Stop Boring Your Audience!
21 Feb 2012
Our very own Dale Smith talks about how we help companies think bigger than bullets.
Article Extract: In this digital era--where powerful, easy-to-use technology aids are more accessible than ever--the average company still fails to wow at conferences. Many experienced speakers persist in sending audiences to sleep with dreary slide show presentations, featuring lists of bullet points and graphs, or dull video loops in their exhibit booths.
But some companies and organizations are breaking away from slide show hell, using new digital presentation tools to make their messages count.
Take UC4, a Bellevue, Wash.-based company that makes IT automation software. UC4 was determined to make its presentations stand out at the Gartner ITXpo, in Barcelona, last November. Despite already having over 2,000 customers worldwide, UC4 knew that standard presentation techniques and tools likely would not make its highly-technical products stand out at the conference.
So, UC4 hired UK-based marketing and communications group Article 10 to dismantle UC4's 50-slide master presentation, which was text-heavy. Article 10 restructured the content and created an Interactive Tablet Toolkit that allowed UC4's sales teams to select only content pertinent to a given audience.
The Toolkit also provides tracking functionality that allowed UC4's marketing and sales team to see which delegates had been interested in what, and create customized follow-up material. The new presentation tool increased UC4's sales leads by 22 percent.
"Interactivity is a big thing," says Dale Smith, Article 10's co-founder. "Presentations can be treated much more like Web content now, where slides can be mixed and matched and selected as appropriate to the situation."
