SmallBizResource Blog -- Marketing

PowerPoint Masters: Stephen Colbert, Bill O'Reilly

Posted by Benjamin Tomkins Monday, May 19, 2008, 07:37 PM ET

For good or ill, PowerPoint is the lingua franca of corporate America. Smaller businesses that deliver polished, professional presentations signal potential clients, partners, and vendors that they're legit. For an example PowerPoint presentation mastery, look no further than two well-know basic cable bloviators.

One widely quoted (possibly apocryphal) Microsoft estimate places the number of PowerPoint presentations at 30 million...per day. Even if that estimate is doubly inflated, that's still a heck of a lot of PowerPoint slides.

As with anything that ubiquitous, there are those who say "nay." Notably Yale's visual information guru Edward Tufte. He's the guy who said "Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely."

Whether you agree with Tufte or not, the slide deck is here to stay and mastering it can only bolster your business bonafides. Over on bMighty, Strategy Matters columnist Nilofer Merchant offers up her list of PowerPoint myths rife with insights on how to boost presentation effectiveness -- ignore at your peril.

Adding my own two cents to Nilofer's (based on my status as an occasional PowerPoint jockey), the most crucial thing to remember about delivering a good PowerPoint presentation is this:

DON’T READ THE SLIDES

But don't take it from me. A survey from Think Outside the Slide says the most annoying thing about PowerPoint is speakers who read the slides to the audience: 67.4% of respondents noted it as the most irksome aspect of bad presentations.

Would you put English language subtitles on an English language movie? No. So why read your slides (before anyone flames me in the comments: closed captioning is are different discussion)
To see masters of not saying what you're reading at work, look no farther than basic cable.

Master #1: Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report who has choreographed his version of PowerPoint (his is just fancier and he has a staff), dubbed "The Word" so astutely that it borders on dialog.

Master #2: The guy Colbert is impersonating, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor who does much the same as Colbert, albeit with a notably different style and intent.

What's common to both is that the words on the screen aren't what's coming out of the hosts mouth. In fact, the words on screen expand, augment, contradict, mock, and support what the host is saying. That's the way to do it.

Next slide!

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