Power to PowerPoint

We’ve lost count of the number of clients that have bad-mouthed PowerPoint presentations. Too many people continue to type in slide after slide of bullet points and then proceed to read them out.

However, Kantar’s social media knowledge leader Tom Ewing has a real passion for PowerPoint and, in an interview with Robert Bain, he reveals why there’s still real value to be had from the presentation tool.

Video:

Tom Ewing

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Dee Clayton

I agree with Tom on some points, the issue comes when researchers mistake PP for the presentation instead of the MESSAGE. Clients want to hear the message in a clear manner and bombarding them with 100 slides is not the way to do it. Using slides to optimise your "performance" though, will work wonders. Another mistake I see when I'm training is presenters using PP as their notes! If you need notes make them on index cards not scribbles around the edge of slide printouts.

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Steven Carter

The clue to PowerPoint is the blank slide every presentation starts with. Tom's right, Powerpoint is ALL about what you do with it. If you audience complains, it's your own fault, not PowerPoint's! I try to create presentations that are a mix of personal presentation and slides - quite often what I want to say, particularly in opening comments or conclusions, sticks better without slides, when the audience has to watch me.

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stephen cribbett

One of the problems that we face, as a supplier of online research tools to agencies and clients, is that our clients often want to extract the multimedia data that has been gathered online and feed it directly into a PowerPoint presentation. This is very difficult to achieve, and often removes much of the context and lessens the impact of what has been gathered.

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