Transcript excerpt of Mike Baco (VP, Media Training Worldwide) discussing how executives at TBS and TNT experienced a total PowerPoint failure during a large upfront presentation and advising presenters to prepare scripted backups and talking points. He emphasizes emailing/printing detailed charts separately and using slides to accentuate stories and anecdotes, so a technical malfunction won't derail the presentation.
Chapters
Executives at TBS and tnt. So what happened to those executives? They were up making the big upfront presentation for the new fall season coming up. And what happened? Well, their PowerPoint presentation went awry. It went completely down. So imagine yourself in front of about 3,000 journalists when none of your presentation can come up. Now, you probably won't be in the same situation as they are in terms of presenting a media upfront to everyone. But what if you're making your own presentation? What do you do if the presentation fails, if the PowerPoint goes down, if some sort of technical malfunction happens? What you should always do and what you should always have is a backup. And what should that backup be? It should be a script. It should be a script that you could follow without any of your PowerPoint slides. You should have talking points for each of your slides. PowerPoint is usually used incorrectly. How is PowerPoint usually used? It's usually used to project all sorts of information that people probably can't see unless they're in the front row. So they have facts, figures, charts. All those things can be best utilized and best used if you email it to people, if you print it up beforehand. That way all those charts, all those figures can be in the person's hands after the fact. What your PowerPoint slides should be doing while you are presenting is accentuating your point. You should be telling stories, you should be telling anecdotes that support the PowerPoints that are up on the screen. So if it's a situation that the power goes out, that the light bulb goes out on the PowerPoint machine, let's say that there's a wrong hookup. None of that will matter because you're already giving your speech. You're already giving your presentation off of a rehearsed speech with your notes. So these are things that obviously the TNT and the TBS executives could have used, could have utilized. But again, they're publicizing their shows. They're needing to show clips to advertisers, advertising and to the media. Probably not a situation that you're going to be in, but everyone will probably be in a situation that they faced with a malfunction one way or another. So hopefully these tools you can utilize the next time this unfortunate situation transpires. I'm Mike Baco, vice president of Media Training Worldwide and lead commentator for Media Training Insider.
