Presenting Creative Ideas

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Unit Purpose and Aims

The purpose of this unit is to;

The aim of this unit is to get the learners’  presentation skills to a workplace standard for the advertising industry through exploration of different techniques and presenting creative ideas.

Learning Outcomes

Learners will;

1. Be able to analyse examples of good practice in presentation within the ad industry.

Learners can;

1.1 Find appropriate sources of example presentations from a range of sources.

1.2 Explain what is good and bad about these examples.

1.3 Research different presentation techniques and approaches to presenting creative ideas; from PowerPoint to theatre.

2. Understand how to create and present presentation visuals from a given creative brief or idea.

2.1 Create a suitable presentation narrative

2.2 Create suitable visuals or other aids for a presentation

2.3 Practice and deliver a presentation of a creative idea generated by the learner to a panel of their peers.

Pitching your ideas

Learning Tools, Resources & Links

Things that will help the learner develop understanding of this unit;

Mentors  please add your ideas, examples, case studies, links to articles, videos, etc. here.

It’s not me, it’s you…

Try pitching your ideas without talking about design or using any design jargon.

The environment should be designerly; everything down to the choice of tea should be thought about; the presentation materials should leave no-one in any doubt that you know what you’re doing; you should be proud to present every idea. But the client has come to you to sell messages, brand a company, grab readers, point people at issues, make products usable… that’s where the focus should be in your presentation.

It seems counterintuitive but it shows that you care about the job the design is there to do and in starting where professionals do – with the problem – you immediately position yourself as authoritative and  head off subjective discussions about pink…

Pitching your ideas

[1]http://prezi.com/m_clzcknrj8-/view/[2]

You are the expert on your project

Make yourself confident by doing your homework, continually checking your ideas back against the brief and being absolutely sure that you have an idea you think will work. Then be shamelessly-manipulative: if you’re presenting more than one idea, you know which one you want the client to go with  and the client wants you to know. Be prepared for awkward questions and subjective judgments. And have answers ready that have nothing to do with you and everything to do with the effectiveness of the idea.


Scary, isn’t it?

Unless you’re a stage school trained actor, prolific public speaker, ex-Britain’s Got Talent contestant or just plain mega-confident, giving your first presentation can be absolutely terrifying. The good news is that the more you do it, the more relaxed you get. EVERYONE was shitting themselves the first time they got up in front of someone senior to them and showed them their baby for the first time. And once you’ve presented your creative work to your group head, and your creative director, and your planners and your account management, and Uncle Tom Cobbley, you’ll still feel that twinge because you’ll want the client to like it too. And that’s the most scary meeting of all.

Thing is, it’s a bit like being the best man at a wedding giving a speech. Everyone in that room is on your side and is there to make you look as good as possible. The agency want the work to sail through because that’s the best way to keep the account profitable and the work sharp. The client wants to buy the work because it’s only a small part of what they do and they’d rather buy ideas than reject them. So you can feel loved and wanted by everyone. And as long as you’ve done your homework and can answer the questions pertinent to the creative idea that they come up with, you should be fine.

The other thing to remember is that although looking out from inside you, you think you’re coming across as hesitant, nervous, and plain scared, from the outside, you probably look a LOT more confident, able and authoritative than you feel. Try videoing yourself giving a presentation and you’ll see the difference. It will give you more confidence, I promise!

Of course there’s all the usual advice about keeping it short, sweet and to the point, but how you feel, how enthusiastic you are and how positively you come across will do as much to sell the work as the work itself. People need to buy YOU before they buy your work.

I wish there was a quick fix to acquiring the confidence to give great presentations, but it’s just practice and experience. Even if you screw up the first ones you do, don’t worry – they’ll probably be internal anyway, and we’ve all been there and done that, so it won’t count against you (worth reminding your boss about it being early days and how they fest about presenting too, though…).

Lastly, on a personal note, if you aren’t sure about it, I’d stay away from PowerPoint. It’s not creative and it’s not clever. Never has been and never will be. But that’s just my opinion.

An ideal book which can be reffered to is ‘Life’s a Pitch’ by Stephen Bayley & Roger Mavity

Part inspirational manual for business, part guidebook to a successful and happy social life, Life’s a Pitch is written as the result of an accumulated half century of (mostly successful) pitching by the authors. Ground-breaking and genre-busting, it will transform the way you think about the art of persuasion for ever.

Make use of visuals, but only if they support your presentation’s message.

Look at how the talk is visualised and enhances the message’s power.

Run through your presentation in Pecha Kucha style

If your message is strong you shouldn’t need too many visuals. It also prevents you from reading from a paper, since each picture has a clear message to tell which only lasts between 20-30 seconds.

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Infographics

Data can be really hard to understand, and even more difficult to memorise. If data is a main aspect in your presentation about how well your creative idea works infographics are a great way to keep the audience interested. Informationisbeautiful is a great website to get inspired in how you could symbolise your next 1200% decrease of toxic waste in your neigbourhood. Here is another example of creative use of infographics. The Heath brothers talk in their book Made to Stick much about the impact of images and visualisation of facts or data. Malcom Gladwell says in Tipping Point that research found out that visualisation immensely increases memorability of facts and figures.

Don’t lose your audience in number games, try to visualise these and make them stick in their minds.

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What I Learned About Presenting from Doing Stand-Up.

Jan 4th, 2011 by heywhipple

Back in 1981 and ‘82, I had a short career in doing stand-up. My days on stage started off pretty well but ended in disaster, in a blizzard that happened on Christmas Day.

Doing stand-up was actually one of the best things I ever did for my advertising career. In fact, I understand Miami Ad School now makes stand-up part of the training; a very cool idea, but we’ll discuss the ad stuff in the next posting. For today, let’s just get to the disaster. Or as it came to be known, “The Incident At Dudley Riggs.”

I was a junior copywriter at the time, recently hired by Tom McElligott and Ron Anderson at Bozell & Jacobs’ Minneapolis office. Stand-up exploded in the ‘80s and every exposed brick wall in America suddenly had a comic in front of it.

I was amazed by the insanity of people like Sam Kenison, Andy Kaufman, and Steven Wright. And so fools (like me) rushed in. Over 6 months on various stages around Minneapolis, I honed my act, and while I was never a headliner, my 5 minutes of open mike grew to about 20 as an opener.

Of my 20 minutes of material, most of it of was prop-based and more like the horrible Carrot Top than the cerebral comics I admired. But what it lacked in highbrow it made up for in shock – particularly the last part of my act where I showed audiences how to make a rat sandwich using a real rat.*

With some trepidation, I include here the video of my third time on stage and as you watch, please be kind. Remember I was young, stupid, clueless and brave.

Now to the disaster.

Christmas Day, 1982. There’s a blizzard in Minneapolis and nobody’s going anywhere. I get a call from the guy at the city’s premiere club, Dudley Riggs. He says the headliner blew them off and can I fill in?

I said sure, I’ll headline. But here’s where I screwed up.

My vast 6 months of experience on stage had in fact grown my confidence considerably. But unchecked, confidence can become arrogance. I began to think I was naturally funny and that pretty much anything I said or did would make people laugh. So I threw out all my tested material (such as the Rat Sandwich) and on my knee in the cab, wrote a bunch of “shocking” Jesus and Christmas bits and walked into Dudley Riggs. (“Eww look at ‘im, he’s so edgy.”)

The fact that all 400 seats were filled on Christmas day, that wasn’t what was weird. It was that they were all FARMERS. Pretty much every single person in the audience seemed to be wearing Osh Gosh overalls, was over 60, and I may have even seen a few Amish hats. To this day, no one can explain why 400 farmers came out through a Minnesota blizzard to see comedy …  on Christmas-fucking-Day. But there they were.

Here is where we cut to me on stage. Here is where we cringe as we listen to every single one of my “shocking” Jesus jokes and anti-religious zingers die a death so horrible I should’ve made the cover of Flop Sweat magazine.

From my last time on stage, the only laughter I remember was from the two other comics behind the curtain, laughing their asses off as I augered in.

In our next posting, we’ll try to learn from my mistakes and talk about some presentation do’s and don’ts.

Today’s lesson: KNOW your material. And KNOW your audience.

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Techniques how to enhance your presentations

The presentation magazine lists a lot of content about how you could enhance or downgrade your presentation. They have condensed all of the presentation techniques down to the most effective. Here are the Top 10 effective presentation techniques.

These are all great features, however, the main thing is to make sure that you feel confident and come across self assured about your idea. If you come across as if you have doubts, you are more likely to transfer your feeling of doubt to the audience, who will then think and feel similar to you.