Image: The visual aids and technology for giving presentations have changed a lot over the years. The basic presentation skills remain the same, however, and these transfer well to video.

I gave my first presentation aged 13; the subject was my favourite record, and the audience was my school class.

Today, 35+ years later, I can still recall my choice was Elton John’s Indian Sunset from his Madman Across the Water album released in 1971. A track that turned up again in 2005 as a sample in the Eminem-produced Tupac Shakur song “Ghetto Gospel”.

Since that first event at school, I have given hundreds of business presentations in many situations, from small one-on-one sales meetings, to large trade conferences and company-wide meetings.

One particular event that remains seared in my mind is a vendor presentation I gave at an IBM partner conference held in Las Vegas. About 500 people were expected to attend; the audience that actually turned up was a grant total of 1 (and he was only there because we used to work together and he came along to say hello — Hi Helmut if you are reading this!)

From transparencies to PowerPoint

The way we give presentations has changed a lot over the years, starting with OHP transparencies drawn by hand (remember the special pens we used to have for this?) and then taped into protective flip frames. We even had special cases to transport these slides. It was a nightmare travelling internationally with these types of presentations.

My first PC-based presentations were created under MS-DOS using Lotus Freelance Graphics. We printed the presentations (in black and white) on OHP transparencies. For special occasions we connected a few monitors together using (expensive) VGA splitter cables.

The next generation of technology was Harvard Presentation Graphics, again running under MS-DOS. There was a lot of buzz in the presentation world in 1986 with the release of Harvard Graphics. It seems odd to say it now, but this was the first presentation program that supported editing text, graphs and charts from within the same program.

Moving to Windows around 1990, I finally came into contact with Microsoft PowerPoint. Again, originally printing in black and white (for really special occasions in colour) to transparencies. Since the late 1980s it has been pretty much PowerPoint all the way (at least for Windows users like me).

More recently, SaaS web-based presentation tools such as SlideRocket are positioned as the next great leap forward. The metrics feature alone of SlideRocket is something we could only dream of in the past. We would create slide decks with hundreds of slides for our sales teams to use; however, we never really had any idea who was using what slides. Or, of course, whether anyone was even looking at the presentations at all.

From transparencies to projectors

In the early 1990s LCD panels entered the market that could be laid on an OHP projector. Initially these only showed gray scales, but colour models followed fairly quickly. I remember that these panels were very fragile and always needed careful handling.

The cost of these early LCD panels was horrendous, but the increase in flexibility was tremendous compared to transparencies. We bought lots of these panels and used them widely for sales presentation, customer training and internal meetings.

From there, of course, we have moved through the various generations of beamers and projectors. From the massive BARCO projectors mounted to the ceiling in conference rooms, to the (barely) transportable projectors of the mid 1990s to the fantastic mini and amazing micro projectors available today.

Presentation design becoming mainstream

Unfortunately, the standard practice in many businesses (and I plead guilty to having done this myself) has been to create “Slideuments“. These are presentations with lots of bullets and text which the presenter then reads to the audience. Come on, admit it, you know what I am talking about …

Luckily, in the past few years there have been some real advances within the business community about designing good presentations. At this point I would like to highlight the great work done on improving presentation design by Garr Reynolds from Presentation Zen and Cliff Atkinson from Beyond Bullet Points.

If you are not familiar with their work then I recommend you take a look. Your presentations will certainly get better, and your audience will thank you for it.

The disappearing audience

What these technologies have in common is that they are there to support the presenter in front of a live audience. Today’s business world, however, is very different; instead of presenting in a formal setting to a live audience, we increasingly have to present remotely.

The first step in this direction was online screen sharing products, which then led to online webinar solutions. In almost all cases, however, the presentation environment is limited to prepared slides being shown while listing to the presenter. PowerPoint by radio, you might say.

Funny videos and Lolcats

More recently we have seen the move to web video, with YouTube and other free hosting services making it ever easier to distribute videos. Millions of people are now doing so, with 20+ hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube alone.

I have often heard business people who do not use YouTube (or similar video sharing sites) claim that all these sites contain are “funny videos” or Lolcats (although they would not know what Lolcats are, of course). This assumption naturally influences their thinking about how video can, and is, be used in a business setting.

The truth about YouTube is very different; there are videos for almost anything you can think of. Getting back to where we started, why not lean back for 7:02 and watch Elton John performing Indian Sunset live in 1971.

What does this all mean for business?

In my next post on Sell to Camera I will look at the important first step with video you should take to improve the first impression your website makes on first-time visitors. In the meantime, please join the conversation in the comments and share some of your own presentation experience. I am sure you have some remarkable (good or bad) presentations stories you have just been waiting to share…