SlideShare: Presentation Trends for Ad Agency New Business

February 8, 2012

The Biggest and Best Uses of SlideShare for Ad Agency New Business.

Here’s a brief synopsis if you unfamiliar with SlideShare. Launched in October of 2006, it is a slide hosting service, often called the YouTube of presentations. SlideShare claims to be the world’s largest professional content sharing community.

Ranked as one of the top 150 sites on the Web, SlideShare has more than 60 million visitors and 3 billion slide views a month. The traffic comes from organic search, social networks and other SlideShare content.

SlideShare is an invaluable promotional tool for your agency and  provides many creative ways that businesses and agencies can use it in their new business strategy. Here are just a few:

  • You can easily embed presentations in other social media sites such as your agency’s Facebook Fan Page or  you can add a SlideShare presentations to your agency’s website or blog. This is a great way to increase your site’s traffic.
  • Social share buttons allows your SlideShare presentations to become viral.
  •  A track-back feature allows you to monitor how many people have viewed each presentation.
  • You can engage viewers through their comments they add once a presentation has been published. Comments allow you to also revise and improve the presentation.
  • You can also leverage SlideShare to gain rank in search engines.
  • Use SlideShare to let people know more about your agency. Create a presentation that tells your agency’s story.
  • Visualize some of your best articles and posts using SlideShare.

SlideShare also collects a wealth of data that is helpful in knowing about presentation trends and best practices. SlideShare’s The Optimal Presentation is derived from data on thousands of presentations hosted on its site. It includes these 3 key insights:

  • Keep presentations short and sweet. The average number of slides per presentation is 19.
  • Be visual. The average number of pictures per presentation is 19.
  • Get to the point. The average number of words per slide is 24.

Annually SlideShare analyzes metrics from the previous year and shares a summary in a presentation they call Zeitgeist 2011. This report also  highlights the Top 5 Most Favorited Presentations along with the 5 Most Popular Business Presentations. This is helpful information to stay up to speed on what’s happening in the world of presentations.

Here’s what they discovered…

Additional articles of interest:

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Posted by Michael Gass

Ad Agencies Should KISS for New Business

August 18, 2011

Photo Credit Walt Stoneburner

The K.I.S.S. principle, “keep it simple stupid” is a great maxim to remember when developing a new business program for small to mid-size ad agencies, digital shops and PR firms.

This principle has been a key to success in my years working with new business within an agency environment.

When it comes to new business, consistency trumps perfection. Ad Agencies, the cobbler’s children who have no shoes, are very inconsistent, primarily because they tend to over-think and over-create anything associated with the agency’s brand.

Ad agencies often make things harder than normal. Certainly harder than performing some of the same tasks for clients. They are their own worse client.

That’s why most are so inconsistent with their new business efforts. It’s makes for an unnecessarily painful experience with new business tasks such as updating or redesigning the website; creating a newsletter or eNewsletter; creating direct mail or collateral pieces and even creating and implementing platforms for social media. One agency took over 3 months just to design their blog header.

The person charged with new business for the agency should be on point to simplify anything that relates to new business. Be proactive in keeping all of the processes as simple as possible.

RFPs and agency pitches can also be needlessly taxing upon the time, energy and talent of the agency making new business harder.

For instance, with regards to RFPs. Don’t reinvent the wheel each time a response is created. Covers for RFPs could be designed by well in advance, when there is a lull period and designed for particular industries.

One agency that I previously worked for, we created RFP covers that were specific to Academic Medical Centers. The creative team came up with a great design that was used for every medical center RFP we participated in.

Our creative department was able to put lots of thought into the design because it was not a busy time for the agency. The covers could easily be resized and printed to each RFP, each usually had some variations in their specification, such as size. These covers added a lot to our RFP response and looked custom for each particular academic hospital.

Something as simple as a “leave-behind” collateral piece, following an initial prospective client presentation, can be created and placed on the shelf ready for the next presentation, months in advance.

I know of one agency that had over 50 initial prospective client presentations within 1 year (these weren’t formal pitches) and created  a single leave behind piece that worked for each opportunity.

If your new business responsibilities require you to serve as the agency’s pitch team leader create a simple, repeatable pitch process to save time and energy. Evaluate and sharpen your process after every pitch and find ways to simplify it.

Here are just a few of the benefit for using K.I.S.S. for new business:

  • Much easier to stay consistent and consistency is one of the main keys to success for new business
  • Solve problems faster and meetings can be kept to a minimum
  • Expend less energy from your staff, especially the creative department
  • A huge benefit for your personal time management allowing you to keep your focus on the most important tasks at hand
  • Staff participation in RFPs, pitch opportunities, agency newsletters, collateral, etc will be a much more positive experience that will provide you with their best work and effort
  • You’ll garner lots of appreciation from your time-strapped staff as you constantly look for and implement ways to save time for new business tasks

If you have any examples or ideas for invoking the K.I.S.S. principal for agency new business, please share them in the comment section below.

Additional articles that may be of interest:

2 Comments | Agency Leadership, Best Practices, New Business Talents, New Business Tips, Pitches | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

The Reader’s Digest Version of the Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

July 25, 2011

Steve Jobs is a master presenter and he provides some important lessons that are helpful to any ad agency pitch opportunity.

Carmine Gallo’s book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is a must read. There’s much to learn from Jobs presentation tactics and style since delivering. Applying his simple formula can greatly improve any agency’s pitch and help them to stand out from the rest.

“You’re time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
– Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is not a natural presenter, he has to work at it. Carmine shares that, “for two full days before a presentation, Jobs will practice the entire presentation, asking for feedback from product managers in the room. For 48 hours, all of his energy is directed at making the presentation the perfect embodiment of Apple’s messages.” 

Nancy Duarte recommends that a presenter spend 90 hours creating an hour-long presentation with 30 slides. But only one-third of that time is spent building slides. Another third is rehearsing, but the first third is spent collecting ideas, organizing ideas, and sketching the story.

  • Thinking
  • Sketching
  • Building
  • Slides
  • Scripting
  • Rehearsing
  • 90 hours | 30 slides

Here’s the Reader’s Digest version from a live presentation delivered by Carmine and recreated through by Peter Walker in this Slideshare format.

4 Comments | Best Practices, Fuel for Thought, Pitches, Speaking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

The 10-20-30 Rule for Keynote Presentations for Ad Agency New Business

June 17, 2011

Clarity, brevity and connectivity are key for winning presentations.

During my advertising career I’ve been part of and a witness to hundreds of agency presentations using PowerPoint or Keynote. I’ve seen many new business opportunities wasted because agencies couldn’t get their point across, tried to include too much within their allotted time or had absolutely no chemistry with their audience.

Guy Kawasaki, well-known blogger, author, managing director of a venture capital firm and an Apple Fellow, promotes a technique  that can help small to midsize agencies with their Keynote presentations, the 10-20-30 Rule:

  • No more than 10 slides
  • No more than 20 minutes
  • No font smaller than 30 points

10 Slides

Guy’s premise, “a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting … If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.”

Your audience doesn’t need all of the details so don’t give them the minutia. Decide in advance what are the two or three main thoughts you want your audience to takeaway from your presentation.

20 Minutes

Guys’ thinking, there are always going to be delays, interruptions to your speaking time … “In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.” 

Recently visiting Washington, DC, I toured the Lincoln Memorial. Etched in its South wall, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a mere 269 words in length. Wisdom is found in simplicity.

Brevity can also be a main point of differentiation. Just be more concise than your competitors and your presentation will stand out.

“The brain can absorb only what the rear end can endure.” ~Mark Twain. This is even truer in our Twitter driven world so keep brevity in mind. Work hard at being brief and look for ways to make omissions not additions.

30 Font

Guy states, “the reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing.”

Know your material: Steve Jobs spends hours rehearsing every facet of his presentations. Every every presentation staged like a theatrical experience. He makes a presentation look effortless but that polish comes after hours of arduous practice.

Be convincing: You should be like an actor on stage and own the room.  Having prepared thoroughly you should be confident, at ease and able to speak with conviction.

Guy Kawasaki shares his mini set of presentation rules in this brief video:

Additional articles that may be of interest:

5 Comments | Pitches, Speaking | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

Use Social Media to Build Relationships Before the Pitch for Ad Agency New Business

May 20, 2011

Social media allows you to achieve a high level of familiarity and validation before your agency’s next new business pitch.

Prospective clients are looking for chemistry and likability in their ad agency partners as part of the pitch process. Chemistry doesn’t have to be a crap shoot.

One of the great things about the internet is that you can develop relationships with people without ever meeting them. Use this to your agency’s advantage to build relationships prior to your new business pitch.

You can get on a prospective client’s radar by commenting thoughtfully on their posts, retweeting and replying to them on Twitter, and submitting helpful tips to them for articles that have nothing to do with your agency.

Don’t promote, engage by being client centric in your conversations. Focus your attention on them, not your agency. well in advance of the pitch.

Here are some 10 quick tips to implement prior to your agency’s next pitch opportunity:

  1. Ask for a list of the pitch attendees from the client’s side, along with their titles.
  2. Do some intel ahead of the pitch on the various pitch participants and make a list of each person’s social media accounts in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, 4 Square, etc. and engage them.
  3. LinkedIn: look for connections from the client side with your agency’s pitch team such as previous employment, college, friends that are in their network. Your searching for the kind of information that will help build chemistry.
  4. Twitter: follow and engage each person who has an account. Let them know you look forward to meeting them. Tweet the kind of content that would be of interest to the prospective client.
  5. Monitor the Twitter hashtags within their community.
  6. Facebook: You could Friend select members from the client side’s personal accounts and ‘Like’ their companies Facebook page.
  7. Blog: If the company or individual members of their pitch review team has a blog, subscribe to its RSS feed for regular updates to keep up with what is being shared.
  8. Read and research before you pitch. Conduct a search for any writing, press releases or other intelligence their team members may have shared through online publications.
  9. Be sure to share intelligence with other members of your pitch team and help them form relationships with the client’s agency review team prior to the pitch.
  10. Focus on benefits. Your audience only care about how your service will improve their lives. Make the connection for your prospective clients. Don’t leave it to your audience to figure it out for themselves.

Additional articles that may be of interest:

7 Comments | Pitches, Social Media | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

4 Presentation Tips from Lee Iacocca for Ad Agency New Business

December 20, 2010

The former Chrysler CEO’s speech writing team provides some useful information for how ad agency executives can inspire their staffs, clients and prospective clients by the spoken word.

“Lee” Iacocca is an American businessman and pitchman, known for his revival of the Chrysler Corporation in the 1980s. He served as President and CEO from 1978 and additionally as chairman from 1979, until his retirement at the end of 1992. He is one of the most famous business people in the world

Iacocca’s business success—saving Chrysler and reinvigorating the American automobile industry in the 1980s—has also become a staple of B-school “case studies.” And most analysts agree a key ingredient—what Iacocca himself called “my most important management tool” —was the spoken word. “I used that tool every day,” Iacocca wrote.

Speechwriter, Jeff Porro, wrote a recent article regarding how Iacocca’s used speaking ability to bring success to Chrysler. He interviewed two members of Iococca’s speech writing team. The following  4 presentation tips are just a small portion of the rich takeaway’s you glean from reading Jeff’s entire article:

 

 

  1. Motive: “In every speech I give, the object is to motivate. You can deliver information in a letter or tack it on a bulletin board.” He wanted to know what we wanted to accomplish with each particular audience: the point he wanted to make, the behavior he wanted to influence, the actions he wanted them to take.
  2. Rehearse: Iacocca understood how overwhelmingly important it was to persuade and put a huge amount of effort into each speech. He put in the hours to rehearse and revise each speech, his delivery was so smooth, natural and relaxed, it could sound ad-libbed.
  3. Tell a Story: A good speech is a story.” Iacocca knew that everything having to do with communication was a story. “Iacocca was a great at telling stories with a beginning, a strong middle, and an end.”
  4. Keep it Simple: He stayed far away from corporate-speak. Says Tsigdinos: “Simple but effective. That’s what we strove for. No convoluted language. He was great at making direct statements that people could remember.”

 

Speechwriter Jeff Porro (www.porrollc.com) helps executives prepare effective speeches and presentations. Click on the following link to read the full version of Jeff’s article, “For today’s CEOs, lessons from master speaker Lee Iacocca”

Additional articles that may be of interest:

4 Comments | Agency Leadership, Best Practices, Fuel for Thought, Pitches, Speaking | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

The Only Rule That Really Matters When Presenting for Ad Agency New Business

September 28, 2010

Every agency presentation must be focused on capturing your audience’s attention and keeping it. It is the presentation rule that matters most.

A lot of agency presentations are nothing but recycled insights, predictable services, with the same agency speak, nothing note worthy or memorable for an audience that must be bored out of their minds. I wonder how much new business opportunities were squandered because of boring ad agency presentations.

If you want to reach your audience, you must have something significant to say that you are passionate about, genuine passion will attract attention and attention will lead to action.

What can you do to keep the audience’s attention through your entire presentation? Chris Atherton, an applied cognitive psychologist, a self-described dork of attentionomics, suggests these 7 specific rules of attention:

  1. People can really only retain about four bits of new, unrelated information — and sometimes not even that many.
  2. It’s hard to process spoken and written words at the same time. Integrating your spoken words with pictorial slides makes it easier for the brain to process these two streams of information efficiently.
  3. A story will keep people’s attention, because they will want to know what happens next.
  4. People really like looking at screens. If you’ve ever been in a pub with the TV on and the sound off, you’ll know that screens are an attention-magnet.
  5. Sustaining audience attention requires frequent changes. Unexpectedness is a great tool for acquiring and maintaining people’s attention as well as changes in your tone of voice, speaking volume, or where you are standing to draw the audience’s attention to a particular point.
  6. Your audience will tell you when their attention is wandering. It’s a kindness and a courtesy to stay with your audience, and a presenter on auto-pilot is not a pretty sight.
  7. Chris’s last rule, short is good.

Here are some additional rules of attention that I would add to Chris’s list:

  • Use a remote. I take one with me to every presentation. It is a great tool to keep me from losing eye contact.
  • Don’t use the podium. I tend to have less energy and am less engaging when I use a podium. I like to be able to move and my presentations tend to be much more animated without one.
  • Less text on the screen is more. People can read faster than you can speak. I find that using images and telling stories allows me to keep my audience’s attention better. I want to be so engaged that they wont break contact to write notes.
  • The fewer the slides the better. Some of my best presentations were less than 10 Keynote slides.
  • Get into a flow. I’m a student of the cadence, inflection and the use of rhyme and repetition that Black ministers have. Their delivery styleexcites their congregants with memorable effect.
  • Passion is more important than perfection. I strive to make my presentations inspirational, not flawless. Passion garners attention and will enthuse your confidence.
  • Know your environment. I almost always ask permission to view where my meeting will be held in advance. For agency presentations I would even make an onsite visit in advance and snap photos of the facility to discuss with our team in advance of our pitch.

Just this past week, reviewing a banquet hall an hour before presenting, I asked permission to make my presentation from a different spot.  The speakers podium, set-up to the left of the stage, wasn’t as engaging as a smaller stage closer to the audience and that was more in the center of the banquet room.

Read Chris Atherton’s article, When giving presentations, the only rule that matters is the rule of attention.

I want to always improve upon my speaking skills. Having spoken in workshops, conferences and seminars in over 40 different cities this year, I’ve also found a wealth of presentation tips from Olivia Mitchell’s website, Speaking About Presenting.

Here are some additional presentation resources that you might find helpful:

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5 Comments | Best Practices, Pitches, Speaking | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

Resources for Successfully Pitching for Ad Agency New Business

September 17, 2010

If you want to win pitches for new business I would encourage you to be a constant student of public speaking.

Recently I wrote an article that received a lot of attention, “Steve Jobs: 10 Presentation Tactics for Ad Agency New Business.”

Every new business pitch should do three things: inform, educate and entertain.

This week my resource is a bit dated but can be just as helpful. I’d like to go back in time to the 1930′s, “Monroe’s motivated sequence,” is a technique for organizing persuasive speeches that is still in use today. It was developed by Alan H. Monroe at Purdue University.

Monroe’s helpful technique for organizing speeches consists of the following five steps:

  1. Attention. Get the attention of your audience that they have a PROBLEM using a detailed story, shocking example, dramatic statistic, quotations, etc.
  2. Need. Concisely EXPLAIN the problem, that it is significant, won’t go away by itself and convince your audience that there needs is a need for action. Use examples, statistics, research, etc.
  3. Satisfy. You need to let them know that you have the SOLUTION.  Provide specific solutions that can be implemented to solve the problem.
  4. Visualization. Tell the audience what will happen your solution is IMPLEMENTED or what happens if it does not take place. Be visual and detailed.
  5. Action. Tell the audience what action they can take personally to solve the problem.

Additional presentation resources that you may find helpful:

 

5 Comments | Agency Leadership, Best Practices, Pitches | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

Steve Jobs: 10 Presentation Tactics for Ad Agency New Business

August 13, 2010

Steve Jobs has something to teach small to midsize ad agencies about pitching for new business.

Every new business pitch should do three things: inform, educate and entertain.

BusinessWeek.com columnist Carmine Gallo reveals the techniques that have turned Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, into one of the world’s corporate presenters. There are some helpful nuggets that will add punch to your next agency pitch.

Here is the ‘Readers Digest’ version of his 10 Ways to Sell Your Ideas the Steve Jobs Way:

  1. Plan your presentation with pen and paper. Begin by storyboarding your presentation. Steve Jobs spent his preparation time brainstorming, sketching and white-boarding before he creating his presentation. All of the elements of the story that he wants to tell are thought through, elements are planned and collected before any slides are created.
  2. Create a single sentence description for every service/idea. Concise enough to fit in a 140-character Twitter post. An example, for the introduction of the MacBook Air in January, 2008, Jobs said that is it simply, “The world’s thinnest notebook”.
  3. Create a villain that allows the audience to rally around the hero—you and your product/service.  A ‘villain’ doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct competitor. It can be a problem in need of a solution.
  4. Focus on benefits. This is important for ad agencies to remember. Your audience only cares about how your service will benefit them so lead with benefits rather than agency credentials and capabilities.
  5. Stick to the rule of three for presentations. Almost every Jobs presentation was divided into three parts. You might have twenty points to make, but your audience is only capable of retaining three or four points in short-term memory. Give them too many points and they’ll forget everything you’ve said.
  6. Sell dreams, not your services. Steve Jobs didn’t sell computers. He was passionate about helping to create a better world. That was the promise that he sold. For example, when Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he said, “In our own small way we’re going to make the world a better place.” Where most people see the iPod as a music player, Jobs saw it as a tool to enrich people’s lives.
  7. Create visual slides. There were no bullet points in a Steve Jobs’ presentation. Instead he relied on photographs and images. When Steve Jobs unveiled the Macbook Air, Apple’s ultra-thin notebook computer, he showed a slide of the computer fitting inside a manila inter-office envelope. Keep your agency presentation’s that simple.
  8. Make numbers meaningful. Jobs always put large numbers into a context that was relevant to his audience. The bigger the number, the more important it is to find analogies or comparisons that make the data relevant to your audience.
  9. Use plain English. Jobs’s language was remarkably simple. He rarely, if ever, used the jargon that clouds most presentations—terms like ‘best of breed’ or ‘synergy’. His language was simple, clear and direct. So don’t use agency speak when presenting, “integration, proprietary process, etc.”
  10. Practice, practice, practice. Steve Jobs spent hours rehearsing every facet of his presentation. Every slide was written like a piece of poetry, every presentation staged like a theatrical experience. Steve Jobs made a presentation look effortless but that polish came after hours and hours of arduous practice. Agencies often are forced to rely on spontaneity to provide creative energy for a pitch because they have spent all of their time on putting together the presentation and leave little or no time for rehearsal. Most unrehearsed pitches end up falling flat.

Click on the link for a downloadable copy of Carmine Gallo’s, “How to Sell Your Ideas the Steve Jobs Way”

This article was based on Carmine Gallo’s book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Applying this simple formula can greatly improve any agency’s pitch and help them to stand out from the rest. It is a must read for ad agencies, PR firms and digital shops.

Additional articles that may be of interest:

31 Comments | Agency Leadership, Pitches, Speaking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

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