Any mildly educated pre-teen can create a PowerPoint presentation. Adding a text box, a few images, or a graphic here and there can be done by almost anyone with a computer. The question isn’t “can you create a presentation?” The question you should be asking yourself is, “is my presentation effective at convincing my audience of my conclusion?” That is what corporate presentations are; mediums to convince an audience to act on some particular thing.
When it comes to your business, you always want the best of everything. Why should presentations be any different? You may know how to drive a car, but that doesn’t qualify you to be in NASCAR, does it? There are some things that are best left in the hands of professionals, and when it comes to high-end corporate presentations, PowerPoint design is absolutely one of them.
Currently in the media spotlight for its controversial surveillance practices, the NSA learned this lesson the hard way, when after an underwhelming display of PowerPoint prowess during a leaked presentation, several professional PowerPoint presentation designers mockingly revamped the presentation to highlight its shortcomings.
Parisian presentation designer Emiland de Cubber did the most famous overhaul of the NSA’s lackluster presentation, adding tasteful graphic design and a simplistic, easy-to-digest format. Soon after, other presentation designers, and even Slate Magazine, took a crack at overhauling the organization’s presentation.
The lesson here isn’t that the NSA is incompetent or tech-savvy, because with the wide variety of communications monitored by the national organization, they most certainly are familiar with intensive technical work. What should be taken from this is that there’s no replacement for professional expertise, and when it comes to something as impressionable as a high-end presentation, you don’t want to fail to make an impression because of an amateur PowerPoint presentation.
Professional presentation design not only adds visually inviting graphic design that makes a presentation not only informative, but engrossing, and a professionally designed presentation will help condense and clarify your message, which is key to keeping an audience attentive. When it comes to high-caliber, corporate presentations that need to impress, a PowerPoint expert could make all the difference.
We can’t blame the NSA for producing a bland and confusing presentation, since it’s the best they could have been expected to do, which is why they should have trusted the experts.
