What makes a presentation interesting? Is it the message? Is it the images? Or is it the way the presenter delivers the presentation?

To create a lasting impression in our presentations, we need to think differently. We need to move away from the conventional way of how we design our presentation slides. If the presentation is important, then we have to find ways to ensure it creates lasting impressions. After all, in a sales presentation, we usually only have one chance to make it, or loose it.

The Challenge

Many of us struggle with our presentation slides when we try to think differently beyond bullet points. When I say bullet points, I meant the approach that we take to design and develop our presentation. It seems that most presenters are very comfortable with the fact that they are able to put every word they want to say in the slides. This supposedly acts as notes to the presenter. It also means that they can read from the slides during the presentation.

What I am trying to say is that we are all really taking the easy way out in our approach to presentation design and expect our audience to fully understand the content that we are delivering. Majority of us do not spend enough quality time preparing for our presentations. We usually allocate very little time to prepare prior to the actual presentation. This is because we trust the template that is available in PowerPoint to “bullet-point” the things we want to say.

Another approach that we see often is replicating information (including layout format) from product brochure onto our presentation slides. Product brochures format, although they look pretty, is not an effective format to be used as presentation slides. Most product brochures have very detailed information and paragraphs of text designed for reading. They are not necessary suitable for presentation slides

In presentations, we need to ensure that our presentation slides are simple and that they convey the appropriate messages effectively. This would also mean that the things that we put on our slides, text, images, diagrams, etc., have to be very focused and easily seen from the back row. We also need to be selective on what goes on our presentation slides. Text or images that doesn’t help to effectively convey our messages should be left out. It is not always easy to throw out things cause every one of us have too much knowledge and we always think that everything is important.

The Presentation Tool

A very common presentation tool that is widely used by many is PowerPoint. It is the standard presentation software. However, there other tools available today that we can choose as an alternative. Some Mac users might prefer to use Apple’s Keynote, a very versatile presentation tool available only on the Mac. Another new and interesting presentation tool that recently surfaced is Prezi. Prezi presents an interesting perspective on slide design.

The use of PowerPoint has become more than just a presentation tool. It is being used as a multipurpose tool—documentation, outlining, drawing, page layout, charting, printing of tags/labels, and all things that we can think of. So much so that this has become so convenient for us to show just about anything that we have in PowerPoint as presentation slides during our presentation. We need to reconsider. Use the right tool correctly for the job.

Lasting Impressions

Here comes the difficult question. How do I even start to develop a presentation that creates lasting impressions?

There are many schools of thoughts and varied approaches to presentation design on how to do this. A common take away from all these approaches is that our presentation slides must be simple. Here I will elaborate on the Sticky SPY concept, the concept behind Amazing Sticky Presentations.

The Sticky SPY concept introduces simple ideas that create lasting impressions. The 3 ingredients that make presentations Sticky is SPY, which are acronyms for Simple, Persuasive, and Youthful. The general idea is to ensure that our presentation slides are simple and focused. They also have to be persuasive in the sense that people must be able to relate to our messages or images that we use to convey messages. The third ingredient, Youthful, suggest that our presentation slides must be fresh and exciting. We should use images that are different from what people see everyday. The combination of the 3 ingredients gives stickiness to presentation slides. The degree of stickiness depends on how effectively we are able to apply this Sticky SPY concept.

Simplicity is the key to having our presentations create lasting impressions. Given the limited time in any presentation session, our audience can only remember simple things. So the simpler our messages are, the better. Many of us tend to think that by being simple, we will not be viewed as experts. So as a result, we try to clutter our presentation slides and make them more complex. Among other things, our real objective to present is to ensure we communicate our ideas effectively and that our audience achieved understanding at the end of the session. But of course, unless our objective is to confuse our audience, then we will design our presentation slides to confuse.

The Journey

Moving from conventional approach to the use of Sticky Presentations approach is not a destination, but a journey. It is not always possible to achieve Stickiness overnight. But we need to take the first step to understand the concept and apply it to our next presentation. Different types of presentations to different kinds of audience require different thinking. Most of preparation and development time taken to do a presentation that creates lasting impressions is thinking and researching time. Unfortunately there are no shortcuts to this process. A presenter that is already familiar with this approach can however shorten development time by half.

Having read this article is only the beginning. There are more to making your presentation sticky and to ultimately achieve Amazing Sticky Presentations™. We need to open up our minds and look beyond bullet-point styles of presentation design if we want to make our presentation Sticky and create that lasting impression.