The Presentation Agency

Many companies want their presentations to look better than PowerPoint.

There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Sales people want to stand out from the competition and capture the audience’s attention.
2. We’re moving towards a world where people expect to see video and compelling Flash animations.
3. Marketers want to carry corporate branding into slides.

When you think about it, presentations are the final frontier where branding isn’t represented properly. Is a white background with two lines and a logo really the best way for a fortune 500 company to represent itself? Keep in mind that these are the same companies that spend millions of dollars on logos, slogans, printed materials, television advertising, and other high-end design.

So marketing professionals reach a dead end with PowerPoint and decide to build video or Flash presentations. These look beautiful and truly represent the brand, but the content goes out of date almost immediately. It’s expensive and time-consuming to make changes, because marketers have to go back to the video or Flash designer. Then they have to redistribute the video or Flash file to every sales person.

An inefficient way of creating multimedia presentations is to hire a designer to combine all content into Flash or video

Part of the reason that presentations present such a problem is that people want to edit them right up until the last minute. Television ads look so good precisely because no one is making changes to them ten minutes before they are broadcast.

So there’s a tension in most companies: they want their presentations to look better than PowerPoint, but they have sales and marketing people constantly making changes to slides. So they try video or Flash, get frustrated because they can’t update it themselves, and then they go back to PowerPoint.

There is, however, a better way.

Use presentation software that lets you separate the Flash content from the text, images, and videos. Your company can hire a designer to put together the Flash layer, but any business user can edit everything else.

The efficient way to creating multimedia presentations is to keep the Flash layer separate and allow business users to edit text, images, and video as necessary

This solution is more efficient and offers the best of both worlds:

• Compelling, branded slides that look better than PowerPoint
• Business users are confident they can customize as needed, right up to the last minute

You’ll need professional presentation software that allows you to layer images, text, and video on top of Flash content.

Mike Lingle / @mike_lingle