Building Great
Presentations

What I’m going to cover
The State of Presentations Crafting the Story How Do You Make It Look Good? The Art of the Delivery

ONT L FR Mattan Griffel
A E TH BS Founder & CEO, The Front Labs Partner, Grow/Hack I run the world’s first growth hacking agency based out of New York City and have helped launch dozens of different products. I've also spoken at various industry events – including at Bloomberg, Internet Week, and Social Media Week – and have been featured in BusinessWeek, Mashable and The Next Web.

This material is adapted from
Garr Reynolds, Chip & Dan Heath, Kevin Allison, and others, as well as from my own experience

Have you ever sat through
a really shitty presentation?

Have you ever sat through
a really shitty presentation? (it’s a rhetorical question)

Who the hell likes to
digest content this way? • There’s way too much text. It’s pretty easy to lose track of where you are. Are you still even listening to the speaker? • The audience has to do too much work. What is the point of this slide? What am I supposed to take away from it? • The font, colors and images are crazy ugly. Seriously, if you’re trying to visually represent something, at least put some thought into how it’s going to look. • This could be the most interesting content in the world, and it would still be boring. A bad presentation can kill any topic.

“ Countless innovations fail because
their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way. ” – Seth Godin

Seth’s 4 rules for slides:
1) Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them 2) Don’t use cheesy images 3) No dissolves, spins or other transitions 4) Create a written document to leave behind

Sample Slides
from Seth Godin

I like Seth’s approach

I like Seth’s approach but
I don’t think it’s practical

Teach Yourself to Code. How
to Growth Hacking LEAN MARKETING FOR STARTUPS When they sold to Microsoft 1.5 years after launch, Hotmail had 12 million users “ Put ‘PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail’ at the bottom of each e-mail. A lot of you just have an idea Web applications are applications ” July September November January March May July September November accessed over the internet Viral growth This is your rails command center Do you pivot? Do you keep releasing new features? Landing page optimization Product management What do you do? SEO Analytics Part 3: Onboarding How I Taught Myself Terminal TextMate Do you experiment with other Email marketing UX to Code in One Month marketing channels? Do you try to target a different PR Behavioral economics demographic? Google Chrome

My presentations have been shared
over 150,000 times

How do I do it?

Start at the
end

The first step is to
figure out your take-away

What’s the
point?.

Sure, you can want people
to just know more

Sure, you can want people
to just know more and that’s okay

Sure, you can want people
to just know more and that’s okay (but it’s also shallow and boring)

You want people to act
act!

“OH!”

ASK YOURSELF: Who is your
audience?

ASK YOURSELF: Why are they
there?

ASK YOURSELF: What do they
care about?

ASK YOURSELF: How can I
speak to them?

What makes
messages stick?

Simplicity

Unexpectedness

Concreteness

Credibility

Emotion

Story

First slide ??? ??? Last
slide

Stories have 5 Beats

Stories have 5 Beats 1)
Set-up Establishes the Who & What

Stories have 5 Beats 1)
2) Set-up Inciting Incident Establishes A journey the Who & begins What

Stories have 5 Beats 1)
2) 3) Set-up Inciting Rising Incident Action Establishes A journey Stakes the Who & begins continue to What increase

Stories have 5 Beats 1)
2) 3) 4) Set-up Inciting Rising Main Incident Action Event Establishes A journey Stakes A turning the Who & begins continue to point What increase occurs

Stories have 5 Beats 1)
2) 3) 4) 5) Set-up Inciting Rising Main Resolution Incident Action Event Establishes A journey Stakes A turning Explains the Who & begins continue to point what it all What increase occurs means

problem to a building up
Start by

Write your o • One
utline : • Line • At •A • Time

Each line builds on the
previous one

And ultimately leads to your
big take-away

Here’s mine:

Presentations are about
flow

And anything not essential should
be removed

You can use paper, whiteboards
or stickies for storyboarding

I like to storyboard in
Keynote

So how do you make
it look good?

1 No more than idea
per slide

Reduce the noise

Slides from Garr Reynold’s Presentation
Zen

Slides from Garr Reynold’s Presentation
Zen

Slides from Garr Reynold’s Presentation
Zen

Also please take your logo
off every slide

Also please take your logo
off every slide (are you really afraid people will forget?)

“ If you want people
to understand better, then get that stuff off the screen... it is simply making it more difficult for people to ” understand what you are saying. – Tom Grimes, Kansas State Journalism Professor

What simple visual element would
complement each idea?

It could be an image

Or maybe just some
typography

Where can you get good
images?

Buy (good) stock photography iStockPhoto
(www.istockphoto.com) Shutter Stock (www.shutterstock.com)

Find images online Google Images
(images.google.com) Flickr Creative Commons (www.flickr.com/creativecommons) (be careful of copyright issues)

Take your own photos

Give it room to breathe
(use plenty of empty space)

Consistency is
REALLY
important

Make sure you always use
the same font And same colors

Don’t center everything

Asymmetry is more
interesting

Invisible lines are important

Rule of thirds (just do
it.)

Buy (good) stock photography iStockPhoto
(www.istockphoto.com) Shutter Stock (www.shutterstock.com)

“ Countless innovations fail because
their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way. ” – Seth Godin

Asymmetry is more
interesting

Sure, you can want people
to just know more

And try to line everything
up Either on the sides Or in the middle

Avoid templates

Avoid clip art & bad
stock images

Don’t use common fonts

Like Arial

Or Helvetica

Or
Calibri

Or Times New
Roman

Choose a good font like
Serifa like Futura like Rockwell like Avenir like PF Din

Check out FontSquirrel.com

I like widescreen (you get
way resolution slides more room) 4:3 (default) 16:9

I like widescreen (you get
way resolution slides more room) 4:3 (default) 16:9

Black on white is easier
to read

Black on white is easier
to read (Unless you’re in the dark)

Pick a color scheme: background
color main text emphasis text complement text (optional)

Keep an archive of good
presentations to inspire you

100SOME 1 “ Audiences everywhere
are tough. They don’t have time to be bored! or brow beaten by orthodox, ! old-fashioned advertising.! ! We need to stop interrupting ! E what people are interested in ! W & be what people are A ! INBOUND ! interested in.” VS. ! OUTBOUND ! CRAIG DAVIS MARKETING! CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER, WORLDWIDE MARKETING! J. WALTER THOMPSON (WORLD’S 4TH LARGEST AD AGENCY) STATS! 4 CHARTS ! One third of US consumers ! & GRAPHS! spend >3 hours online every day. 46% WARNING: SAFETY GOGGLES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! of daily 180+ MINUTES 35% searches are for 60-79 MINUTES 33% info on products 1-59 MINUTES 14% or 0 MINUTES 19% services. 7 SOURCE: THE MEDIA AUDIT, OCTOBER 2010 SOURCE: SRI, OCTOBER 2010 29

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1 Your Idea Starting with
your branded message... Advertising launch ⋅ accelerate ⋅ measure Get more ROI with Viral Lift BuzzFeed consistently delivers viral distribution even for advertising content. Make it Viral with BuzzFeed For every 100,000 clicks generated to our advertisers’ content through paid media, they saw an average of 60,000 “free clicks” generated by sharing activity. salesteam@buzzfeed.com

THE FRIENDSHIP HOW TO BUILD
BRAND ADVOCACY IN A CONSUMER-DRIVEN WORLD YES Thank you But the real problem... MODEL Copyright © 2007 22squared Here’s how we size up advocacy: % of brand’s customers who are... ... we must create relationships SHAREHOLDER EVANGELIST Copyright © 2007 22squared RECOMMENDER worth talking about. REPEAT SATISFIED ADVOCATES BUYERS CRITICS MARGINAL CUSTOMER DISSATISFIED CUSTOMER ACTIVELY AGAINST Copyright © 2007 22squared Copyright © 2007 22squared

The art of the delivery

Start by speaking with your
audience

Move away from the podium

Hans Rosling at

Use a clicker

Make good
eye contact

Take your time

Keep the lights
on

Next steps

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
Read Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath

Practice speaking at:
Do

Learn
everywhere

Thank you. Connect with me
at www.mattangriffel.com Mattan Griffel mattangriffel@gmail.com @mattangriffel