Presentations for the Future! (For Now)

UGC (or user generated content) has been the fuel of the social media revolution. It started with simple blogs and comments and has morphed into our present landscape cluttered with social networks, fan videos, and microblogs. All of this activity online has shifted the digital consciousness from the software and hardware that lives in your computer tower to the collective consciousness of cloud storage and exchange.

What has allowed this social media revolution message to really take off is that people have been armed with increasingly easy-to-use tools to create compelling multimedia on their own PCs. One human being can literally be a production house unto themselves. This means that people can create videos, websites, photo albums, etc. worthy of others' attention. Our sophistication as media consumers has thus increased significantly. We demand slick graphics, an appealing layout, and engaging imagery.

This demand for visual sophistication doesn't just exist in the realm of online entertainment, but has been running simultaneously in the world of business. Replacing pages of dry reports is the behemoth PowerPoint and decks of dry bullet points...augmented with animated transitions and easy-to-use color schemes, charts, and image importing.



PowerPoint has encouraged people to...think more about visual presentation and has become de rigueur in business communication. In fact, there was recently an article in the New York Times on the rampant use of PowerPoint by our own U.S. military.



Recently, a friend of mine tipped me off to Prezi.com. It's a web-based software program (that wonderful cloud-computing we were talking about before) that lets you easily create very dynamic Flash presentations.

Below is my own first attempt at using the software:

Bio Prezi on Prezi

My own presentation is rather limited. I kind of cheated and uploaded a large pdf, but that has created pretty blurry text. You can create text, add images (but maybe not use an entire image as your presentation), embed video, zoom in, zoom out, rotate your view, determine whatever path you want the points to follow. It's pretty great. It allows lots of personal control and at the same time is pretty simple to use.

You can store your presentations in Prezi's cloud (much like the currently popular SlideShare, you can share your presentation via link, embed it, or download it to your hard drive for an offline experience.

As a potential business communications tool, I think it shows genuine promise. It offers greater visual control and flexibility than PowerPoint. It is a web-based application, which means its very friendly to netbook users (but not necessarily iPad/iPhone users since it is a Flash-based application).

What really excites me about Prezi is that, rather than fracture an idea into bulletpoints one slide at a time (creating weak arguments and oversimplification of complex issues), the Prezi platform requires that you structure the narrative of your argument before you start using the program, that you look at the over-arching thesis of your argument and how you want to travel from point to point to point. Because of its zooming capabilities, it also becomes easier to take a step back and look at the "big picture" of an argument or zoom in for more "granular detail" (text/image points that were not previously visible in the presentation).

Angelie Agarwal does a much better job of showing in a simple way, some of the potential of Prezi (particularly for our Armed Forces):

De-Spaghettization of a PPT slide on Prezi

I would encourage you to check out Prezi's brief demo video to get a better grasp of how you might be able to begin to use it in your own communications/UGC/thank you cards to friends:

R-E-S- . . . P-S-S?**

Research. Who does it? Who cares?

Lately that topic has come up quite a bit in conversation as I have talked to various people in the industry (of advertising).

Sometimes it seems that clients want to use research as a crutch, to validate the proposed campaign, to make decisions for them on what path to take, to help them sleep at night resting comfortably that they will get great ROI (Return-On-Investment. Perhaps one of the most hateful terms to have gotten stuck in my head since entering this dizzy little industry).

I think, for this reason, many creatives and planners have developed something of a resentful relationship towards research. It becomes hampering towards great ideas, diluting creativity, and stymie-ing potential growth. Some planners and creatives I have talked to value infinitely more the power of brilliant intuition.

This intuition comes in particularly valuable when you are called upon to offer keen insights on the spot, without the chance to research a question and assess trends and history. I would, however, counter that great intuition is built upon good research.

Once, long ago, I was fervently dedicated to the idea of becoming a clinical psychologist. People already came to me for advice, and I thought I was pretty darned good at it. I shudder now to think at some of the bad advice I gave. But at the time I thought my intuition was so damned good. It took years of listening to people's problems, studying human behavior in an academic way, going through some of my own life experiences, and taking a step back, pondering, and looking for larger patterns.

Now, when people come to me for advice on relationships, I think I can reliably say my intuition is pretty good. I can quickly look at a situation/dynamic and assess the key issues. Often, I can even offer a really good solution. But this quick intuition has been fed by years of research and analysis.

Ultimately what is intuition, but what is latently within us. And you can only get out of something what you put into it.

Some planners reading this will be quick to observe this is why we often want planners with a wide breadth of experiences, because they can draw upon those experiences to feed their intuitive problem-solving. Life experiences, reading, and deep pondering are definitely forms of research.

But I think we should not be quick to negate other structured forms of qualitative and quantitative research as incredibly valuable to the creative process. Research results from these endeavors can significantly expand our thinking beyond our limited experiences. Sometimes it is just about the right question. We see surprising data that maybe did not fit with our preconceived thinking, but suddenly that puzzle piece makes sense in the whole scheme.

I think therein lies the key to good empirical research feeding the creative process of advertising: asking the right question. Asking the question that probably no one else has thought to ask. It is asking these kinds of questions that has led to some of our great breakthroughs in thinking: air-borne germ theory, a helio-centric planetary system, pizza-on-a-bagel means you can have pizza anytime!

In all seriousness, as a former academic, I value good research and the insights it can bring, but, as a creative person, I know that the best solutions often involve an element of risk, of trying out something that cannot be proven to be fail-safe. And that is bad news to the business suits who want security blanket solutions.

**SPSS . . . the statistics analytics tool. R-E-S-P-E-C-T . . . the Aretha Franklin song . . . never mind.

Student Run Grocery Store

Love it.

Check out the story.

An interesting idea. More than anything, I whole-heartedly approve of getting kids applying their skills toward something "real" and helping them realize they are empowered.