Good example of how a tagline can work to wrap up an advertisment. Honda do a good job here with their visuals and the tagline sums up the whole one minute advertisment.
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I have written before about six word stories and today I saw an example of one from the Department for schools, children and families in the UK. They have launched a campaign on internet safety which intends to teach young children how to stay safe while using the internet. Their tagline is “Zip it. Block it. Flag it.”
My first impression was that it could be a little confusing. When I think of ‘zip’ in relation to computers my first thought is ‘zipping files’ so that they are compressed into a smaller file size. But then the target audience for this campaign might not have that perspective. “Zip it” in English slang means to be keep quiet and not disclose information .
So ‘zip it’ means do not give out any personal information. ‘Block it’ means use the blocking feature on social media sites or IM tools (like MSN). ‘Flag it’ means talk to a trusted adult if you are harassed online.
This tagline will not doubt be promoted heavily in schools and after a while will become a well-known catchphrase. The creators hope it will be about famous as the Green Cross Code.
What do you think? Will it stick or be quickly forgotten ?
Vary your energy
Even a well framed and messaged presentation delivered in a monotonous and disinterested manner will be poorly received. Executives (and all presenters) have a bubble within which they are comfortable. It has been successful to get them to where they are today. However, I am often asked to help executives with strong technical backgrounds to make the step up to senior positions. This requires coming out of the comfort bubble which means overcoming deeply engrained habits. Common habits include being too softly-spoken, projecting a constant (often low) stream of energy and little variety in voice and energy throughout a presentation.
I don’t believe you need to be an extrovert to be a good presenter. Steve Jobs is regarded as one of world’s best business presenters without being a hyper-energetic speaker. However, regardless of your starting point, you do need variety in your presentation.
The most obvious is to bring enthusiasm for your subject. When you are enthusiastic, energy levels increase and this is very attractive to the audience. Think about how you talk about your hobbies to your friends. What gets your energy going? Talking about the sports results, mentioning your toddler’s latest developments or sharing your knowledge with others? A good resource for enthusiastic presentations can be found at TED Talks (www.ted.com). Pick a topic and notice how the passion of each speaker is very engaging.
Examples of Lifeforce:
Take your next presentation and after you have prepared all the content (including messages), practice delivering it out aloud a couple of times. When you feel you are starting to get familiar with the flow, take the opening one minute and deliver it as though it was the most boring topic in the world. Then, go straight into delivering the same one minute as though it is the most interesting topic to you. Record both rehearsals. Playback and observe the main differences in your delivery. Pace and intonation of your voice. Energy delivered. Which one would your audience prefer to listen to? Which one would be more engaging and persuasive?
Use your energy and lifeforce to put a sparkle into your presentation delivery. Variety is the key to keeping your audience engaged.
Tagline them
Have you ever been asked to prepare a 40 minute presentation and then just before you come in to deliver it, be asked to ’slim it down’ to 20 minutes?! I mean what are you meant to do? Speak twice as fast? Cut out the verbs?
A way to be always ready for this challenge is to properly message your presentation. I call this taglining. Consumer companies use taglines to create a memorable phrase that is linked with their brand. For example, since adidas introduced their “Impossible is Nothing” tagline, it has become part of their target audience’s vocabulary. I call this type of message a ‘meta-tagline’ which summarises a broad theme or direction. Your presentation should have a meta-tagline. You can think of it as your high concept or movie title. (eg It’s a Wonderful Life, Saving Private Ryan, Snakes on a Plane).
The main benefit of using this approach is that – together with framing – it helps you think more clearly about the key messages that you want to deliver. This is important as today’s audience are busy, overloaded with information and distracted by mobile devices. You need to be able to deliver your key messages in a short time and make them memorable.
This is quite a challenge. Especially when most presenters can’t even remember their own presentation! Reading off crib notes, turning around to speak off the screen or frequent looking up or down are signs that the presenter has not prepared adequately.
Once you have a meta-tagline, go down through your presentation section by section and ask “What is my key message here?” How could you summarise it into a short sentence or tagline. This requires some thinking and can be difficult when you first use this skill. Once you have completed this, you should have an overall message or concept (meta-tagline) and between three to five messages summarising the main section content.
Your messages can now be easily written on a card and memorised. With clear messages, you can tie your content together more naturally and then the content (data, statistics etc) are used to support your message. This approach makes you bulletproof to shorter presentation times and ensures you have clear messages throughout the entire presentation.
Examples of Meta Taglines:
Too broad – Quality Concerns
Too long – The most important quality concern we have today is in manufacturing
Good example – Three Essential Quality Changes
Examples of Taglines (for sections):
Too broad – Data insufficient
Good example – Two data gaps we must monitor
Frame It
When facing an executive audience, such as a board of directors, you need to help them understand the scope of your presentation for two reasons.
Firstly, busy executives have so many issues swirling around their heads that you cannot assume that they know the scope of your topic.
Secondly, senior executives do not want to know all the details. That is why they hire you. You are the subject matter expert. So what this means is that at the start of your presentation, you must signal the depth of your content. By indicating to your audience that you will not dive straight into detailed charts and statistics you are showing that you understand their expectations. Later on while you are presenting you may be asked for extra details, but don’t assume that an executive audience wants to know every single statistic.
Example of framing 1: “Today, in the next 15 minutes I will cover the three main updates for Project X. I will not go into the data charts which I have provided as handouts. I will take a Q&A after each update. Shall we start?”
Example of framing 2: “The main purpose for this presentation is to highlight the options available to us following the discovery of Problem Y. Although this could take us into several related areas, we have decided to stay focused only on the short term solutions. This will take 30 minutes and I welcome comments throughout. If this works for everybody, I will start.”
Simplicity Sells
With the rise of the over 50s as a demographic that marketers would like to target, finally we have computer makers designing a computer for people who are not comfortable negotiating a complex file management system or a desktop full of icons.
Simplicity Computers have introduced a computer with a simple navigation interface (Square One - couldn’t they have found a better name?) and built-in video tutorials that are clear and easy-to-understand.
This got me thinking that designing a good message for a presentation is all about simplicity. Being simple is not easy. And being concise can take a lot of preparation. The next time you prepare a presentation, ask yourself, “What is my message?” Is it concise? Could someone over 50 or under 10 years of age understand it?
Simplicity means cutting out the jargon, and acronyms. Simplicity is about reducing a concept to its simpliest terms (without being patronising). Simple messages are easy to transfer.
David Pogue - an advocate for simple design - also has a speech called “Simplicity Sells” delivered at TED Talks.
Meditation can improve your concentration
With the need to multi-task and sift through a never-ending flow of information, we have adapted - with the help of technology - to become more skillful at darting our attention spans from point to point. From an email, to the mobile phone, to a web site, to a download, to a conversation. And so on.
While this adaption is an important part of being productive in a digital information age, it also impacts our ability to focus on one thing for a long period of time. Switching attention between tasks reduces effectiveness and hampers our ability to get things done in one sitting.
I recently attending a workshop and received a 25 minute meditation recording which I use at the end of the day to relax, unwind and calm my mind. One thing that surprised me was how difficult it is to focus for the complete 25 minutes. While listening to the guided meditation (basically someone’s voice), I noticed that my mind was drifting onto other thoughts. Even after pulling my attention back to the recording, my mind kept darting onto other topics.
Gradually, the more I meditate with the recording the longer I am able to focus my attention entirely. As we continue to plough through life with our numerous distractions, it’s good to remember that we can also “work out” our concentration and focus from time to time. Turn off the devices and just relax for 25 minutes. Your mind and attention span will appreciate it.
Rehearsal or Repitition?
In my experience of coaching and training executives in multinational companies, the one major deficit that I find is the lack of proper rehearsal. People are just not interested in putting in the time to rehearse their material.
If you have been involved in a sports team or theater then you will know that most of your time is spent practicing drills. A sports team will spend most of the time working specific drills day-in, day-out before they get ready to work on their game practice.
More worryingly, I find that younger professionals are even more averse to rehearsal. Perhaps its the consumer, must-have the next new thing that influence this opinion. Most success is hard work. And most hard work is spent mastering mundane tasks.
In presenting, effective rehearsing needs as a foundation a mastery of the content to be delivered. Most presenters don’t even reach this level. This is one reason why they struggle to deliver with confidence. It’s hard to deliver with style while you are still trying to recall the next sentence you need to deliver.
So where do people spend their time? Mostly making PowerPoint slides. A completely inefficient use of time. A slidedeck is simply a tool to support your message and add visually memorable ways to recall your key messages. It is not the presentation.
A proven way to speed up the process of reaching a message is to “stand-and-deliver” the speech as soon as you have a basic outline. Record these early rehearsals five minutes at a time. Then immediately listen to the recording and note which areas sounded strong and flowed well. Make a note of them on your outline (or write it into a script if you prefer). Keep cycling through your presentation in this way until you have solid message that flows well through the presentation. Once you have got to this stage you can work on refining the transitions and think about adding visual aids and slidedecks.
When it comes to rehearsing a voice recorder is your best friend.
5 minute presentations
I am sure you have all sat through many teeth-grindingly long presentations with 89 PowerPoint slides. But what if the presentation was only 5 minutes long, with 20 slides and each slide automatically rotated after 15 seconds. Sounds great!
There are a number of new events springing up which ‘force’ presenters to be concise. I think this is a great thing. It is much harder to be concise and still remain compelling, but the philosophy of The One Minute Presenter is just this. With today’s short-attention span audiences, it is becoming more and more important to be concise.
If you cannot get along to one of Ignite’s events (Wiki page) - try this method when you are preparing for your next presentation. It will help you deliver a to-the-point message and finish on time.
I am passionate about Toastmasters having been a member for almost 9 years and served as Chairman of Toastmasters in China helping to form 27 new clubs in a year. It’s a very positive organisation that has helped millions of people become better communicators and leaders.
I am frequently invited to giving speeches and trainings to young leaders. Here is the slidecast from a training focusing on the connection between service and leadership.
