Our client base ranges from one-man-band start-ups to multi-national corporations. I’m not saying that the one-man-bands are better at making presentations than the corporates – they’re just bad in different ways!
Here’s our experience of working with large, corporate and corporate-style organisations. Do you see anything you recognise?
Corporate Templates
template powerpoint
Let me get this off my chest right at the start – templates of any kind are the bane of my life. As I said here and here, I’m sure there are good ones, I’ve just pretty much never seen any that work as well as a little bit of imagination and effort.
But corporate templates seem to have a hydra-like evil life of their own. I chop off one head and two more take their place.
Common comments seem to be things like “But the PR department says we’ve got to stick to the corporate line”. That’s not too bad, I suppose, except that the PR department usually doesn’t know what it’s doing. What looks good on a traditional brochure doesn’t work on the screen. How hard is that to grab, as a concept?
What am I talking about? Things like insisting on a font that reads well on paper but can’t be read easily on the screen. I know of one organisation who insist our workbooks are written in a font which saves ink (for good, environmental reasons) but who also insist that we use it for all their presentations without checking to see if that font projects well.
Is it just me who sees the dumbness of this? Given that it takes no more electricity to project a good slide than a bad one, why are you tie-ing our hands like this, guys?!
Or how about this “The boss uses this template!”
Really? Do you have the same car as your boss, too? The same handwriting? Do you make sure you have the same tie on that he does?
Okay, if your boss uses the corporate template for good reasons, by all means use it – but use it for those same good reasons, not just because he (or she) does. After all, if your boss jumped in front of a passing train you’d not do the same! (Would you?) And yet you’re happy to create a presentation that’s a bit of a (corporate) train wreck. fine.
Costs
Excuse me?
Seriously, costs.
Well, costs and (mainly) effort. In fact overwhelmingly ‘effort’. How about this conversation:
Me: Did you like the mock up of the presentation – we did the first four slides
Client: Yeah, they looked fantastic – really got the message over
Me: Glad you liked ‘em – it’s what we do
Client: But we can’t use them.
Me: Eh?
Client: No. The boss says we’ve got to go back to the old way of doing things ‘cos these slides make our other presentations look bad.
Me: Errrrr…… Can I talk to your boss….?
Does anyone have any advice for this?! That’s deliberately deciding to be bad!
Good grief! I felt like I’d wandered into a Dilbert cartoon.
Expectations
Actually, I do have a tiny bit of sympathy with this one.
It goes something like this… “We can’t use a different type of presentation, though I agree your way is better. Everyone at the conference is going to be expecting the boring slides – the kind they use – and if we stand out people won’t like it”.
The bit that worries me here is that all too often these people know that they’re doing something boring but they’re too frightened to try something new. It seems to be a case of avoiding being bad rather than trying to be good.
The reason I can understand it is that all too often conferences cost and arm and a leg. Taking risks is potentially expensive: there’s a corporate aversion to risk of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” style.
Thing is, though, it is ‘broke’! When clients do the sums they often find that the number of sales these conferences generate doesn’t realllllly cover the costs, once they’ve taken all the internal, hidden costs into account.
So what have they got to lose?
Just their inertia
The reason I’ve got only a little bit of sympathy here (as opposed to lots) is that this is just the corporate equivalent of just doing things because everyone else does. Isn’t it time a few corporations got out of this rut and decided that “When everyone else zigs, zag”? :)
Sigh!
Okay, gentle reader – the sound you can here is me, climbing down off my soapbox. Over to you – what are your thoughts on poor corporate presentations, and the reasons for them…?
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