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Archive for April, 2009

This is what's happening.

April 15th, 2009 | Jeff Brenman

Sprint’s new ad campaign, What’s Happening, is making some serious waves. The ads are brilliant examples of effective marketing and great presentation design.

Sprint spent a lot of money building a new 4G network and had to figure out how to show it off. They could have taken the traditional approach and created a campaign that explains the network’s new features (e.g. “you can transfer so many megabytes per second on our new network!”), but in reality people don’t care much about features — they care about benefits.

My favorite example of selling benefits instead of features was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod in 2001. He didn’t describe the iPod as a “4GB music player”; it was “a thousand songs in your pocket”. Big difference.

Sprint clearly understands the power of selling benefits because instead of focusing on what their network can do, their campaign demonstrates what people can do on their network, and on an incredible scale.

The ads are slick examples of how proper pacing, dynamic visuals, and the right amount of humor can make a fact and data driven presentation extremely compelling to watch. You’ll definitely find inspiration in these videos for new, creative ways to present your data in future presentations.

Check out one of the ads below.

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Breaking up is great to do.

April 8th, 2009 | Jeff Brenman

Overloading a slide with too much information is an all too common presentation design faux pas.

Bullet point after bullet point — one for each idea you want to express — clutters the slide and forces your audience to spend more time reading than listening.

People often try to reduce the clutter with animations, building one bullet point on the screen at a time, but by the last build it’s still a bloated mess.

Instead, break up your content and put each point on its own slide. It’ll give your messages some room to breathe, making it less likely for you to overload your audience with too much information. Your story will be easier to follow.

Splitting up your content helps you the designer see which points can be enhanced with an evocative visual. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand bullets — so why not use one?

Great slides help you tell your story. Bad slides distract your audience, or worse, force them to work harder to understand you. Avoid bloated slides. Break them up.

Split Up Your Slides.png
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