Last Thursday June 9 RewardStream attended The Art of Marketing Conference in Vancouver, where Guy Kawasaki spoke. One of the topics he spoke to was “how to position, pitch, brand, evangelize, build a team, and raise internal or external capital”, all issues near and dear to the hearts of B2B marketers.
 
In his newest book, Enchantment, which we discussed in an earlier post, Kawasaki shares insight into how to be enchanting, a state of being which certainly enables a business to effectively position, pitch, brand, build a team, and raise internal or external capital. In the word of B2B marketing, many of these activities are driven by presentations. One of the most actionable pieces of advice in Enchantment is the 10-20-30 presentation rule,  which is all about keeping the audience engaged. Briefly, the 10-20-30 rule refers to “no more than 10 slides, no presentation longer than 20 minutes, and no text should be less than 30 point font.” You can view a short video of Guy Kawasaki explaining the 10-20-30 rule here.

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Kawasaki also shares a list of 10 Japanese aesthetic principles from Garr Reynolds’ book, Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations. One of my favourite principles, which we saw applied at the BCAMA 2011 Vision Conference was Datsuzoku, which refers to “transcending habit, formula, and conventionality” by “break[ing] away from the tired text-and-bullet-points method.” As mentioned in an earlier post, Nikki Hellyer, Director of Marketing at Future Shop, did a great job of this. She used Prezi, a web-based presentation tool that uses map layout and zooming to show contextual relationships between topics, trumping the linearity of presentations typically given at conferences. The presenters from Blast Radius also did a great job of using evocative pictures in their presentation, rather than filling their presentation with text as per formula.
 
Are there any other rules you follow for presentation design? Or, what was your favourite?

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