Here is a question that I received from my recent client of mine who says that TJ. I followed your techniques of just having images on my PowerPoint slide and not putting the traditional wall of text. But when I asked my colleagues what they thought of the presentation, they said that it seemed superficial. What do I do?
Well here is the real challenge I have for you: rather than asking people what they think of your presentation I am much more interested in you asking them what they remember from it because people will have all sorts of judgements about what works and what doesn’t which is different from what actually works for you.
If you ask people across the board if advertising affects them everyone will say that they do not fall for advertisement. But we all know how sophisticated advertising works and that is why corporations spend millions of dollars on advertising. So that is my first challenge to you: do not ask people what they think of your presentation, ask them what ideas day remember. if they remember your main ideas, your presentation worked.
The second thing to think about is that people often misinterpret my message on PowerPoint slides. My message is not that you should not have lots of bullet points and text and content, my point is the traditional PowerPoint that you have with lots of bullet points and text in rows and columns. You should create such a presentation and hand it out to people or email it in advance of the presentation or afterwards. But when you are standing up and presenting to them that is when I believe it is most effective to put up one image per slide or one Idea per slide regardless of what people think about it.
I have tested audiences all around the world and you can bet that nobody remembers anything from a slide of a block of text.