You’re standing on stage at Carnegie Hall, about togive a presentation to a packed house. All of your slides containing all of your documents are hovering like holograms in the air beside you—just off stage where only you can see them. There are slides with videos, with photos, with art, graphs, documents—all sorts of things.
As you speak, you reach out and swipe one of the hologram images with your right hand, and suddenly it appears on a big screen behind you in super high resolution. Then you swipe another slide and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony starts to play, booming out over the audience. You swipe up, and a 3D graphic appears, animated to the music. You’re like a conductor of a symphony orchestra, but your instruments are your files.
All of these files are coming from your slide library, and they include a full range of multimedia content. You’re able to create a live digital production of such quality that it’s like you’re producing a movie right then and there before your audience.
That’s the near future of presentations, and you might even see it today. You won’t have to be at Carnegie Hall to have access to it. Indeed, soon the average Joe or Jane on the street will be able to turn around and pull up any multimedia content in their library right there. Any video, any image, any document can be pulled out of their library at a moment’s notice and played live, as if it were a musical instrument in the hands of a trained artist.
Imagine a world where Presentation Management is managing all of your content at all times and making it accessible and available to you, ready to present. We’ve used the metaphor of your smartphone’s photo library, but what we’re moving toward is even more robust and powerful than pulling up organized photos on your phone.
A Living, Breathing System Of Communication
Presentation management is already being used in some creative and surprising ways by global companies, 131 including one we’ve already mentioned: Medline Industries. We recently designed a feature in our Shufflrr software that enables users to save their files as videos instead of presentation slides. Medline is using this feature to create videos that they can use to train critical care specialists and clinicians on using their products whenever they make a purchase. These videos work as both sales tools and training tools, both before and after a sale, and they can be played separately or integrated seamlessly alongside all of their other slides.
Medline’s slide library, this living, breathing system of communication, is actually serving different groups within Medline with very different needs. On the one hand, they are creating traditional sales presentations about Medline products that reps can use to make pitches. On the other hand, they are also creating product portfolios for customers that contain custom training docs and training videos for the products they’ve purchased. Furthermore, training content contains very specific instructions to teach nurses, doctors, and healthcare providers how to use Medline products safely and effectively, to help rather than harm patients.Good Presentation Management is able to handle all of these different needs simultaneously, while still keeping every presentation on message and on brand at all times. It’s like a conductor swinging their baton to keep a complex array of musicians and instruments playing together in rhythm and harmony: every instrument playing its own part in sync with every other instrument to create a single piece of beautiful music.
And that’s just one example of the many new and creative ways that business leaders are using Presentation Management to change the way they do business. It’s not just about how you use your presentations, it’s also about getting the most out of the robust data that’s available on slide use.Imagine how it’s going to change your approach to presentations when you can see how many times people have viewed each slide, how they’ve used it, and what their reaction was.
This kind of data will enable you to curate your slide library, eliminating the dead weight that’s not doing you any good, bolstering the content that is effective, and improving the nuances that seem to generate the strongest positive response. A process of constant improvement like this is going to make your messaging tighter, stronger, and more consistent throughout your organization.
In that way, it’s similar to other forms of communication.If Budweiser runs a Super Bowl ad that gets a huge positive response and results in a surge in sales, they’re going to run that ad again many times. They might even create a whole ad campaign that plays off the same themes to keep the momentum going. Now, you can do the same thing with your presentations. You’re treating them just like any other form of marketing or sales communication, leaning into what works and making your message more effective over time.
Analytics ensures that each slide becomes iterative, constantly tweaked and improved by your content admins, and if the data shows that a slide doesn’t work, as we said, it can be cut entirely. You’re managing a global communication tool that affects the verbiage being used across your entire organization, and as you make it better and better, you make your entire organization better and better at communicating the value of what you have to offer.
At the same time, because you’re treating each presentation like a story, and every slide like a scene, you’re going to be making a deeper and more emotional impact on your audience. Think about it: every person in your entire organization getting better and more consistent at telling impactful stories about your products and services, and they’re always on message, on brand, with relevant and accurate information at all times in every presentation everywhere.
No other communication channel has the potential to make such a profound impact on every person in your entire global organization. Every slide and every presentation will be right at your fingertips, always up to date and constantly getting better, giving you immediate access so you can use, reuse, and repurpose any of your content instantly. What an 134 incredible resource for communicating your value, answering questions and concerns, and spreading the story of your brand far and wide. It makes every person a more effective and intelligent storyteller.
When you have data that shows what people look at and how they respond, you can help clients make informed decisions backed with real data. It’s a living, breathing system, and it’s poised to change the world. In fact, the change is already here. We’re talking about interactive presentations that enable you to present spontaneously to clients. No need to prepare a dry speech or practice it repeatedly in front of the mirror or to your spouse or roommate. The slide library is going to give you everything you need.
Imagine if everyone at a meeting had your presentation on their phones, and as soon as they asked a question, AI picked up the words from their phone and instantly suggested the right slides to the presenter so they could respond to the question. Imagine if your Presentation Management software curated questions from a large audience, selected the most important ones, and suggested the most appropriate response?
This level of interactivity is just around the corner. The days of awkward, cobbled-together, linear presentations that can’t follow your audience, can’t respond to their questions and concerns, and provide conflicting messages are over.No more getting dumped by PowerPoint. And no more presentation hell. Now, every person in the company is telling stories, sharing impactful and consistent messages across your organization using all of your best content, responding to your audience in the moment, and making a deeper and more compelling emotional impact backed by data that leads clients to a decision far more naturally and effectively.
That is Presentation Management, and it’s the future of presentations: better stories, with the best content, all backed by data. And you can get a head start on that future right now.
