A PowerPoint presentation can quickly become boring if the audience doesn’t get to see anything except the slides. Cleverly incorporating an object related to the presentation theme can bring an interesting additional three-dimensional component to your presentation.
Give priority to the object
PowerPoint presentations often feature illustrations. For example, images of products to be featured in the presentation. While it’s true that a picture is often worth a thousand words, better than a picture of an object is the object itself. If you want to promote an innovative new cell phone, for example, photos are good for making a first impression. If you want to give your audience a better understanding of this phone, and your audience is not too large, you can pass around a few original copies. It makes your audience notice how the cell phone feels, how heavy it is, maybe even a slight smell emanates from it.
You give your audience the opportunity to perceive your product with additional senses such as haptics. It becomes more tangible as a result. When a new car is presented to the trade public, an original car is almost always shown, which can be marveled at from close up and in whose interior you may even be allowed to take a test seat. Of course, it is not always possible to show a product in its original form during a company presentation, for example. Just think of office buildings, luxury steamships, wide-bodied aircraft or a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Here, a replica in the appropriate scale can be useful.
Advantages of presentation with objects
An object in 3-D simply adds an extra dimension to your presentation and helps the brain process information. Objects can often be used to convey abstract facts in a vivid way. Let’s say you wanted to explain the concentration of a chemical substance in a product and clarify its compatibility for the environment. Then maybe you could set up an aquarium tank filled with water. You now ask your audience to imagine 400 of these basins that together make a container. Then, using an eyedropper, add a drop of water to the aquarium and explain that on 400 tanks, just one drop of this substance corresponds to the concentration in your product. Viewers can do more with this than with a bare number. A similar example is stacking sugar cubes to show how high the sugar content is in a common soft drink compared to a healthy drink .
Combine even sometimes inappropriate things
Another trick to make the audience curious is to connect seemingly incongruous things that at first glance have nothing to do with each other. For example, you could put up a poster of Cologne Cathedral and ask your audience what the church building might have to do with your product. You might add that there are a certain number of commonalities (depending on what you can think of) that you will point out in your presentation. The important thing, of course, is that parallels or similarities actually exist between your subject and the seemingly non-matching object. In this case, it is important that the solution to your “puzzle” generates enough curiosity through the presentation. Play with your own creativity. What can be used for your presentation? A robot, a bee, Barack Obama, a stuffed bunny, the Mona Lisa? The more absurd or provocative, the greater the curiosity. Of course, always be mindful of good manners and the feelings of your audience.
Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Informatiker Matthias Garten as the expert for multimedia presentations and professional PowerPoint presentations knows about the art of professional slide design. He is an entrepreneur, speaker (TOP 100 Speaker), trainer (TOP 100 Excellence Trainer), multiple book author, presentation coach (presentation training), member of the GSA and Club 55, organizer of the Presentation Conference, Presentation Bootcamp and Presentation Rocket Day. In addition to PowerPoint and presentation training, he inspires and advises companies to present themselves even more effectively and thus stand out from competitors. He is the business owner of the presentation and PowerPoint agency smavicon Best Business Presentations and with his team has created over 15,000 professional PowerPoint presentations for over 150 industries since 1993.
