The Presentation Agency

This blog is devoted to helping corporations understand how to create and manage presentations across the organization. This is not really about tips for designing better slides. Instead, it’s about using a combination of design and technology to ensure that marketing messages are being delivered correctly, that brand and design guidelines are being enforced, and that sales people can easily tailor each presentation to the audience.

In 1995 I worked with the Discovery Channel to overhaul how they were doing their presentations. They wanted to:

1. Deliver slides that looked more like television but were still editable like PowerPoint
2. Work from a central library of approved, up-to-date slides that anyone in the company could access easily

The solution required both design and technology: design to make the slides look great and to convey information succinctly and effectively; technology to allow Discovery to layer text, animation, and video as well as manage slides across the company (and across the world).

That project has defined the rest of my career–15 years and counting–and Discovery is still using a version of what we built. In this blog I will reveal what I’ve learned so that other organizations can benefit.

So what’s a presentation agency? It’s a firm that uses design and/or technology to help companies create, manage, and deliver the best possible presentations.

Mike Lingle / @mike_lingle