PPT doesn't kill people, people using PPT kill people

Another shot fired in the PowerPoint war, this time from Slate. It's a balanced view of the application's weaknesses and strengths, and spends a lot of time – as it should – not blaming the app but the people using it.

Unlike masters of presentation like Jobs and Gore who simplify their slides, and use them to illustrate their thinking, most people get caught in the snare of templates. They cut down on the number of slides (too many looks like too much work) by packing maximum information into each slide, using bullets, sub-bullets and sub-sub-bullets. Each topic gets its own page, because that seems neat and clean. And if the slides seem too busy, then the presenter will often use builds, fly-ins, music and cute animations to make the thing more, um, entertaining.

(The worst, as of course you know, is when the only path open to the presenter, when sitting in a room full of people staring at these unreadable slides, seems to be to read them verbatim to the audience – boring them more deeply in multiple media. But that's not the point of this post.)

As a some-time participant is such affairs, it worries me when important information or a key point is getting missed for the sake of the template. I'll always suggest busting the template, or a single big headline on a single slide to ensure a point gets across, and sometimes I'm even listened to.

But writing in PPT is impossible for me. I have to write in Word, and actually have a flow and logical thinking, because I feel like PPT discourages that. And the Slate article points to a great example of exactly that, one I'd heard of but hadn't read before – this description of the way that NASA and Boeing engineers and managers used PowerPoint to elide the real risks that the space shuttle Columbia faced after its heat shield was damaged. It's a frightening look at some of the actual slides with a detailed critique. You look at them and can't help but think that, if someone wanted to hide the actual risks, they couldn't have done a better job.

As Edward Tufte says, when each issue conveniently takes up an equal single page, can it really be that they are all of equal concern? What is being deleted, missed or ignored in the serious issues? And how can you even differentiate the serious issues from anything else? Someone who is on autopilot while cranking out a PPT isn't going to be thinking about stuff like that.

What is incumbent on the presenter is to actually think about what you're trying to communicate, and ensure that your presentation and you combine to say what you want. Make sure you know what your big-ass fundamental point is before worrying about your sub-bullets. And remember that you get to choose the damn template you start with, and get to change it at will.

So, in the end I know it's not PowerPoint's fault... but the more I think about, writing presentations in Word (with full control over layout and fonts) then saving them as PDFs makes more and more sense.

another olde tyme post on the earlie education of a nascent copywriter

As avid readers of this blog (and there seem to be at least couple who don't share an IP address with me) may remember, my first adventure in this glamourous endeavour we call Marketing was as a proofreader in the in-house advertising department of the unsinkable luxury liner of Canadian retail, Eaton's. (Or, chez Québec, Eaton.)

Now, this in-house operation was serious. It was several times larger than some agencies I have subsequently worked at. It pumped out multiple newspaper ads every day, for dailies all across the country, as well as national flyers, DM inserts, credit card statements, in-store signage for over 100 stores, and retail radio spots. They had even just installed computers throughout the department, and set up their own studio using the biggest, fastest Macs being made – the Mac IIcx, I think. In retrospect, for 1989, it was pretty advanced.

I was slightly awed. (Keep in mind, I finished university in one of the last years it was possible to be an undergrad without a computer.) There were some really good people there, folks I learned a lot from. There was a whole new and very precise way of looking at language, something I hadn't really bothered to cultivate at university. And there was a pantload of material to proofread, with most flyers having several versions, based on both pricing and language variations. But in spite of my awe, there was one thing that deeply bothered me.

The tagline. Eaton's tagline throughout the late '80s made no sense to me.

We are. Canada's department store

The necessity to declare your own existence seemed a trifle desperate. (With good reason as it turned out.) But worse for me was the lack of a final period. How can you introduce the idea of a period halfway through a sentence, placing it with a good deal of arbitrariness, then abolish it three words later? Seeing as how they'd hired me as a proofreader, I began to obsess about this. How could mistakes like this happen? No one I worked with seem to know, or at least didn't want to share with some half-bright rookie asking stupid questions.

About a month after I got hired, the Advertising Department held its annual Christmas party.

I was pretty reserved; I didn't know a lot of people, and I was still figuring out who was who, let alone what my job entailed. But for the dinner, I found myself sitting at the same table as the VP of Marketing. (Let me assure you, this isn't a tale of drunken embarrassment.) He was courtly, and solicited people's thoughts, and actual dialogue seemed to occur. Lord knows it was probably painful work for him, but he didn't make it seem that way.

Anyway, at one these junctures of actual dialogue, I somehow found the nerve to ask about the missing period. And he didn't tell me to piss off. He gave me a response filled with what turned out to be the first nuance and insight I encountered in this business.

He said that when they first came up with the line, they had tried it the logical way, with a single period at the end, and that it had seemed a little flat. Then they came up with the two sentence structure, with two periods, but somehow that seemed off, too flat a declaration. Then someone had had the flash of insight to erase the final period, and the declaration "We are" got balanced by the openness of whatever followed, usually "Canada's department store." (It was a little like today's Nissan Shift campaign, with multiple phrases getting dropped in.) Suddenly the damn thing worked.

I had never thought of this before. I'd just assumed that applying the rules to the language would make it correct, and therefore right. As soon as I started thinking about what the line would look like properly punctuated, I saw exactly what he meant.

It was the first time I understood in a working sense that advertising language didn't have to be prose; that it could, if not be poetry, at least use some of the techniques and freedoms of poetry. 

It was the first demonstration I had that what works is much more important than what is correct.

And no, I didn't get fired. I don't think he remembered my name or my impertinence the next day. A nice secondary lesson that it never hurts to ask.

yet another reason that Samuel Johnson is smarter than me

For someone who was a math geek through high school, and who today can still add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers without a calculator, and probably even still swing a pretty mean square root, the dread that this time of year brings is inexplicable. Because I ordinarily love numbers. I'll happily jump into a spreadsheet jammed with client data, filled with media spends or call volumes or whatever, and I really love crunching them.

But ask me to do my expenses, or my timesheets, or, when I was freelancing, my invoices, and I will find any excuse to hide. I will clean my desk, or call clients to see if they want to go for lunch, or come down with the flu. Tax time is the worst of all.

I hate money, or rather, the need to do any kind of examination of my own money. I have an absolute aversion to dealing with numbers in a business context when my own money is on the line. When any such topic comes up – expensing a lunch, submitting mileage – I get the sinking feeling that I'm about to make a mistake that will cost me personally thousands of dollars. Somehow I will do something wrong on a form and the accounting police will swoop in and I will be charged and life as I know it will be over.

It's irrational and stupid, yes, I'm aware of that.

When you're a full-time employee at an agency, and a creative, there's usually a little bit of leeway accorded you. Agency accounting departments expect creatives to ill-tempered innumerate children, and so I've been able to use this low set of expectations to cover my guilty tracks.

As a freelancer, you can't afford this level of unreason. Otherwise, you don't eat. So you find some sort of minimum requirement that you can meet, day in and day out. For me, for instance, that meant dropping all my bills and receipts into a shopping bag near my desk. I could manage that. It meant that I'd have to spend several hours before meeting my accountant every year, tallying and cross-checking everything, but I could manage that, too. I'm sure that would horrify the suits, as it did my accountant. No weekly or monthly tracking of anything. No sense of what my accounts payable or receivable were. But I muddled through it pretty well.

Needless to say, I was slack with my invoices as well. This I really don't advise. I may be one of the few freelancers I know who never got seriously burned by an unpaid bill, but this was pure dumb luck on my part. The best thing you can do is get your invoices in quickly, and if you're doing an ongoing gig, as regularly as your client will take them.

Not many clients value work they get for free.

As every writer's friend Sam Johnson once said, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

what to say when they say no one reads any more

I recently got a DM package from a large telecommunications concern, trying to get me to choose their Internet service and save money by bundling it with some other service of theirs.

The letter was clear and succinct, less than one page with lots of white space. The offer was strongly laid out, but the art director had managed to do a nice job designing it.

Great direct mail, right?

Nope. Complete waste of time.

It was like they'd put a billboard or newspaper ad in an envelope, or like they'd sent me an email that was one large, single jpeg. Nothing personal about their communication in a space where I expect and require personal communication.

I know why it happened. I've been in the kinds of meetings where these things get decided, and I have become vocal in opposition.

"The letter copy's long," somone says. "No one reads any more." Forgetting that 75% of the Internet is words, and I understand that it's still somewhat popular.

"Yeah, let's cut that," says someone else. "People these days are so busy they want to get right to the point. Let's get the product and/or service right up top." Forgetting that if I happen to be interested in your product and/or service, I will actually want to know about it, and this quest for knowledge will probably entail reading about it. Why not deliver that information instantaneously, i.e., in the letter, instead of forcing people to go to a computer and find your site so they can get it?

Two gross generalizations and the entire room has turned against, not just your copy, but the idea that your copy has any value beyond stating what the price and offer are.

If you're a writer, you can't wait until this point to feebly mount a defence. The moment any point like this is made, you have to, without getting antagonistic, immediately begin to assert the positives of copy. You have to remind people of the basics of DM – that most people who get your letter aren't going to look at it, no matter how long or short your copy is. And you don't care about them. It's the people who do want to know more, the people who are interested; they're the only ones you care about. And you must give them the info they need to click or pick up the phone.

And an essential part of that is a story, a way of connecting emotionally with the product and/or service. A way of making your communication personal. A way of helping people understand your product's value and getting them to understand that they need it.

If you don't give this audience what they need, you get 1% response, or 0.1%. If you do give it to them, you get 3% response. Or 10%. Or more. You go from being a very bad method for acquiring customers, to being staggeringly successful at it.

Having worked in a marketing sector for a year now where stories are essential and copy is a primary way of delivering those stories, I have a new appreciation for building a message with long copy, and telling stories. I think there are a lot of marketers out there who need to relearn this fundamental truth.

just one more word, it's waffer thin

Was recording a :30 radio PSA this afternoon and our voice talent, who we've worked with several times before and who is fantastic, reminded me just how fantastic she is. (Not of course literally by telling me, but by... oh, just keep reading.)

The script was too long; our client wanted to say a lot and at the last minute added three or four extra "clarifying" words that actually made the difference between a tight but doable script and one that just sounded rushed all the way through. (Surprising how small that difference is.)

So, I apologetically warned our voice talent about all this as she stepped up to the mike, and she was game. And on maybe the second take she nailed the script as it was written perfectly. That is, as perfectly as she could. Because she sounded like she'd been sped up by the sound engineer. She was rushed, and there wasn't a drop of space or emotion in it; it was clogged with words for 30 seconds solid. 

Crap.

It was the kind of thing you technically could deliver to a client and say, hey, we did everything you wanted, here you go. But in the real world you can't do that. It's just bad work with excuses, it's bad for your spirit, and in spite of the fact that you've caved on every single thing asked for, you still end up with an unhappy client.

As I stared at the board and the sound engineer thought about how dumb I was, the producer suggested losing the word in the call to action that was repeated from two lines before. At first I resisted, because I liked that particular bit of repetition and thought that there had to be some brilliant alternative. Then after a couple of bonus minutes of floundering, I realized that she was right. (Hey, the script was less than 24 hours old, and the last client changes had come through only an hour before the session. Lighten up, okay?) The repetition in the CTA was gone. Same with two wonderfully descriptive adjectives that until that moment I'd thought were vital, but were in fact just adding precious time. And this is going to sound funny, but these adjectives were long words; they were words that naturally wanted emphasis when they were read.

So, by deleting them and that repeat in the CTA – literally just three words – we actually gave our voice talent room to breathe. She nailed take after take running between 28 and 29 seconds. (Try it some time; it's got to require an internal metronome.) She repeatedly nailed the subtle but necessary inflections that gave the script not just some human feeling, but actual meaning. All it took was us (okay, me) giving her room to do her job, by extracting a few of those waffer-thin words that couldn't possibly make a difference.

That's how she reminded me just how fantastic she is.

Now, it's not an award-winning spot. It's a straight read of a serious message that needed to convey a lot of information.

It's just a nice example of the craft that actors, and specifically voice actors, possess. They have skills. They have knowledge. They can save your butt when you cross the line between too much and waaaay too much.

a pantload of writing advice

New book coming out that all writers need. Not just because if you're a writer you need to read a lot, but because it's about the folks who pretty much invented modern comedy.

For instance, Larry Gelbart is a name you should know. Why? Well, he not only created MASH for TV and wrote its first several (and best) seasons, but he also wrote Tootsie and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Forum and other stuff. (And Blame it on Rio, but we won't hold that against him.)

He also helped write Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, along with some punks you may have heard of named Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Woody Allen.

Larry was funnier than you'll ever be. He knew stuff that you and I need to learn.

I am aware of all Internet traditions...

...and so, in the spirit of Tbogg and Atrios, it seems right to start a Friday change-of-pace blog thing about writers. Maybe it becomes a tradition, maybe not.

J.D. Salinger died. I made the mistake of not reading Salinger in high school, because when I finally did come to Catcher in the Rye in my mid 20s, it was horrible. Even in my confused and tormented post-adolescent state of mind, I saw Holden Caulfield as someone who deserved to be beaten up. This was the basis of The Great Reputation? Because that was impossible, I kept going, into the later Glass stories, only to discover that they're contrived and precious and, well, awful.

So, in honour of his passing, let's talk instead about Hunter S. Thompson. I'm not claiming that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the great American novel, but it sure as hell captures the cheap, low-grade hustler quality of so much American life, even (perhaps especially) professional and business life. The novel is untidy, self-indulgent and not suitable for young people, but it's alive and angry and funny as hell.

There's something about that heavily Republican time that reminds me of living through the eight years of Bush. We forget that after the summer of love, Republicans won in 1968 and 1972. Advertising talked about joy, but fear and anxiety were top of mind for a huge chunk of North American voters at that time. It was much more like 1984 than anyone realized – anyone except HST. And if you weren't completely obsessed with consumer gadgets for the last ten years, perhaps you came up for oxygen long enough to realize that.

His hatred of uncorrected power, his unerring eye for trends, his libertarian ideals, his anarchist love of self-responsibility – they all contributed to the eight or so years when HST was simply the best at reporting how all of us felt and acted and were.

It's all summed up in the line: "As your attorney, I advise you to pass me the mescaline."

(By the way, here's where the all Internet traditions thing started.)

don't tug on that

It's been, um, a busy week. Lots of typing and presentations happening very quickly. Yesterday I got feedback on some copy which was approved except for one word. One little word. Change it and everyone's happy, and we can get on to everything else. No big deal, right?

Wrong. One wrong word sitting in the middle of a whole bunch of right ones makes all of them wrong. Clients and account people aren't paid to listen for nuance and emotional impact and, well, flow. But we are. Because people out there notice. Sitting in their car listening to the radio, or when they bother to click on the one potentially interesting email in their inbox, people care if what you write feels wrong.

The fact that the words have to feel right is why not everyone who slings words can actually write. It sounds finicky and stupid but it's true. People read not just the sense but the sound of your language. You have to be aware of the poetry in the language of even the most mundane buckslip. Even if you can't formally scan the metre of what you're writing, you have to hear it. It has to flow. If it sounds wrong, or if it sounds out of place, it probably is.

It's why I think about writing as composing.

So when I present a deck to my client, it works. It hangs together seamlessly. (In my mind at least.) You can't just pull out one stitch and think that the whole blanket will hang together.

Changes are of course fine. But tell me what the issues are, so I can incorporate them and still write something that flows. Don't tell me what the changes must be. Don't try to pull a word out and jam something else in.

To quote the immortal words of the great scientist and rock star Buckaroo Banzai, "Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."

will he succumb to the maddening urge? I think he just did

Blogs for me have always been a shiny red button. It's never been a matter of "if." It was always about "when."

I've been reading blogs since the 2000 U.S. election debacle, when I stumbled upon Talking Points Memo, and that led me eventually to Kos and Atrios and Yglesias. Then suddenly all kinds of folks had them for all kinds of fun non-political uses. Lame ones, too. Lots of lameness, from people whose tinfoil hats were clearly getting in the way of their typing. And, hell, if they could do it...

It's always been tempting. But, like being tempted to write a novel, when I finally sat down to write one, inspiration, focus, purpose and motivation all dried up quickly.

Not sure why this time is different. Maybe because I didn't promise anything with my first post. And I'm not making any promises now.

I just hope I don't erase too much history.