Leeds-based marketing agency holds event to help people in business "get to the point"

Leeds marketing agency, The Marketing Optimist, is urging the business people of Leeds to Get to the Point. The agency believes that business presentations are far too long and confusing, and is holding an event as part of Leeds Digital Festival, on September 27th, to show business leaders how effective presentations can be.

It is the tradition to use PowerPoint slide decks 100’s of pages thick, with whizzy animations and lots of text, to pitch to customers or to report on progress and results. Often these dense documents are used to make it look like companies have done a lot of work, dazzle people with jargon and flashy charts, and sometimes to hide bad news in their depths.

Richard Michie, CEO of The Marketing Optimist thinks there’s another way. At the Get to the Point event speakers will have 20 slides, each changing automatically every 15 seconds, and exactly 5 minutes to get their point over to the audience. They won’t have time to waffle or pad out their talks with long anecdotes.

“I’ve sat through 200 page slide shows where the presenter has read every single word out to me. It was painful. The content could have, and should have, been communicated in about 5 minutes, with the presenter speaking to me about the idea. If I’d wanted to read their talk, it could have been emailed and saved us both a lot of time and effort,” said Richard.

“I was the co-founder of Bettakultcha which used a similar format, which ran over 200 events like this. By working within these constraints we had some amazing stories and ideas, which would never have been told by giving people free reign.

“It’s been a few years since I left Bettakultcha, but now that people are meeting face-to-face again, it feels like it’s an idea that businesses can benefit from, and I hope that the presenters and people who come as part of the Leeds Digital Festival will enjoy it.”

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily

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