All presenters should Twitter, to practice compressing an idea into 140 characters. More clarity, more impact. End of post.

Blather.

Edited launch video. Full version (1hr 20min) here.

Steve Jobs is rightly regarded as a master of the presentation universe. How many presentations get that level of global PR hype, both before and after the event?

Here are 10 lessons to draw from the iPad launch speech:

1.    Open with an attention-grabbing  amazing fact: in this case, that Apple has now shifted its 250 millionth iPod. Which tells the audience: we’re probably right about this new product too.

2.    No jargon. Jobs uses none of the clichés that bedevil corporate speeches, particularly in the IT field. No “enterprise-class solutions”. No “best of breed”. Just a conversational chat the way any normal human would talk.

3.    No excess information on the screen. No ever-present logo bars, event titling or other clutter. If you can take something away without it affecting the message, then do it.

4.    Strong use of quality images. In the shot below, a single photo that sums up Apple’s unique marketing positioning. No extra verbiage required.

5.    Don’t be afraid to create an enemy, in Jobs’ case the Netbook, which he says is just a cheap PC that doesn’t do anything well. A lot of people will tell you that all negative messages are bad. That advice is well-meaning and wrong. If your product is the solution to a problem, you’d better spell out exactly what that problem is. And remind everyone how much it pisses them off.

6.    Perfect timing on the screen graphics. Nothing comes up too early to spoil the surprise, and nothing hangs around afterward as a distraction. Which comes from:

7.    A huge amount of rehearsal. Anyone who’s demonstrated software will know the tremendous scope for things to go wrong. The more effortless a presentation looks, the more effort has gone into planning and rehearsing every detail again and again.

8.    A distinctive look, where every detail is consistent. The Apple stage look is always designed for zen-like simplicity to match their products. Jobs’ clothes are always consistent – even if the jeans came straight off Seinfeld. It might not work for other companies, but it works for Apple.

9.    He demonstrates the product sitting back in a comfy leather chair.  The underlying message is: this is a product that isn’t just designed for work. You can’t kick back in a chair and read a laptop comfortably. With the iPad, you can relax and enjoy yourself. Good stage design can send messages like that.

10.    Use of the blank screen. If there’s no visual that goes with the words at any point, go to blank. The focus is on you, the presenter, with no distractions. Then, when the images return, they have much more impact.

It wasn’t a perfect presentation. It wasn’t exactly a revelation to see the iPad “just go straight to the New York Times web site” and allow you to look at it, like every other web device on earth. Snipping out some of this filler would have made it shorter without reducing the impact. But these are minor quibbles in a presentation that generally acted as a showpiece of how to get a message across clearly.

“Please. That font doesn’t match those shoes.”

For years, people in black clothes and matching square-frame glasses have told you that font choice is important for successful communication.

But how important are fonts, really? Maybe that’s just the designer’s opinion, rather than a scientifically proven fact. After all, communication is fertile territory for pseudo-science and wrong conclusions from legitimate research.

As it turns out, scientists have researched it, and found that fonts play a decisive role in how your audience perceives your message. And more importantly, how likely they are to act on it.

In this useful article in The Psychologist, studies have shown that fonts “influence how fluently new information can be processed. The resulting feeling of ease or difficulty, in turn, informs a wide variety of judgements, from judgements of effort to to judgements of familiarity, truth, risk and beauty.”

One example studies people who were considering a new exercise program, and wondering how much pain was in store. They were given two sets of printed exercise instructions, identical except for the font.

Asked to estimate how long it would take to do the routine, they estimated an average 8.2 minutes when reading instructions printed in Arial. Given the same instructions in a complex, harder-to-read font, they estimated it would take 15.1 minutes.

They list lots more studies in which the choice of font has a dramatic effect on how people respond to new information. If your job involves getting people to overcome their fears and act on new information, you know how hard it can be.

So check those fonts and make sure they’re easy to read, because that makes them non-threatening at a subconscious level.

By the way, article uncovered via @ChasLicc . Who would have thought that the wackiest Chaser prankster of them all would  provide an endless stream of Twitter links to fascinating, thought-provoking information, much of it of a decidedly non-wacky nature? The man must never sleep.

The design guys and I are working on a food packaging project at the moment. It’s quite a fiddly task. There’s a Dan Brown novel’s worth of legal mandatories to fit on each box, much of it warnings about the two greatest threats to Western civilisation: nuts and crustaceans.

DANGER THIS FOOD MAY HAVE BEEN PREPARED USING EQUIPMENT THAT MAY HAVE COME INTO CONTACT WITH NUTS OR CRUSTACEANS, OR POSSIBLY OPERATED BY A PERSON WHO ONCE SHOOK HANDS WITH SOMEONE WHO ONCE ATE A NUT OR CRUSTACEAN, AND IN FACT IT IS POSSIBLE TO DIE A SLOW AND PAINFUL DEATH FROM JUST THINKING ABOUT NUTS OR CRUSTACEANS, THAT’S HOW DANGEROUS THEY ARE ACCORDING TO OUR LEGAL DEPARTMENT.

So there’s a lot of fine-print type going over the top of photos, which creates production dramas too tedious to relate here, but it has some relevance for creating presentation graphics.

A nice photo makes a more compelling background for your screen show than a cheesy graphic template. But adding words over the top can present all sorts of hassles. Here’s a quick guide to the words-on-pictures thing that you can do within PowerPoint, rather than having to use Photoshop, Illustrator or other fancy gear.

For demonstration purposes, here’s a picture of the handsome lads of Scene Change Tasmania, in their natural habitat of Constitution Dock (which, by the way, is ALIVE with dangerous crustaceans).

Like most shots, it’s a mixture of dark and light bits, so the black type disappears into the dark suit. Let’s try white type.

That’s a lot better, but it still gets a bit lost on the lighter concrete background. So we’ll add a subtle shadow to the text in the slide below. Adding the shadow actually reduces the perceived weight of the font, so I’ve switched it to Bold as well:

That’s much clearer. It’s a black shadow with a 75% transparency. It works best if your version of PowerPoint has an adjustable shadow facility. Some of the earlier versions had a single, very ugly setting with a gray, massively offset shadow which will do your photo no justice.

If adding a shadow still isn’t making it clear, try the ‘glow’ feature (Format/Font/Text Glow and Soft Edges). This is a black 8 point glow on 32 point type, at 75% transparency:

Almost all video titles use a glow, because of the legibility hassles with a moving background with changing levels of contract. It’s pretty foolproof for still images. But if you’re dealing with a super-contrasty background, consider putting a transparent background in your text box.

Drag the borders of your text box to the left and right margins of the picture, and centre your text. Now adjust the ‘Fill’ on your text box from ‘No Fill’ to black. Now adjust the transparency until the text is legible, without blocking out the picture too much. On this shot, I’ve set the transparency at 75%:

It’s quite a nice, elegant effect. Depending on the shot, and your personal taste, you could use black text on a white box, also set to 75% transparency, like this:

While the transparencies look great on screen, beware if you’re planning to print the pages. Some printers give you a messy, crosshatched effect. Test your printer well in advance of the deadline.

And after all those shots, you’re probably feeling a strong, subliminal attraction to Scene Change Tasmania. If you are, you should know the contact details for our beaut new office, a stone’s throw from where this photo was taken:

Cnr Macquarie/Campbell Sts

(GPO Box 2266 Hobart Tas 7001)

Hobart TAS 7000

Tel: 03 6234 2266

Fax: 03 6234 2655

If you’re looking for the future of presentation technology, you only need look as far as CSI Miami and its futuristic rainbow-lit headquarters.

That’s where you’ll find image scanners that can query a database of all the left-handed golf gloves in Florida, and bring up a photo and address of each owner. We’ve previously discussed their image sharpening software that can take a grainy security camera image and enlarge it to full HD.

Then there’s the transparent screens that allow you to flick images around with your hand like playing cards, which you can see at the 2′30″ mark here:

Now, you could say that CSI isn’t realistic program. That’s a fair viewpoint when last week’s TV Guide offered this as the plot of CSI NY:

“After a buzzard flying over Manhattan drops a human eyeball into Stella’s coffee, the race is on to find its owner.”

But as it turns out, we’ll all be getting our greasy hands all over our presentation material sooner than we think. Here’s the just-released Light Touch from Light Blue Optics.

It’s “a laser projector that turns any flat surface into an auto-focused and image-adjusted 10-inch touchscreen with WVGA resolution thanks to its laser- (not LED) based pico projection engine dubbed HLP (holographic laser projection) and infrared touch-sensing system.”

Amazing. Obviously its uses go way beyond the tradition presentation-based projector, like in retail:

Stand by for interesting changes to the way presentations work.

And get ready to see ‘please wash your hands before touching our screen‘ signs in conference centres.

What can you learn about presentations from a TV chef who puts vibrators into a giant, luminescent jelly to make it wiggle as it arrives at the table?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. Today, the second half of what presenters can learn from chef Heston Blumenthal.

3. A Sense Of Theatre
In the olden days, there was no TV or laptop to keep you amused in the evenings. Food, at least for the nobility, was the entertainment. Chefs in those days went out of their way to surprise and delight with grand reveals, illusions, and amusing tricks. Like this medieval gem of food theatre:

“The French would pluck a live chicken, brush the skin with saffron, wheat germ and drippings, then put the head under the belly, and rock the chicken to sleep. The live chicken was then served on a platter with two cooked chickens, carried to the table and the cooked chickens carved as the live one would wake up and run wildly around, to the merriment of the guests.”

Blumenthal delights in putting on a show, like the enormous pie containing four and twenty live pigeons that fly out on cue.

Your surroundings play a huge part in your perception of an experience, even without the magic tricks. A meal eaten overlooking the sea in France is going to taste better than the same meal eaten sitting on a bed in a freeway motel watching TV.

A presentation delivered with attention to the theatrical details will always work more effectively. Imagine that, like a medieval dinner, your audience had no TV to go home to, and that your presentation was their only source of stimulation that day. What would you do differently?

Create a sense of surprise. Dress the room up with mood lighting and interesting set pieces. Finish on a bang, rather than an ‘any questions then?‘ whimper. Leaving them wanting more. If you need help with this, money spent on a good event producer is invariably worth it.

4. Educate By Entertaining
Blumenthal spends a lot of time researching the history books for ideas. Who knew that the Victorians loved nothing more than getting blasted on laudanum, cocaine, and hallucinogenic wormwood liquor? Or that they invented the vibrator, for the purposes of some pretty dubious female therapy? Presented in the right way, history becomes fascinating.

After watching the show, you’re not only entertained, but a little bit better educated. Regrettably, this clip leaves out the scene where they take prototype jellies down to the sex shop to see which vibrator delivers the goods:

And that’s something to aim for as a presenter: to have people leave the room feeling a little bit more intelligent and educated than they were before. Saying, ‘you know, that was unexpectedly interesting.’  The trick is to tell relevant stories that bring your message to life, not just to speak a list of facts.

5. Love Your Subject
You can tell by the delirious expressions on Blumenthal and his kitchen team when they’re experimenting with covering food with explosive gun cotton, or building an ejaculating, Caligula-inspired dessert, that they genuinely love what they’re doing. It comes across in everything they do. Just talking about it makes their eyes light up.

Your subject might not be as interesting as that, but if you really like what you’re doing, it shows. Your energy rubs off on the audience, and they’ll share your enthusiasm. If you can’t summon up gleeful enthusiasm for your subject, that’s probably a clear sign you should consider changing jobs.

Welcome back to 2010, folks.

Been away from the blog longer than expected, but that’s probably a good thing.

At this time of year I always feel sorry for Americans, who only get about three days leave a year.  Holiday deprivation can often lead to a blinkered, captive-animal approach to work, shying away from any idea or technique that breaks the templated approach.

And there are few forms of communication as templated as the TV cooking show. An endless parade of chirpy, chatty chefs building their personal brands and cookbook franchises, churning out the same old char-grilled beef fillet drizzled with a balsamic reduction of pan juices etc etc, ‘plated’ up with a wink and a flash of whitened teeth.

All the food’s been done a million times before. There’s no sense of wonder, magic, or even of a special occasion.

Then there’s Heston Blumenthal. Over summer his Heston’s Feasts popped up amid the other shows like a centaur in a pet shop.

The Art Of Messing With Your Mind

Blumenthal, at his UK restaurant The Fat Duck, has taken food to places that few others have dared, or been able to. His work combines science lab techniques, a love of theatrics, and painstaking historical research into recipes from ye olden days. His specialty is messing with your mind using flavours and ingredients presented in forms that make you expect something else: a realistic looking fruit platter that’s actually made from different meats, snail porridge, or edible candles and cutlery.

On each episode of his TV show, he creates a banquet from a different era, and serves it up to half a dozen nervous celebrity-types. It’s absolutely riveting television, full of dangerously mad ideas and terrifying ingredients.

It should be compulsory viewing for anyone in the event industry, and anyone who’s involved in making presentations will learn something useful.

Blumenthal’s fundamental challenge is to get a reluctant table of diners to overcome their fears and preconceptions in order to experience something wonderful. Anyone in advertising will recognise this challenge, standing in a boardroom trying to persuade six nervous people that your strange ideas might actually be good for them, if they’d only try one.

Here are five things that you, the presenter, can learn from Heston Blumenthal.

1. Aim High, Take Risks
Blumenthal is ambitious in his plans for each of the banquets: he wants to create the greatest dining experience of his guests’ life. He’s obsessively driven by that aim, and it comes across in his painstaking attention to detail.

To create an experience like no other, he takes a lot of risks, feeding his guests brains, testicles, grasshoppers and lampreys in various disguises, having faith that the rewards will outweigh the risks. In the end, some of them aren’t major hits. But when one hits the bullseye, you can see the guests eyeballs rotating in amazement and pleasure.

Almost all presentations are put together in the hope of creating as little impression as possible, because that means the lowest chance of any embarrassing mistake or controversy. And that’s fine if your sole aim is to keep your current job.

If you want to achieve greatness, you’re going to have to go out on a limb and try a few things that others are afraid to do.

2. Work With All The Senses
When you’re eating, taste and smell are the basic building blocks of the experience. Blumenthal spends a lot of time exploring how the other senses can color your perceptions. Like a Victorian era ‘edible garden’, with deep-fried crunchy insects, served with the smell of grass and the sound of a lawn mower.  Or serving sashimi with a set of earphones playing squawking seagulls.

Likewise, most presenters believe their experience is limited to audio and visual. Why not get your audience touching things, playing with your new product? Theatrical smoke machines can produce different fragrances like vanilla, mint, or coconut. You could use atmospheric sound effects that can take their minds to another place.

Blumenthal describes memory as the most powerful sense, where “the triggers from our past create the most intense flavors of all.” Smell and sound can evoke this at a far more powerful level than words and images. It’s not as easy to stage as a slide show, and you can’t do it for the average boardroom presentations, but for a larger event it’ll create lasting memories.

Part 2 tomorrow, or perhaps the day after.

Last week was the annual Scene Change Christmas party tour, which was excellent.

As is traditional, Scene Change Hobart held its annual staff barbecue party the day after the client event. It had a special significance this year: a farewell to the Kingston shed-warehouse, headquarters of the glorious Scene Change Revolucion of late 2006.

We’re moving into a very attractive new office in the Hobart CBD, at the rear of the Hotel Grand Chancellor . It’s the place with the white awnings outside, though they’re being removed soon. You can smell the seafood of Constitution Dock from there.

Here’s PK and Rod checking out the night-time ambience.

The only drawback of the new space is that it’s less suited to the Guitar Hero mania that went down in the Kingston warehouse. Last Friday, Rod, Damo, and the rest of the band played their final performance.

Which was NOTHING compared to some kid who’s hooked up his Guitar Hero to 22,000 Christmas lights on his house (technical details here).

(Via Brand Flakes)

And with that masterpiece of festive technology, your correspondent is signing off for the year to get some surfing done. Happy Christmas to all Friends of Scene Change, see you in ‘10!

Westpac has rightly taken a lot of stick for its animated presentation on why they’ve raised mortgage rates beyond everyone else.

The overall idea is a good one - explain to confused customers what’s been happening with the money supply over the last year. And the simplicity of its animated figures might have worked well with a better thought-out message, even though the people have been taken directly off the doors of ladies’ and gents’ public bathrooms.

Between concept and delivery, the presentation ran way off the rails and ended up as something a 10-year-old would find incredibly patronising.

Lessons for presenters from this ongoing PR trauma:

Choose Your Analogies Carefully

If you’re talking about a high-commitment product like a 25 year mortgage, it’s wrong to compare it to something as trivial as a snack, even if the comparison works in terms of pure logic. It makes your audience feel that you’re too big and out of touch to understand their pain.

Don’t Underestimate the Intelligence of Your Audience

The whole tone of the speaker and the script suggests someone talking to children. Your audience might know less about the subject than you do, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Beware of using a tone that suggests you’re talking to simpletons, or they’ll turn against you fast.

A bit of editing would have helped, too: “Once upon a time, there were big lush fields of banana crops.”

Understand People’s Preconceptions of You

People will hold certain beliefs about you and your company before you open your mouth. You need to know what those beliefs are, because that context affects your whole message. If you’re from a family-oriented company like McDonalds, you have to present in a style that matches their family values. If you know you’re starting with negative preconceptions, you can pleasantly surprise them as ‘the bank executive who was unexpectedly warm and human’ or ‘the IT department head who was amazingly open to suggestions from other departments’.

Given the general public perception of banks, perhaps ‘Being popular is not our focus’ wasn’t the best choice of words.

Get Someone Else To Check Your Material

When you’re immersed in your own subject, you can assume that everyone else feels the same way. And material that makes perfect sense to you might not work for everyone else. So show your script and visuals to an outsider and see if there’s anything in there that makes them scratch their head.

Like “We all understand this story, right? A+B=C.”

Well, no, we don’t.

Understand How Fast Material Can Spread

Once Westpac realised the folly of its banana-themed message, they pulled the video from public view. But the horse had bolted, and it’s easy to view on a wide range of sites. In the digital world, once you’ve released anything, it’s out of your control. So be more careful next time.

There you are up in front of an expectant audience, buck naked, without a script, and you open your mouth and nothing comes out.

That’s the standard presentation nightmare, though if you eat a lot of cheese before you go to bed, sometimes you get the enhanced version in which the audience consists entirely of llamas in lederhosen.

As you know, that sort of thing rarely happens in actual life. But the next worst thing happens all the time: you go to show an audience your thrilling video, and it’s NOT THERE.

Just a big empty black box in your PowerPoint.

You click and click, hoping that the laptop’s just running low on available memory.

“Just bear with me,” you say. “Any second now.”

But there’s nothing. So today we’re going to look at the two main sources of on-site video trauma for presenters.

1. Embedded Video Not There

When you insert a video clip into PowerPoint, it doesn’t become part of the presentation file like a picture does. It’s just a link to somewhere else on your computer.

AV technicians spend much of their life trying to help presenters who have copied their PPT file across to a USB stick, brought it along to the show, and are wondering where their video or audio clips went.

If you’re not using your own computer for the presentation, you have to copy all the video and audio files into one folder on the USB stick or disc. Then when you load it onto the on-site computer, make sure the links are still working. Get there early, before there’s an audience in the room.

If you are using your own computer, check that the linked video files are actually on your machine, not on the server back at the office.

2. Is it really a DVD?

“I’m bringing a DVD” can mean a lot of things these days.

There’s your ‘classic’ DVD: a video program using DVD encoding, like you rent from Blockbuster. You stick it in a DVD player, and it plays.

Then there’s video files burned on a blank DVD. It says ‘DVD’, but it’s not programmed like a movie DVD. It’s just another form of file storage. So you stick the disc in the rented DVD player in your trade show booth, and nothing happens.

There are two ways to check what you’re dealing with.

One is to stick it in a DVD player - an actual playback deck rather than the DVD player on your laptop. if it brings up an on-screen menu and plays, it’s a DVD and will work pretty much anywhere.

The safest option is to look at the disk in your file management program. Actual DVD’s have a distinctive-looking file structure, with separate video and audio directories, like this:

If it looks like this, it’s just video files stored on a DVD disc, not a universally playable DVD:

To complicate things, some DVD players will read other file formats and play them. But some won’t, and that introduces a scary level of uncertainty if you’re travelling around using rented AV gear.

When in doubt, ask your AV people what to do, well in advance of the event. That way, there’s time to get the DVD properly authored so you can sleep as peacefully as your hotel room allows.