6 Tips for Better Presentations in the Ad Biz
How to grab attention, deliver information, and motivate action
If you work in advertising, you’re really in the “presentation” business.
The truth is, we make a hell of a lot more decks than we do ads. I’m afraid to do the math (“Good god, what have I DONE with my life?!”) but I know I spend a lot more time in Google Slides than I do on production.
No matter what department you’re in — creative, strategy, account, media, etc. — if you want to get ahead in the ad biz, you’ve got to be a good presenter.
So, at Duncan Channon, we designed a training to help our people get better at it.
Now, the Internet is already full of general public speaking tips. We wanted to focus on something more practical — the presentations we give in our day-to-day life as advertising professionals. Internal presentations (to your team, to your boss, to leadership, etc.) and presentations to clients (to sell them on a strategy, an idea, an execution, or to report results, etc.)
We designed the three-session class to be highly interactive, with homework assignments and participants DOING and PRACTICING rather than listening to lectures.
And then…coronavirus. (Sad trombone)
So, while the IRL class is on pause until we’re together again, I wrote up some of the ideas we were going to cover.
Obviously, a long Medium post is no substitute for actual practice, but I hope some of these tips help you as you prepare for your next presentation.
Because the better presenter you are, the further you’re going to go in your career. People who can grab attention, deliver information, and motivate an action are the most valuable people in advertising. You might as well be one of them.
Tip #1: 95% of the presentation happens before the presentation
Most advertising presentations are terrible because the person who is giving the presentation doesn’t have a fucking clue what they’re really trying to do.
Boom.
“That’s bullshit, John. I don’t give a presentation unless I have to. And when I do, I know exactly what I’m trying to do.”
Maybe.
But I see a lot of presentations that are all over the place. Way too long. Eye charts that no human can read. Too much information on slides.
I sit in a lot of meetings where I’m actually invested in the content — I need them to go well so that I can do my job — and I still can’t follow the plot.
So here’s my #1 presentation tip:
Don’t start your presentation in Slides. (Or Keynote. Or Powerpoint. Or whatever presentation software you’re using.)
Start every presentation with a piece of paper and pen. (“LOL. OK, Boomer.”)
And write down two things:
Who is your audience?
What do you want them to DO?
FULL STOP.
You should never start planning a presentation until you’re crystal clear about the answer to these two questions.
Sometimes, it’s trickier to figure out the answer to these questions that you might expect. But you have to. And you have to be brutally honest about the answers.
Because sometimes the “same presentation” isn’t really the same presentation.
Let’s take a “creative presentation” as an example. It’s actually a few different things along its lifecycle and, as such, should be approached differently at each stage.
For the creative team, the internal presentation that they give to ME as the creative director isn’t the presentation that they will give, eventually, to the client.
So if a creative team was doing the write-down-your-audience-and-what-you-want-them-to-do exercise, they might jot down, “This presentation is for John, the creative director.”
Hm. What do I want John, the creative director to do?
“I want him to pick one of my creative ideas so that it makes it into the creative deck so that the client will see it. I want him to help tweak the idea so that it has the best chance of getting picked by the client so that I can go on production (which is fun AF) and make an ad that I like that will go in my book and help me get my next job.”
The audience is clear. As is the ACTION that you want that audience to take.
But the version of the creative presentation that eventually goes to the client? That has a different set of goals, so the presentation itself is going to be different.
For the client presentation, you might articulate your audience and goal as follows:
“I want the client to see three great campaign ideas and get excited about our range of thinking as an agency. I want them to pick idea #3 because it’s fresh, original, and we think it will do the most for the brand. I want them to have courage, because that idea is unlike anything they’ve bought before and it will feel risky to them.”
That’s a very different presentation.
This focus on the audience should guide everything you do in a presentation, from what appears on the slides to the tone to the length to the content itself.
Also, getting clear about your goal is going to make you more confident. When you walk into a presentation with a clear, focused agenda built around the needs of your audience, you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve.
You can focus on the stuff that matters and you don’t have to waste any time on the stuff that doesn’t. That will make your audience happy. And you will be more confident going in.
Write it down! Who is your audience? What do you want them to do?
Getting clear about those two things will automatically make your presentation better.
Tip #2: Your audience is more important than you
“Presentation” can mean a lot of different things. We often use “presentation” when we really mean “a deck.”
For the purposes of this too-long Medium piece, when I say “presentation” I’m talking about you presenting something to somebody else. In real life. Or (in our current times) via video conferencing. But it’s you interacting with other humans to present information.
It may or may not be accompanied by slides. In our business, it usually is. But the goal of the meeting should really drive what visual aids you use to make your point.
Slides for a presentation that you are giving to another human in real time are different from a PDF that you send via email that is meant to be read.
Slides designed to accompany your verbal presentation should should help you tell your story and keep it moving. As such, there’s only so much that can and should appear on an individual slide.
A deck that is meant to be sent via email and read by a client (think RFP or media plan or testing results) can have all sorts of detailed pages with lots of words on it. Your audience has time to digest all the information on a page.
But a real-life/real-time presentation can’t work the same way. Humans can only digest so much information at once.
When you put up a slide that has a million words or microscopic numbers or too much detail on it and THEN you add your talk track over it, you aren’t putting your audience first.
You’re putting YOURSELF first. You’re saying “this is all the information I want to give to you.” And you’re vomiting it up in a way that’s easy for YOU.
We’ve all been in those presentations where you, as an audience member, think, “What do you want me to do right now, read the slide or listen to you?”
If the answer is “read the slide” then, congratulations, that presentation could have been an email! If you need people to really read and digest detailed information and make a decision, then that’s not going to happen in a meeting.
What CAN happen in a meeting is an overview of the decision to be made…and then you give them time to read and study the detailed information afterwards.
How many words on a slide? That’s the subject of some debate. Google will tell you that some people say 30 words. Some people say 40. (Oh, also, your audience should be able to READ those words…no micro type, please!)
Personally, I’m less concerned about some hard and fast word-count formula. For me, the overall goal is EMPATHY.
Put yourself in your audience member’s shoes…
I guarantee your presentation is not the only one they’re going to see today.
They’re going to see it amidst hundreds of other emails and chat messages and meetings and deadlines and…you know, normal workday stuff.
How can your presentation be a breath of fresh air?
A presentation shouldn’t be what YOU want to say, it should be what YOUR AUDIENCE needs to hear.
That’s one reason I start most presentations with some quick recap of the assignment or where we last left the discussion.
Your audience member has not been thinking about the details of the assignment to the same degree you have. They will be grateful for the quick reminder: what’s the assignment, where are we in the process, what they saw last, and WHAT THEY NEED TO DO.
Make it EASY for them — tell them in advance what you want them to do. “Today we’re showing you Round 2 creative. We’re going to walk you through three options and then give you time to digest and discuss them as a team. We’ll need a decision/feedback on these by Friday.”
Now your audience can relax. They KNOW what’s expected of them. They can listen to the information with the goal in mind. You’ve set your audience (and yourself) up for success.
Tip #3: Make it easy for your audience to take action
Ultimately, we give presentations to get people to DO something.
Our presentations are A MEANS TO AN END.
(Yes, presentations should look good and be well-designed because that’s a way that you show respect for our audience and make sure that the information is easy to understand. But we should remember that slides are behind-the-scenes aids to get to a decision where we can then make REAL WORK — the actual media buy or ad. The deck doesn’t go on air.)
If presentations are a means to an end, we have to know the END in order to craft the presentation.
Once you are clear about what you’re trying to get them to do, every presentation becomes a mini strategy assignment: how do you get your audience to DO that thing?
As any good strategist will tell you, it’s hard to beat the classic problem/solution structure.
Where is your audience at? What is their problem? How will what you’re sharing in the presentation solve their problem?
Sure, you can do a slide that says “problem” and “solution” … but it’s going to have more impact if you do a little storytelling.
Now, in advertising, there’s a lot of talk about “storytelling.” IMHO, it’s mostly bullshit; something we tell ourselves because we don’t want to be honest that we’re salespeople. (The greatest take on this is from legendary designer Stefan Sagmeister.)
But…it is helpful to think of the problem/solution as a story. Our human brains use stories as a way to remember. And your audience is much more likely to remember your presentation if it’s a story that you’re telling.
Also, it’s another way that you demonstrate empathy because you’re giving your audience the tools to pass that story on. It’s a story that THEY can go tell their boss to help sell the solution.
What does a “story” look like and how is it different from the old “problem/solution” slide? In some ways, the “story spine” (the classic fairy tale story structure) offers a guide:
1. Once upon a time, there was a brand that… (the popular impression of the brand)
2. And every day, that brand… (what they’ve been doing)
3. Until one day… (the thing they ran into that showed their current way isn’t working)
4. And because of that they… (the actons that you’re recommending)
5. Until finally… (the thing that will happen when they take the action you’re recommending)
6. And ever since then… (the amazing FUTURE state that they will find themselves in once they do that thing that you’re recommending.)
7. And they lived happily ever after!
Now, I’m not suggesting that you use fairy tale language to tell stories to our clients, but it’s a helpful structure to remember how humans retain information.
Most presentations get right into the new thing you’re recommending without putting it in context. Don’t forget to tell the “story” of why that solution is the right one.
Tip #4: Be a human
A lot of us get nervous about certain “performance skills” when it comes to presenting. But we should probably worry less about being a performer and just focus on being a good HUMAN in the room with your audience.
A story…
Years ago, I was at looooonnnnnggggg client presentation that was scheduled to last hours. We were in a dark conference room at the big tech client down in Silicon Valley. And we had hundreds of pages to present (which was stupid, but I was early in my career and didn’t have any control over that.)
And the mood was…not great. Tense. There were lots of VIPs in the room and you could feel their anxiety. As a result, the presentation felt very loaded.
About two hours in, we had to shift gears to a different part of the presentation. This part of the business was led by a different creative director who had not been in the room for the early stuff.
Let’s call that creative director “Jim.” (Because that was his actual name.)
So, Jim walks into that room. And he was just…a human being.
He realized that he was walking into a group of humans that had been cooped up in there for a while. He noticed that the room was dark and stuffy.
So the first thing he did was make eye contact with the clients in the room, raised his arm in greeting, and introduced himself. “Hi, guys. My name is Jim. I’m a creative director and I’m going to share some new stuff with you on the launch of the new tablet.”
Now, this may seem like a small detail. But even that simple greeting is an act of empathy for your audience. Positive energy. Not forcing them to remember your name or guess who you are. Clearly state up front why you’re there and what you’re going to do.
And then he did something pretty cool.
“You guys are probably sick of sitting in a dark conference room. Let’s open the blinds and get some light in here and I’ll walk you though this work on the wall.”
He called an audible. Instead of worrying about the 100 slide deck that was teed up, he had the emotional intelligence to read the room and understand what the audience needed.
They needed a little sunlight. They needed a change.
So Jim opened the blinds and presented the work off of print outs that he pinned to the wall. (Yes, this was 10 years ago when we still did that.)
And the mood in the room completely changed.
Again, it’s not about what YOU the presenter want to do or say…it’s about solving your audience’s problems.
Jim solved their immediate problem (the dark, dank mood in that room) and then showed them how the work that we’d come up with would solve their business problem.
We get anxious about presenting because we are worried about ourselves. It helps to remember that it’s, actually, not about YOU. Advertising presentations are a SERVICE business.
Nothing you have PLANNED to say is as important as being a human in that room with other humans; clue in to what your audience needs.
Maybe it needs you to stop reading your “script” and just speak from your heart. Maybe it needs you to tell a story to illustrate a point. Maybe it needs a light, funny moment from you.
Which brings us to…
Tip #5: Great presenters are great listeners
You’re not giving a speech. In our day-to-day work presentations, we’re trying to get your audience to DO something.
And to do that, you have to LISTEN.
Listening starts BEFORE the presentation. (Go back and look at the brief again and REALLY make sure you heard your audience’s “ask” before you start crafting your presentation.)
But it’s especially critical when you’re presenting.
You have to “listen” to your audience when they’re not speaking. Look for the non-verbal clues. Are they engaged, leaning in, listening, nodding? Or are they lost? Is it clear that they already understand your point and you’re simply beating a dead horse? Check in. Make sure they’re with you. (Yes, this is verrrrrry hard to do on video call presentations.)
And then, once you’ve presented…SHUT UP. Give them space to ask questions.
When they do, really listen. Ask a clarifying question if you don’t understand.
Don’t be defensive. It won’t serve your ultimate goal. AND, again, we are in a service business. If our audience is confused, let’s help bring clarity to the situation.
And if you don’t know the answer, don’t bullshit. “That’s a great question. I don’t have the answer right now, but I’ll get it for you immediately following this meeting.”
Tip #6: Name what makes you anxious
In the pre-work for the class, the most common request was, “How can I feel less anxious and more confident going into work presentations?”
Another story…
For many years, I performed with an improvisational theatre company here in San Francisco. (BTW, everybody in advertising should take improv, especially writers.)
If you’ve seen an improv show before, you know the gist — everything is made up right there on the spot; nothing is pre-planned.
One of the shows that we would do was an improvised musical. So, not only would the story be made up completely on the spot, every single song we’d sing would be created spontaneously on stage in front of the audience.
In addition to shows, we’d also teach classes. And the musical improvisation class was one of our more popular ones.
But people were also terrified to take it.
Because most people have been taught to believe that they’re not singers.
Of course, some people are not naturally gifted musicians. There are plenty of tone deaf people in the world. And I’m not suggesting that everybody deserves a career as a professional singer.
But in every class we taught, people would come in and say in that first session, “I’m not a singer” and by the fourth week, they were belting out improvised show tunes.
Part of the change was learning tips and tricks to arm individuals with a “toolkit” they could dip into. Part of it was getting people to understand that they didn’t have to be Beyonce, they just had to be THEM.
But the biggest change was simply replacing FEAR with CONFIDENCE.
We get anxious before we present because we’re afraid.
“Is this presentation good?”
“Do I know the answer to every question that’s going to be asked?”
“What if I fuck up?”
“What are people going to think of me when I present?”
So how do you put those fears aside?
Our beloved creative leader at Duncan Channon, Michael Lemme, once said that the way he wards off presentation jitters is to think of the sky.
“When I think of the sky, I realize how small we are and how dumb it is to get worked up about an advertising presentation.”
Everybody gets pre-presentation jitters. Whether you’re just starting out in your career and whether you’ve been doing it for many years.
There are as many different reasons for nervousness as there are people. I won’t pretend to know what makes YOU nervous before a presentation.
But each of you will find your own way of managing those jitters. If you’re a metaphysical hippie like Lemme, maybe thinking of the wild blue yonder will give you some peace.
For ME, preparation is peace of mind. Making sure that I’ve done my homework, crafted an entertaining story, and am focused on the needs of my audience gives me the confidence that even if I’m not on my A-game that day, the presentation will still be successful.
But what are YOU scared of?
Here’s what I recommend: write it down. (“Hey, you suggested that before! About 2,000 words ago!”)
Seriously. Write it down. Why are you nervous? There’s no wrong answers. “I don’t want to looks stupid.” “I don’t want to fail in front of my boss.” “If I fuck up, I’m not going to get an opportunity like this again.” “Sometimes I say ‘um’ too much and I worry that it makes me look young.”
What is it for you? Write it down. Articulate it as specifically as you can.
Anxiety is about fear. Once you’ve named “your foe,” it’s often less scary. But even if it’s still spooky, once you name it, you can start to deal with it. Come up with a strategy. Ask a mentor for help with that particular issue.
That’s it! Six tips. Again, nothing beats on-your-feet practice, but hopefully there are a few things here you can use.
Best of luck and happy presenting!
John Kovacevich is a creative director and founder of Agency SOS. He often writes about what he’s learned in the ad biz and you can read it all here.
