The Art of a Presentation
In a profession where each idea, comp, and thought has to go through countless approvals, rounds, and revisions, you would think there would be a more deliberate means of teaching the art of presentation. Most times, the verbal aspect of presentation is learned on the job using the trial-by-fire method, like the surveys I endured. Other times, the creative work is given to a client-facing account person who couldn’t possibly present your work with the same conviction that you could. Our passion for the work is part of the gift of being creative. We are an emotional people. We’re trained to channel our emotion into tangible concepts using words and pictures that achieve client objectives. Yet most of us aren’t actively trained on how to manage those emotions in the context of a presentation. We walk into a room full of people we’ve never met before and present something we’ve poured countless hours of love, creativity, and effort into. From the informal internal presentation to the formal new-business pitch, every designer knows pitching comes with the territory.
But knowing that the presentation is coming doesn’t make giving it any easier. Most of us are juggling the stress and adrenaline of having multiple projects and deadlines. In an instant, the same emotions that enable us to create can become the worst stumbling block to finding the words to articulate what we’ve created. So when someone says “I don’t like it,” that can sound like “I don’t like your nose.” It takes active training and experience not to take rejection of our work personally because it is personal. On top of all the emotions, it’s in the forefront of our minds that if the presentation is bad, our ideas get killed.
In his book Perfect Pitch, Jon Steel explores “‘the presentation’ not as just a single event but as a period extending from the moment the invitation to present is delivered, to the moment a decision is made. This period could extend over several months or even years.” This view is a more holistic and comprehensive approach to client service that will require a whole lot of discernment and judgment.
So now that you’ve been given or done your research, defined your target, found a differentiated selling proposition, looked at all the relevant features and benefits and understood your campaign objectives, crafted the right positioning statement, written your inspiring creative brief, and had a briefing with your creative team ask yourself:
How do you choose the right creative executions? What order do you present the ideas in? How do you set up or frame the presentation?
That discernment is what this chapter will be about. You’ll get pointers on the process of organizing and presenting your creative ideas as well as how to deal with the everyday struggle of being a creative.
I’ve made a range of presentations over the course of my career. Some went great and others weren’t. The main lesson I’ve learned in the sour pitches is that the context the ideas are presented in can actively hinder the work being presented, but it doesn’t have to. Now that you’ve chosen the typefaces, images, and colors, presenting them in a way that will increase the probability of selling them is key. Mastering this skill will help you advance in your career, gain or retain more clients, and increase the probability that your work gets a fair shot at seeing the light of day. After all, this is why designers stay up working all night. Now, let’s go sell it.
Establish Your Position
My professors at Pratt were world-famous design gods who either worked for Pentagram or Landor or were once partners with Herb Lubalin. We all knew who they were and why their opinions mattered. As you leave academia or gain more responsibility within a firm, it won’t be as clear who’s in front of you and vice versa. In business meetings, you’ll need to get to the recommendation quickly and then explain or justify your thinking. Most business people or marketers don’t know, understand, or care about the details of the creative process—that’s our world. What they want from your presentation is a top-line understanding of why your approach is relevant and strategic—things that matter in their world.
Begin by answering their first two questions before they even ask them: “Who are you, and why should I listen to you?” The fact that they dropped out of Harvard to start a business, completed their MBA at Stanford, or inherited the family business got them to where they are. Likewise, get their attention by having a brief explanation or a few prepared sentences about why you—or your firm—are uniquely positioned to offer the right solutions to their business problem.
Here’s an example I use: “Nine years ago, I stumbled into a strategy meeting and realized that becoming the ‘creative who understood business’ would differentiate me. This has helped me to inject creativity into solving business problems versus restricting creativity to the execution. ‘Design plus business’ experience gives me a complete strategic and tactical range of solutions, and I’m excited to share some insights with you today.” Finding the right way to position your skills will take some work. Once you can articulate your value, it’s a great way to introduce yourself and explain why they should consider your point of view.
Know Who’s in the Room
Now that you’ve grabbed their attention, you’d better have a relevant point of view to share. Yet “relevant” is relative, so knowing who’s in the room is essential. This will require some homework in advance—never enter a room blind. A few clicks in LinkedIn or Google should give you all the info you need to understand whether the person is an influencer or a decision-maker within the context of your project.
What’s the difference? An influencer can have sway over the project, suggest a particular vendor, and usually will need to make a presentation to the person writing the check. As a mid-level person, he will need to manage the expectations of his boss as well as manage the productivity of the people who report to him. The person writing the check is the decision-maker.
As you present your creative ideas, know who your audience is and what their goals are. From there, you can recognize, extract, and weave the insights needed for their decision into your presentation. Framing the context of the ideas with business considerations is invaluable when needing to justify and defend the work. In business school competitive strategy classes, marketers are taught to read case studies from the perspective of the decision-maker. In doing this, they’re then trained to develop solutions to the business problem using the information the boss had. This analytical tactic taught me to step into the shoes of a businessperson, use my discernment to sift through mounds of information, determine what factors are unimportant, and arrive at viable solutions.
GRAB ’N’ GO
Regardless of who’s at the meeting, your presentation should be transferable so that after you give the influencer your best in-person pitch, he can take the hard copy, slide deck, or leave-behind and pitch the person who can greenlight the project. The visual on each slide needs supporting copy or captions associated so that the rationale for the work speaks for itself when you aren’t there. The worst thing you can do is bank on an audience member to remember what you said the way you said it when he’s trying to sell it to the boss.
MATCH YOUR WORDS TO YOUR AUDIENCE
Remember, your business or marketing audience doesn’t live and breathe design, so anticipate when an explanation will sound like “Nah-nu nah-nu nah-nu.” This is particularly important for our digital brothers and sisters who understand the technical back end. Remember that you’ll need to make explanations plain by speaking about functionality happening or not happening versus the tech specs if you want to be understood. When the time comes, be sure to use the business terms and concepts that your audience will understand.
Master the Setup
I remember being in presentations and realizing that I did one of two things: spoke too much before showing the work or didn’t say anything before revealing it all at once. Both extremes are a death sentence for ideas. (Thank heavens the work in each situation was sound, because my presentation or context for the ideas was terrible.) Talk too much and you’re like a commission-based sales
staff at an electronics store. You always know the difference between someone “selling” and someone who took the time to understand why you came to the store. The latter person is meeting you where you are, asking questions to understand what you need to make the decision.
On the other hand, not saying anything ensures that you’re about to be locked into a subjective opinion struggle with everyone in the room versus what works to meet the marketing objective.
On the way to gaining enough presentation experience, creatives will often waste valuable time explaining or talking through information the client knows all too well. There’s no reason to recite the history of the brand to its own business or marketing team. They know it much better than you do. Ask yourself, “What part of this is a given? What do they already know?” Then approach your setup by offering new information. Try building your pitch on the implications of that history (e.g., how their history presents an opportunity to capitalize on a relevant emerging trend, or how this interesting tidbit about the brand’s heritage will inspire a unique way to communicate to the existing customer base). Be sure your logic was inspired by factors relevant to the business problem they’re facing. Think of how to leverage a particular behavior or mindset of the target, a feature or benefit of the product, a client objective, or a message that the target group should understand. Formalizing this part of the presentation will take some time, but it’s worth it.
WHEN TO GO OFF SCRIPT
Business people like agendas, and agendas are helpful for organization. At the same time, when reading the room, know when to move in an unscripted direction toward the goal. But wait, this goes against all the practice/have a plan/structure advice, you may be thinking. I stand behind all that; however, no plan always works and you’ll have to read the room to understand when things aren’t going to go the way you may have prepared for. (Think back to Dr. Kalter’s story in the Foreword! Know the difference between going off script and going rogue.) Either way, practice makes presentable and if you are prepared to keep the objectives in mind, you have all you need to get to “yes” another way.
I can point to several reasons for the bumps in my thesis presentation at Pratt, but this was the main one: I went in without preparing, practicing, or thinking about what new information I was going to offer. Gone are the days when creativity for creativity’s sake allowed for ideas that were presented as “cool” or “edgy.” Design and advertising have changed from a purely idea-centric field to one that has to provide creative business solutions. Marketers now hold agencies accountable for their creative ideas, and as a result, success is measured in new customers and ROI. If you’re injecting creativity into solving the business problem, you’ll need to present the idea in a way that makes the audience aware of the business or marketing objectives you factored into this solution.
KNOW WHEN TO USE EMPHASIS VERSUS REPETITION
There is a difference, so be sure to differentiate when developing a way to reinforce a theme. When presenting, you’ll need to look at the total picture to discern which is which. Set the timer on your iPhone and practice giving the presentation so that you can hear the points and revise where needed. Emphasize the themes throughout the presentation by highlighting the supporting points as they come up. This weaves justification into the presentation in a way that strengthens your overall position versus repeating the exact same information over and over again.
Set the Context to Anticipate or Avoid Negativity
The setup is also the place to try to neutralize negative client comments that could come in the feedback portion of the presentation. It’s important to anticipate hot-button words, avoid negative connotations, and steer clear of previous failed approaches. Head off potential negative client comments like “It looks communist” after the presentation by framing what you’ve done before you show the work. “We were inspired by diagonals used in Swiss poster design, the color palette of Constructivist cinema poster designers Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, and the visual symbolism of the strong figures used in muralist Diego Rivera’s work.”
Assuming that you’ve had a sound brief to work from, like the one I detail in Chapter 10, this approach gives sound strategic footing to show your creative ideas. The setup can be a powerful preamble that frames the reason that the concept or theme you’re about to present is viable rather than an idea-suffocating eulogy better known as pre-ramble. Being orderly and strategic makes all the difference.
Pay Attention to Structure
Although I wasn’t involved in any way with the long-running Apple campaign “Get a Mac,” I’ll use it as a familiar case study for how to structure your pitch. First, begin with the most relevant insight about the target you’re trying to reach. This frames the reason that the concept or concepts you’re about to present are right (form follows function).
Insight: “The larger market share of Windows-based computers makes most people more familiar with PCs. That doesn’t mean they prefer them, though, because with that familiarity comes the headaches of viruses, uniformity, clunky user experiences, and crashes.”
From here you can lead into what I like to call the “therefore.” This is the bottom line or actionable conclusion from the insight.
Therefore: “If more people knew that the Mac alternative handled all the same functions while providing a cooler, easier, and overall more enjoyable experience, they would listen.”
This leads us to the reason we are here in the first place: the verbal articulation of the creative concept or theme. It’s tough to articulate a concept at first. You should be able to explain it in no more than a few sentences. If you can’t, it’s too complicated, and you’ll need to simplify either the idea or the explanation. Remember, a concept isn’t a description of the execution, it’s the actual idea.
Concept: “The idea is to compare and contrast the differences between Mac- and PC-based platforms by personifying the computers and acting out the differences.”
The execution is how the concept is being communicated. Think of the concept itself as the palm of your hand and the executions as your fingers. Depending on how big your campaign is, the executions are all extensions of the same concept. Executions live in media channels, and this is how campaigns are built.
The Manifesto: In the fourth edition of his book Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This, Luke Sullivan writes: “A manifesto is your brand’s Magna Carta, Rosetta Stone, and Declaration of Independence all rolled into one; it’s the halftime locker room speech given by the CEO; the words the founder heard on the mountaintop before bringing down the stone tablets. Reading a great brand manifesto should make you wanna run out and try the product. You should feel the brand fire in your bones.”
You’ll need to use your judgment here, but when launching a new product, relaunching a brand, or introducing a new brand, you’ll need a manifesto. Sometimes this could be used in the launch ads, turned into a long-form YouTube video about the brand or placed in the retail environment. Use visual language so your audience can see what you mean.
Tagline: The campaign theme is explained through the brand manifesto and may often serve as the “period” in the piece. If the manifesto is the speech, the tagline would be the punctuation. It should sum up what’s at the core of the brand in a memorable and differentiated way. This takes skill and much more in-depth study, so for more on writing taglines and creating smart creative work, consult my friend Pete Barry’s Advertising Concept Book.
Execution: “TV spots, print ads, digital, or any other channel will focus on a different Mac feature such as banter about connectivity or an interaction around stability and, thus, give the reason to consider switching.”
The benefit to the target group is a result of the feature in that particular execution. Features are tangible aspects of the product or service, and the benefits from those features are often abstract results to the consumer. It’s the point of the execution and should be differentiated relative to competitors.
Benefit: “The benefi
t will be acted out between the characters to illustrate the ease of use, stability, connectivity, etc. (the things the target will do with the platform).”
Chapter 5 explains that the message the ads convey should be a plainly stated takeaway that the target audience should understand after coming in contact with your campaign in any execution.
Message: “A Mac does the same thing as a PC, just without the headaches and with a whole lot more fun.”
The objective or goal of all this is one that would be given to you in the brief, or recommended as the agency/firm point of view if this were a pitch.
Objective: “Increase awareness: Make Mac computers top-of-mind when considering a computer purchase. Support the purchases of existing customers, and increase market share by convincing PC users to switch to Mac.”
Again, though I wasn’t in the room or associated with this idea pitch, this example shows that all of the necessary categories were well thought out and executed. Taking the time to write out your pitch structure provides clarity, organization, and flow.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design Page 15
