PowerPointless - Why you should ditch the deck and give live illustration a whirl!
Research suggests that 99% of people have an existential meltdown when the speaker in a meeting uses the phrase ‘I’ll just share my slides.”
** This is a total fabrication. SORRY. Do not trust our fake research. But also DO, because it’s believable, right?! **
We all know the drill by now. The second someone whips out a PowerPoint, we’re all about to stare at the screen while someone more or less just reads stuff out to us. And if that’s ALL that is happening at our event, we’re not gonna get much engagement from it, are we?
People do start with good intentions! The Head of Such-and-Such promises to keep it simple - while inserting ten million fancy graphs with figures nobody knows the meaning of. The Chief Executive Thingamabob swears they’ll use plain language and keep the word count down - then sneaks in 50 bullet points of Hieroglyphics on ONE PAGE. Then there’s CLIP ART and WEIRD DESIGN CHOICES and that NOT QUITE CORRECT SHADE OF BLUE SOMEONE USED ON SLIDE 3 OH GOD HELP.
Y’see, even with super slinky brand guidelines, you can’t always trust that your stuff is gonna look appealing when done in-house. (We’ve got an internal comms person here and she’s SEEN THINGS. Trust us, she KNOWS.)
Don’t worry, we’ll stop roasting PowerPoint in a minute… we’re not here to bash it entirely!
We believe it DOES have its uses and serve a purpose in events. But so do we! So let’s (slightly more professionally) break down why PowerPoint does and does not work, and how live illustration could jump in as a smarter solution for real event success!
Sliiiiide to the left…
Reasons we’re swiping left (ahem, sliiiiding to the left) with the traditional deck are as follows:
Information Overload – Attendees are often bombarded with too much text, too many bullet points, overwhelming layout choices and data-heavy slides which don’t always make sense to everyone in the audience.
Passive Learning – PowerPoint promotes one-way communication, where audiences absorb information without active engagement. If all you’re using your PowerPoint for is to be a bit of a script for what you’re trying to say and nothing else, then why are you hosting an event in the first place?
It’s just boring - Let’s face it, it’s generic! We’ve all seen slides before, we know what they’re there to do, and if they’re the star of the show, then it’s not gonna be very spangly. You can keep ‘em, sure. But you need to find a new star of the show, folks!
Sliiiiide to the right…
Reasons we’re swiping right (sliiiide to the right) with the traditional deck are as follows:
Remote events – Here we are banging the ‘PowerPoint is dumb’ drum when we’re a REMOTE business and we know fine well that you bloomin’ need slides or SOMETHING on the screen if you’re hosting an event entirely via the power of the internet.
Your voice alone isn’t enough to engage your audience’s brains, so snappy visuals are your best friend, and this is where you can get smart with HOW you’re using visuals.
Eg: Use ‘em to keep topics fresh in people’s minds, quickly summarise top-line information, display short, impactful text or quotes that support a theme or help to wrap up a section.
Like we said earlier, your slides are not the star of the show - not anymore.
Making sure that the message of your event resonates with your audience is the *real* star of the show, and visuals via live illustration is what we believe will get you there more than slides ever will!
Let’s be serious, this is a niiiice lookin’ screen to stare at, isn’t it? Live illustration gets your brain juices flowing like nothing else!
Reframing what’s in the frame - When to let live illustration step in where PowerPoint left off
So. Some of this might be hard to hear, but if you dare to listen, you could be walking away from this blog with a winning formula for your next event. Seriously.
You and PowerPoint may have always been a match made in heaven, and even if your audience is used to it and you know that it *works* because you’ve always done it, one thing you just can’t get away from is that gluing yourself to PowerPoint is always going to come across like it always has.
If you’re looking to ramp up engagement, can you really guarantee that a rinse and repeat of the last event is going to do the trick? Especially if that rinse and repeat is just you running through some slides, mailing them out afterwards, then wondering why the corporate grapevine is clogged with people saying they STILL don’t know what’s going on?
“Oi! Illustrated Live! How is live illustration different from slides though?! Surely it’s similar if it’s just a case of having visuals on the screen representing the same info we’d talk about in the slides?”
Haaaa, you’d think so. But nope! Here’s why it’s different.
Ready…
We’re not you!
Why is that good? Well BECAUSE:
Separating you from the content allows you to have a more authentic connection with your audience and speak to them on a more direct level, rather than relying on prewritten slides to do all the work with minimal results.
Off the back of this, it also allows for unscripted, undetermined moments to be captured where they previously might not have been able to if it was just you and your Microsoft 365 Office suite against the world.
We make you SHINE. The job of a live illustrator is to reflect well on you and make sure your message lands in exactly the right way for your audience, no matter what!
Remember how we said before that PowerPoint alone could lead to passive learning?
Well, live illustration combats that! You still get to have a visual aid (and it can still work alongside a slide deck), but now it tells a story in real time. It reacts to what is happening in the present moment, in a language relevant to everyone, and it is inclusive of interactions that happen at the event between you and your audience, making the content more conversational and less ‘broadcast’ heavy.
Have we convinced you yet?
Picture it this way…
A live event illustrator rocking up to your event will basically give you exactly what your dream outcome for your dream audience member would be.
Imagine it! An audience member at your event leaves the day feeling:
Informed about every single topic - EVEN the ones they knew diddly-squat about when they walked in.
Excited about the event they just attended and keen to recap it through those cool drawings that were happening in the background in real time.
So much more invested in the conversations that were happening and actively involved in keeping ‘em going because the visual storytelling locked it all in so much tighter than previous event formats have been able to and made them feel more involved.
This! THIS is what a live illustrator does.
Sooo. Are we in agreement that shaking it up a bit at your next event and finding a new star of the show might be worth having a lil’ think about?
If so, you’re welcome to have a lil’ think about it with us on a call! We’d love to help you out! (We promise not to bash PowerPoint on the call, we just had to do it a liiiiiiitle bit here to make our point! Soz PowerPoint. Love you.)
x Illustrated Live