Too many balls.

How many presentations have you sat through?  The amount may vary depending on your choice of career, but chances are...it's a lot.

How many have you actually learnt something from?  How many were you engaged with? Did you enjoy any of them?

The same could be asked of advertising. How many ads have you seen? Probably millions. How many have you engaged with...enjoyed? You get the idea.

Like good ads, good presentations are the result of many contributing factors. The presenter, the topic, the slides, the content, the setting, the audience...the list goes on. A lot of these factors concern execution, but what if the most important part is the brief?

Presentations should be written to entertain, educate, sell or persuade. To do any of these things, simplicity is key. A single-minded message (supported by a couple of reasons to believe) will ensure clarity, and allow for a creative delivery. This then gives the presentation much needed purpose.

People often try and cram far too much into their presentations.  That's what the accompanying documents are for...use them.

And while we're on this analogy, here's another one - you've probably heard it before (but the oldies are the goodies): throw someone a tennis ball and watch them catch it. Throw them ten and well, they're not going to catch them all are they?

Pick your message, select your supporting arguments and focus on making them as clear as possible.

We all know this guy was good at it:

And here's someone with a single point, a couple of examples and a truckload of enthusiasm:

So next time you need to present something, perhaps you should spend less time faffing about on PowerPoint, and more time developing your single-minded message...

Just a thought.