighty.  As expected, both Simon and Richard performed brilliantly and delivered interesting and engaging presentations.  Good job all round.

However the speaker that took the conference from “good” to “great” was a chap called Jeremy Gilley.  He is the founder of the Peace One Day movement, a not-for-profit organisation focussed on stopping all warfare across the world for one day every year (the 21st September seeing that you asked). 

Think of it like peace fuelled version of “Mothers Day” – the idea is that everyone across the globe acknowledges it every year but rather than rushing out to buy overpriced cards and flowers, its represented by people laying down their weapons for a day. 

A laudable idea but how to present this to a business audience..?

From a presentation structure and delivery perspective, Jeremy shone.  His presentation managed to be simultaneously humble, moving and motivational.  His message was heard and understood loud and clear by everyone in the audience…and I have no doubt, will stay with many of them for a long time to come. 

He used his content wisely – never blinding the audience with too much detail (it would have been easy to turn the presentation into a “this is how complex international diplomacy is” rant) and using video to illustrate points quickly and effectively. 

It has to be said that the few PowerPoint slides he did use weren’t great but we’ll be working on those for him over the next few weeks!

Ultimately the reason he was able to deliver his presentation so effectively was because he truly believes in his message.  He’s presented the same story hundreds if not thousands of times to a range of audiences – business conferences like this one…but also Heads of State, C-Level Execs in organisations like Coca-Cola and, um, the Taliban. 

All tough audiences in one way or another…all bought into Jeremy’s vision because his message was so crystal clear and simple to understand.  Something all presenters should bear in mind…

All of this said, the most important message I and my fellow delegates took from the day was that Peace One Day is working.  It’s a frustratingly slow process…but it’s working.  I take my hat off to Jeremy and the rest of the Peace One Day team on their amazing achievements so far. 

To learn more about Peace One Day, please view the short video below.  I assure you it’ll be worth it.

Even though it’s a bit dated (no mention of PowerPoint 2010 in it!), there are some cracking morsels in here about Apple’s Keynote software. 

It also addresses some of the points raised by it’s legions of fans who swear that that it’s the antidote to death by bullets. 

To learn more, listen on…

PowerPoint vs Keynote Podcast