I got dumped via PowerPoint.
The year was 2005, and we’d been seeing each other for a while. To be honest, I thought the relationship was going well. We’d had some fun times, and it looked like we had a future together. Then he called me one morning and said, “Sweetheart, I’d like to meet with you and talk.”
I could tell by the tone of his voice that something was wrong. “Can’t we discuss it over the phone?” I asked.
“No, this needs to be done in person,” he said.
Despite my misgivings, we met in the back room of a local coffee shop. The lights were dim; the place smelled like espresso. Although I could hear a few people chatting quietly, we had the back room all to ourselves.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
He’d brought his laptop, and he placed it on a table as I sat down.
“I’ve come to a decision,” he said, “and I just need to explain myself.”
As I sat there, stunned, he opened PowerPoint, angled the laptop screen where I could see it clearly, and turned up the brightness.
“Wait a second,” I said. “Are you about to show me a slide presentation?”
But he didn’t answer. Whatever was about to happen, it clearly wasn’t intended to be a two-way conversation. My boyfriend took up a position beside the laptop, a wireless clicker in his hand, and cleared his throat. Then he proceeded to walk me slide by slide through a presentation he’d created. The first slide declared his intention: Reasons Why We Have to Break Up. It included a nice, animated GIF of a heart cracking down the middle.
“I’m sorry, Alex, but I think our relationship is doomed,” he said in a stilted voice that suggested he’d prepared his words in advance.
“What? Why?” I was shocked. Things had been going so well. We’d just gone to dinner and a movie the night before, and we were planning to visit his parents in a few days.“Why do we have to break up?”
His answer was all in the presentation. The second slide was a chart showing the differences in our travel preferences. He liked camping and trekking through the wilderness, while I liked staying in nice hotels. The third slide showed our educational differences. I went to UT Austin; he went to a technical college. The fourth slide showed the differences in our entertainment preferences. Then our philosophies about money. Then our family backgrounds.And so on.
Through a series of graphs, charts, and pithy quotes from famous people, he made his case that our lives weren’t aligned. It was a well-constructed argument, and the slides looked nice. Still, I wanted to refute much of what he said.Some of his points were off. However, the linear nature of the presentation wasn’t conducive to a discussion, so I sat there in shock.
After about fifteen minutes, he came to his dramatic conclusion. “We’re clearly not compatible, as I have demonstrated here today. We have no choice but to end our relationship.”
“There are some things I’d like to say,” I told him.
“I’m sorry. It was all in the presentation,” he replied as he closed his laptop. “I can send you the slide deck if you want to look at it again on your own time.”
And that was the end of both our coffee-shop meeting and our relationship. After he walked out, I sat there for a few minutes, nursing a cold latte and feeling a bit overwhelmed. His presentation had been mostly a one-sided information dump, and I was still processing my thoughts long after he was gone.
When I finally trudged out of the coffee shop that day, feeling hurt, frustrated, and embarrassed by the whole thing, I was a single woman again. My boyfriend had dumped me by PowerPoint.
That whole bizarre experience got me thinking about how ubiquitous slide presentations have become. It’s clear why my tech-minded boyfriend broke up with me that way—a typical slideshow is a crutch for communication. It forces the discussion to move in a specific direction as you progress from slide to slide, and it has a preordained ending that can’t be changed. Instead of a conversational mutual exploration of thoughts and feelings, it pushes both speaker and listener down a linear path that feels unnatural but guides them to an obligatory conclusion.
But what if things had gone differently that day? What if, instead of being forced down a linear path, I’d been able to pull out my phone and bring up pictures from all of the fun times we’d had together—our smiling faces at dinner, our smiling faces on vacation, family holidays, spending time with mutual friends?
What if I’d been able to counteract all of his charts and graphs with a series of photos and videos that told a much more poignant story? Instead of a linear, predefined presentation, that meeting in the coffee shop would have been a conversation full of genuine emotion and honest responses. It might even have salvaged the relationship. We’ll never know because that conversation never happened.
As strange as that meeting sounds, it’s not all that different from what takes place in the business world every day.Think about all of the dry, linear, predetermined presentations you’ve sat through. Think about how many of those presentations you’ve given yourself.
What if they were more dynamic, responsive, and impactful, drawn from a library of slides on the spot to address questions and concerns? What if, instead of trying to cobble together a brand-new presentation every time you wanted to make a sales pitch, you could draw from a preexisting wealth of content that you knew was high quality, compliant, conversational, and consistent with your brand?
It would certainly mitigate the awkwardness we all feel when giving presentations—not to mention the awkwardness we feel when listening to them.
Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Presentation?
If you’re like most people, you’re probably afraid of giving presentations. There’s something uncomfortable about them, isn’t there? When you’re building your slide deck, you can’t know how your audience is going to respond, what questions they’re going to ask, or how they might react to individual slides, but you still have to preordain the ending and construct a slide-by-slide path for getting them there, whether they like it or not.
Despite the obvious deficiencies, presentations have become ubiquitous in the modern world. They’re everywhere. Think about how many hours of your life you’ve spent cobbling together slide decks for sales pitches, conferences, and board meetings. Think about the time you’ve spent pulling together graphics, statistics, and quotes from disparate sources, hunting through folders, trying to anticipate your audience. On average, a person spends about five hours preparing a presentation. All for what? Just to give a thirty-minute presentation that feels unnatural.
But what if you could pull from a corporate slide library that had individual slides for every issue: who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it. What if you could read and react to your clients’ needs on the fly with valued documentation? Imagine this: A few minutes before giving a presentation, you realize you need an emotional video to confirm what you’re talking about. Fortunately, you already have the perfect videos in your slide library that you can pull up right now. You also need some statistical data to back up your claims. A nice chart is readily available in your slide library as well.
More than that, imagine if every single video, picture, chart, PDF, and spreadsheet in your library was already formatted and ready to present as a slide, and the language was consistent across all of them. Think about how that would boost your credibility and ability to respond to your audience in real time.
We call this Presentation Management, and we are convinced it’s the future of presentations.
In this book, we’re going to provide you with a methodology for implementing Presentation Management in your company through Structured Storytelling. You’ll learn how to clean up the vast, tangled mess of slides throughout your company and create an organized slide library that enables every single team member to communicate more effectively.
With Structured Storytelling, you will save a ton of time by reusing all of your assets, and you will have data about which slides are being used—when, where, and by whom.You will know which slides are most effective, so you can constantly tweak the content to make every slide better and better for your entire organization. And you’ll be able to follow conversations, respond at critical moments, and reinforce your message, greatly increasing your chances of achieving a mutually beneficial ending.
That’s the power of Structured Storytelling.
Our Road To Structured Storytelling
We are James Ontra and AlexAnndra Ontra, a brother-sister team with over thirty years of experience helping clients tell their stories more effectively. Through our career from iXL Pitchman to Iguana Interactive and Ontra Presentations and Shufflrr, we’ve worked with numerous global corporations across a broad array of industries, including ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, Warner Bros., Disney, ESPN, Comedy Central, AOL, NFL, NBA, Hilton, Starbucks, Choice Hotels, US Bank, Comerica, and several global pharmaceutical companies—to name just a few.
Our road to Structured Storytelling began in 1993 when James helped create one of the world’s first interactive catalogs, Miramar CD-I, which gave clients an interactive presentation kiosk. Targeted specifically to furniture manufacturers, the technology was ahead of its time, and business leaders shied away from it.
However, in 1998, as head of business development for Micro Interactive, James began promoting and selling the first interactive multimedia presentation system, Micro Interactive’s Iguana, which provided users with a multimedia library they could use for presentations. Among its earlyadopters were IBM, NBC Olympics, Lucent Technologies,British Airways, Cigna, Hilton Hotels, and MGM’s JamesBond franchise. Later, the company became iXL and the system’s name was changed to Pitchman.
In 2000, James raised venture capital and spun out the Pitchman laptop presentation division of iXL, becoming CEO of the new company, Iguana Interactive. His sister, AlexAnndra, left her exciting job in advertising to join him, and the dynamic brother-sister duo was born. We soon found ourselves working with the NBA, the NFL, American Express, and many others. Unfortunately, Iguana Interactive didn’t last long. Our offices were at 14 Wall Street, just blocks from the World Trade Center, and after 9/11, investors pulled out, and the company went bust.
However, from the ashes of Iguana, we started Ontra Presentations, with only a borrowed desk, a phone, and a license to Iguana Interactive’s software. After ninety days of grueling cold calls, we landed our first clients: ABC National Television Sales, and then our second, Towers Perrin. From there, we landed many more high-profile clients, including a number of Fortune-level companies.
When YouTube came along it 2005, it changed the presentation game by democratizing digital video. Suddenly, clients were no longer willing to pay a premium for video and animations in their presentations, even if the quality was better. Our business model was falling out of favor, but a client said to us, “Can’t you just make the video work in PowerPoint?” We listened and went to work developing the PPTshare Slide Library for PowerPoint, a desktop slide library that connected to a central network and enabled users to drag videos into their presentations.
And now, after working with hundreds of clients and developing multiple software solutions, we’re using everything we’ve learned over more than fifty years combined of Presentation Management experience to refine a strategy, process, and technology that enables companies to implement structured stories. As part of that mission, we’ve created Shufflrr, an elegant, easy solution that ensures brand and message compliance, while giving your team a quick way to create and share presentations. More than that, we work with clients every day to help them transform their linear presentations into dynamic and responsive conversations that tell a story and respond on the fly to audience needs.
But is this kind of Presentation Management approach even necessary? Does the world really need Structured Storytelling? We think so, and we’d like to make our case.To do that, we’ll go all the way back to 1948.
An Overlooked Category Of Communication
David Ogilvy, the so-called “Father of Advertising,” founded his agency Ogilvy & Mather in 1948 upon a singular promise to corporate leaders, which said, in essence, “If you give me all of your advertising, marketing, and sales dollars, I will use research and focus on different categories of communication to achieve better creativity, better planning, and better placement for better results. In turn, you will be able to sell more widgets.”
The media of communication that Ogilvy identified as key were print, radio, billboards, and television. Much later, you can add digital to that equation, for a total offive key xxii categories of communication. Multibillion-dollar marketing and sales industries have sprung up around each of them.
Despite being ubiquitous in the world today, presentations are a medium of communication that lacks its own industry. This is despite the fact that slides have been around since the beginning of human civilization. What were the paintings on cave walls if not an early version of Power-Point slides that tribal leaders could use to tell the tribe’s important stories? What were the stained-glass windows in medieval cathedrals but slides that could be used to tell the religion’s stories to mostly illiterate people?
Every single university lecture hall is built around giving presentations, with slides as a critical component of most professors’ teaching styles. Salespeople use presentations all of the time when they’re in front of clients. Yet the same company that will spend tens of millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad will then send a salesperson to talk to a potential customer they met through that ad, and that salesperson will use a presentation that they hastily put together the night before.
Presentations are everywhere because the technology exists to present almost anywhere at any time. It’s a whole category of communication that people rely on every day, so isn’t it time we started devoting energy and resources to making presentations more powerful and effective? Imagine taking your tangled mess of slides and transforming them into a structured slide library that enables every single person in your organization to communicate as powerfully, effectively, and responsively as your CEO.
Imagine if every single person in your organization could communicate as powerfully, effectively, and responsively as your CEO.
In the following chapters, we’re going to provide you with everything you need to know to implement Presentation Management through Structured Storytelling in your organization. You’ll be able to bring together all of the slides, images, videos, charts, and content throughout your entire organization and organize them into a slide library with consistent messaging that will transform every presentation into a more dynamic, impactful conversation where every presentation tells a story, and every slide is a scene.
