PRESENTATION CONSULTING
Zach has created Keynote and Powerpoint presentations for investing proposals, competitions, and information sessions. As a responsible marketing leader, Zach sees it as imperative that he first sits down with the client to fully understand the nature of the brand and how the client wishes it to be perceived. He often helps clients, with weak brand foundations, hone their ideas and set specific goals that they are looking to achieve through their presentation. Zach's presentation development process is aimed at meeting client needs and optimizing presentation effectiveness. In addition to helping them organize the presentation, Zach will create the visual presentation as well. Above all, when creating visual presentations, he follows one cardinal rule:
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The Visual Presentation's Primary Purpose is to Enhance the Oral Presentation
This concept is often lost in typical presentations. Rather than enhancing an oral presentation, visuals often competing with it. For example, a presenter may be verbally summarizing a key point, while appearing on screen is a visual of a paragraph of text that states roughly the same content. In this case, the audience makes a choice: to either read the visual on screen, or listen to the presenter. Either outcome is ineffective as the audience misses out on important content, through no fault of their own. It is the presenter's responsibility to ensure that their visual presentation complements their oral one. Zach uses the following tactics to ensure that this responsibility is met:
- Most visuals should have a purpose, rather than competing with the presentation or serving as a placeholder.
- Presentations should be interesting. Not only because interesting presentations are more pleasant to listen to than boring ones, but more importantly because content in interesting presentations is remembered more easily.
- Presenters should plan to summarize presentation content both in the beginning and the end of a presentation to prepare the audience for remembering the information in an organized manner.