"Messaging"

People ask me whether I take care of the "messaging" of presentations as well. I do, but I do not really connect to the concept. Maybe it is because I come from the world of engineering and consulting, not advertising.

"Messaging" is often used in a marketing context for a consumer audience, not an investor audience. Should we emphasize that this gadget is beautiful, or powerful? In marketing presentation you would say "now in 3 gorgeous colors." In an investor presentation you would put a competitive analysis that show that the marketing strategy will focus on esthetics. 

"Messaging" is often the basis for a design process that revolves around words and sentences. How should we call the benefit exactly. What slogans to use. I tend to think visual, and like to brainstorm concepts visually.

"Messaging" can sometimes come in the form of a prescribed flow of a presentation, we finished the messaging, now "just implement it". Not my kind of brief.

"Messaging" can also mean sorting out the company/product positioning. This is a big piece of work that usually falls outside the scope of a presentation design project. No story, no presentation.

Source: http://tpdsaa.tumblr.com/post/3106513440/submitted-by-copyguy

So do I do messaging? It depends.

More work

As an employee you get "please do this, it will look good on your annual performance review", "or do this, because your colleagues obviously have no problem with it". As an independent freelancer, this is replaced by: "please do this project (more or less) for free, and we will have lots more work in the future".

If you start out new as a freelancer, or if you have hired a few employees yourself, creating a fixed cost base that needs to be filled, this button still can work. But I think for most experienced freelancers with some sort of brand and a large base of existing clients, this does not work anymore. These people probably all work at capacity, and pick projects because they are interesting, push their skill level up, or help out a long standing client even if the work is not interesting.

Filling empty capacity is hardly ever rewarding. SEO, shallow "content" that is pushed on social media. It is better to do great work, get clients excited about you, and get them to refer you to more projects.

I agree that it takes some investment in the beginning. If you are in the early stages of a freelance career, maybe you can suggest to do this project for the full price, but the second one at a discount. The client said she has lots of more work, so that should not be a problem for her.

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Art: Marie-Denise Villers, Self-portrait, Young Woman Drawing 1801, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Podcast appearance

I did a 30 minute podcast interview with Sally Koering Zimney who runs the "This moved me" public speaking blog. Have a listen here. I talk about slide design and the philosophy behind my presentation app SlideMagic.

Where does your pitch go wrong?

I have seen hundreds, maybe even thousands of company pitches coming across my desk. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. Here are some stereotypes:

• An overload of scientific data hides the brilliance of a invention (often in the healthcare field)
• A very straightforward story of an Internet startup is perfectly clear, but somehow looks very amateurish, making the team look amateurish too.
• Super long-winded description of the what this technology is going to do, without any substance on how it is going to be solved, and who is going to solve it by the 3 months time frame put in the presentation
• Feature/benefit overload, making the audience doubt whether there is any distinctive benefit at all
• Failure to explain what the brilliant idea actually is/does
• Buzzword overload: "these people must be lacking substance of they need all that padding"
• Default Microsoft Office color scheme
• "Holy Grail" type of ideas, we will combine this, this, this, this, this, and this to stitch together the ultimate offer (we only do the stitching though)
• Step 1 of the action plan: hire someone who is actually going to do the work
• We started in 2003, then in 2005 we added, then in 2006 this happened, then in 2010 we hired, etc.
• Let's use the one dollar shave club video as an example
• The bulk of the presentation consist of IT architecture diagrams
• "This presentation is almost perfect, you just need to edit the messages a bit"

One of the reasons I like my profession is variety :-)

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Image from WikiPedia

Provoking input

In some projects I am literally stuck with lack of inspiration. The slides don't look good, the concepts don't pop out. To get going again I actually send the draft slides to the client, who inevitably will come back to me with "hey, we are not there yet". But in addition, it is often the few other comments that she makes, that provide a way out of the impasse. 

It is hard to force creativity....

"It is just an animation"

Many junior analysts are struggling to sell their minimal slides to a boss who is insisting on combing slides 2, 3, 4, and 5 into one "to save time". Here is one line of thought you can try: convincing here that slides 2, 3, 4, and 5 are in fact already one and the same slide, it is just an elaborate animation that you spread out over a couple of pages to make editing easier. "The audience will perceive it as one slide".

You can make your argument more credible by making sure that there are connecting elements on your slides that stay the same as you switch pages.

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Image via WikiPedia

Struggling with Apple Keynote

I am currently doing a bespoke presentation design project for a client in Apple Keynote rather than my usual PowerPoint. Overall, Keynote is a great piece of software, but as a power user I seem to be hitting its limitations. Not in terms of features, but in terms of workflow.

In PowerPoint, I have developed a pretty rapid process to turn scribbled chart concepts in decent looking slides. (Confirmed by the occasional client who can look over my shoulder while I do some last minute edits close to a deadline). It is the simple things that you need quick access to: changing colors, resizing objects, aligning things.

In Keynote I am "tearing my hear out" to do a few things. I know this blog is read by many presentation design gurus, so maybe one of you can point me out what I am doing wrong.

• Getting a shape color fill. I keep on clicking the rainbow circle, but it is not always clear whether it is active or not, and if it is, whether you are working on a font color, shape color, or outline color. The same with making things semitransparent: shape, text, line, or everything combined.
• I can't distort the aspect ratio of grouped items when scaling up or down. This is great for images, but not handy when you want to scale up an object composition to fit an entire slide exactly
• When you select multiple items, you can't scale up or down all of them together
• You select items by "touching" them, not by including them in the entire selection box. As a result, you always hit objects such as the slide title by accident in your selection
• I have not found a way to space out part of the columns or rows in a table evenly
• For some reason, I cannot change the color of the left marker in a gradient. My solution is to put another marker on top of it. Again, this leads to frustrated clicking on the "fill" box.
• In the full button, there is a nice arrow that activates a drop down menu with suggested colors, there is no way I can set these to some alternative color pattern.

Hopefully some of you can highlight a mistake I made, and/or Apple can fix things in a next update. Obviously, my presentation design app SlideMagic does not suffer from these issues... 

Adobe Illustrator designers vs PowerPoint designers

Now and then I encounter a PowerPoint presentation at a client which is clearly the work of a designer who comes from the world of Adobe / brochures / infographics. Here are the differences with my style:

• Often, an incredibly spectacular opening slides (sometimes 2-3), lots of detailed artwork, lots of time invested. Serious designers with powerful graphics design tool out-design me easily.
• But after a few pages, the design quality drops of, and you can see that these slides are created rather last minute, in a back and forth between the executive and the designer. Maybe there is the occasional icon, but most of it is text bullet points, which are formatted by a professional.
• Usually PowerPoint's template functions are ignored, guides, color schemes, defaults, making it very hard for anyone but the designer to add/change slides. "Insert new slide" gets you a blank standard PowerPoint page with nested bullets
• Heavy use of custom fonts, looking way better than the standard PowerPoint fonts, but they cause issues when displaying the file on other computers without them. Versions of old presentations usually continue to live through the organization without people even realizing that their headlines show in Arial rather than the intended font
• Massive file sizes as the images are kept in at their highest resolution

Business presentation design is a blend of practicing good design, and making compromises to deal with the practicality of working with lots of non-designers. Being able to deal with frequent changes, keeping design standards up (also on page 5 to 20), and making sure that everyone can make decent looking edits in the presentation.

I am sure that Adobe Illustrator designers can write a similar post about PowerPoint designers trying to edit a basic vector illustration...

Bottom up or top down?

I do both.

Story design. Contrary to good practice I usually start bottom up, designing one or two slides to get the look and feel of the presentation master right, then usually the "killer slide" that captures the most important message of the presentation. After that, I go top down and layout the entire presentation.

Slide design. Contrary to most people I go top down, loosely putting slide elements and scribbling text that is imprecise and not final yet, cleaning things up later.

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Image via WikiPedia

Creation versus polishing

Any creative software is full of distractions that give you excuses not to be creative. In presentation design this could be experimenting with fonts, colors, drop shadows, 3D rotations, or checking all those spectacular animation effects.

Creativity requires the opposite. A tool with few features, which you now inside-out, that enable you to jot down/capture your thought somewhere before it is gone. You have an idea how to tell your story, struggle with a PowerPoint feature, spend 15 minutes Googling tutorials, and fail to get back into the creative flow after.

Use a notebook (or my simple presentation design app SlideMagic) to capture your idea from start to finish before it evaporates.

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Art: Fritz Stotz Mädchen beim Silberputzen 1919

Refreshing language?

It is tempting to describe your product in a completely new vocabulary to illustrate that you do things differently.

Still, the first thing that a potential customer or investor will do, is to translate that back to the old vocabulary in order to figure out what is different, and what is not.

Often it is better to do part of the work for them. This is especially true for impatient investors who are not always convinced that something that sounds completely different, is in fact, completely different.

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Image: The Treachery of Images

That annoying junior analyst

Overheard in a meeting. "Don't put in too much detail in the 5 year financial forecast. It can never be accurate anyway, and you run the risk to wake up that annoying junior analyst who has not said anything the entire meeting, and let her zap the entire momentum of the pitch"

Agree, super precise forecasts 5 years out can never be correct. But:

• A consistent 5 year P&L with realistic margins and marketing spend is a sign that the company knows what it is getting itself into. It is not a test of accuracy, it is a test of management competence.
• Analysts can look junior, but could actually be reasonably senior in an investment organization. Or, even if the analyst is junior, convincing rather than bypassing them is a required hurdle in the investment process. "Hey Sally, did their financial planning make sense? You looked at it right"
• Maybe it is actually good news that the analyst did not ask a lot of questions about the other content in the presentation.

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Image: Promotional photo of the cast of the CBS television series Whiz Kids

Smart row / column insertion

My presentation app SlideMagic is all about the grid. We have made some improvements to make the workflow (even) faster. Now, when you insert rows and or columns, it copies its design and structure from its neighbors. This will save you a lot of time in more complicated table layout with different background colors.

1) Our starting point

2) Open the grid editor

3) Add a row and a column

4) The result

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Image via WikiPedia

Pitchbot - chat bot to practice investor pitches

This is nicely done: pitchbot. It gives you a nice feel about what a discussion with different types of investors might look like.

Art to preserve dignity

Art is a subset of design, it wants to change you. The "Hope" poster from 2008 captured the feelings of many (not all expectations came true though 8 years later). The same artist is part of a broader group who has started a campaign to use design to remind us of humanity. I think it should appeal to everyone across the entire political spectrum who believes in human values, civilized debate, and pragmatic government.

"Marketing English"

Sometimes I get feedback from marketing communication consultants that the English in my presentations needs to be improved in order for it to become proper "marketing English".

I consider this a compliment. "Marketing English" filled padded with buzzwords and long, elaborate sentences is making every product brochure or presentation in high tech sound pretty much the same.

I do recognize though that I am not a native English speaker, and that a native English speaker can figure that out after reading just one sentence on a slide. But I am not communicating in "proper English", but rather "global business English", which I picked up at business school back in France. It is a subset of English with a vastly reduced vocabulary, just enough to communicate important business concepts to other non-native English speakers. (I am not there yet with business Hebrew though).

If you are not a native English speaker, don't try to force a "grander" language on yourself, instead, it is OK to keep things simple and direct. Fix those typos though (I admit that I can be sloppy here as well) and yes, it never hurts to ask a native English speaker to glance over your text of an important presentation. Then decide what advice to incorporate, and which suggestions to ignore.

What questions do you usually get?

They are an indication of what is missing in your presentation. They come in 2 types:

• Easy ones. You think something is so blatantly obvious that you saved some slides by taking it out. Apparently your audience disagrees. 

• Hard ones. If everyone brings up this question, and you know it is one of the weaker point of your story, you might as well address things, since even if you had a meeting where the question was not asked for a change, it is highly likely that the audience did still have it.

Read your audience carefully. Does the same person ask the same sort of question again after she said that she understood a previous answer you gave? Does the person say she understands, but her eyes tell a different story

Investment bank memos

Investment bankers usually prepare the data rooms for due diligence in M&A transactions. Shelves full of information that is usually summarized in an information memorandum. I never found these summaries very useful. It is impossible to create a financial picture in hour head from just reading text with data. "Last year's sales were x, growth for the 3rd quarter was y, the company is doing business in 3 product segments." The only way to understand this is to extract the information and put it in tables or graphs to see what is going on.

And that is most of the times exactly what the buying side will do, hire a consultant/analyst to go through the material and start creating these charts, then someone more senior will go through the charts and select which ones are important, and which ones not.

You can accelerate the sales process by anticipating all of this, and do some of the homework of the buy side. In the process, you can spoon feed them the right insights you want them to have.

Similar but unrelated, this is also why wordy descriptions of company results in newspaper articles do not work for me. The journalist took the data tables and graphs and translated them into words, the exact opposite direction of where I want her to go.

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Image by Andreas Poike on Flickr

Elephants in the room

Client "I don't want to talk about this, because it reminds people of [X] which failed. Let's call that differently because there was that research project 10 years ago that did not work. Hmmm, let's not put that on page 3".

Me "But your technology solves all these problems from the past right?"

Client "Yes"

Me "And in meetings, where do you end up talking about all the time"

Client "People confusing me with technologies from the past"

Sometimes it is just better to take things head on and stop avoiding the big elephant that is sitting in the room but nobody wants to bring up in a conversation.

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Image via WikiPedia

Company pitch versus product pitch

Product marketers can get bogged down in identifying endless lists of product benefits, each slightly different for different customer segments.

There is a problem with this for potential buyers of a product. The long list of benefits waters down what is truly unique about your product. All benefits sound exactly the same as the benefits that are being claimed by about every company in the world.

There is also a problem with potential investors in your company. Investors are interested in buying your company, not your product, so the scope is broader than product benefits. Also, they are buying into someone who is hopefully able to sell. "If I were a potential client, would I buy this product pitch?"