It never ceases to amaze me what runs through my mind right before I have to give a presentation or demo. One of the most vivid and entertaining saunters down this twisted psychological path happened a couple years ago and provided a good rule of thumb when presenting.
I was in charge of a major ad campaign for a new dot com company. It was an ambiguous initiative: major web presence, flashy ad copy and all sorts of hip new techno bells and whistles that I was hoping would role into not only printed copy but also streaming content.
About twenty minutes before the start of the presentation, I was going through my roller coaster rides of emotions, “I’m not smart enough, they’re so much better than me, what if I fail, this is cool, trust yourself, I’m number one, etc…” For me, a certified neurotic spaz, this was business as usual. Then, I flashed back to an old Merv Griffin talk show that Neil Sedaka had appeared on. He told the story of how Calendar Girl was created on a whim right before he was going to demo another song. He and his writing partner were informed that they needed a second song (the “flip side”). They wrote out the catchy but simple song in about 10 minutes. Needless to say, the record executives loved Calendar Girl and it became a big hit in 1960.
Thus, I scrambled to create something of a back up plan. I found some old black and white stock photos of young professionals working in an office environment. I threw them into an MS PowerPoint file, not even bothering to adjust the skewing that PowerPoint had caused. I wrote some simple captions, and printed them out.
As the meeting started and I was going through my presentation I noticed that the CEO had picked up the PowerPoint slides and started leafing through them. About half way through my demo, he stopped me and started querying me about the pictures. He loved them, saying that this style combined a new hip cutting edge look (skewed and all) with established business processes and principles. Me, never one to not cease an opportunity, changed my song and dance and focused on the slides and how we could cultivate the idea into a major marketing initiative. It became one of the most successful campaigns of the year.
The moral of the story — always have a back up. It does not have to be elaborate, just something unique. Just ask Neil, he’s really good at the “song and dance”.
