I remember pretty clearly the day that the February 2000 issue of Presentations Magazine arrived in our Kalamazoo, Michigan office. It contained the results from a Presentations/3M study on the effectiveness of multimedia presentations. Prior to this, I had heard rumblings of “data” from the 1980s studies but had never actually read those research reports. For the next few years, I confidently told audiences and clients that “multimedia presentations could increase comprehension 78% over static visuals.” Like many others, I was eager to use any data that seemed to validate the services we were offering to clients.

So what did this study really tell us about the effectiveness of PowerPoint multimedia presentations? Unfortunately, the answer is: Not much at all. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the problems with the 1986 UM/3M study was that it used overhead transparencies and slides for visual support. It is a little hard to know which of the 1986 findings (if any) might be generalized to the way most presentations are given today. It might be reasonable to think that the positive findings in comprehension and retention would still hold true. What about the significant improvement in the audience’s perception of the speaker however? Vogel hypothesized that the improvement in persuasion was predominately mediated through this heightened positive perception of the speaker. Would someone viewing a typical presentation with PowerPoint visuals today perceive the presenter as positively as the 1986 subjects viewed the speaker with overhead transparencies? Read the rest of this entry »

7% - 38% - 55%

How many of you know the significance of these three percentages?
Anyone who has ever attended a seminar or course on presentation skills has undoubtedly heard them. When communicating, we are told, only 7% of our message is communicated through the words we use… 38% is communicated through vocal tone… and a whopping 55% is communicated through facial expression.

I was thinking about this during a trip I took this spring to Prague in the Czech Republic. Czech is a very difficult language to learn (for me anyway). But according to the 7-38-55 theory, I really shouldn’t need to learn Czech at all…. I should be able to understand 93% of a Czech conversation through tone and facial expressions alone. Needless to say, the 7-38-55 concept did not work for me that well. Without understanding the words I was pretty clueless!

So what exactly is going on here? Where do these percentages come from? Read the rest of this entry »

As a teenager living in Sao Paulo, Brazil I owned a machete. It had a 20 inch blade, a shiny black handle and a leather sheath decorated with beads and tassels. Now Sao Paulo was a city the size of NYC at that time… a place where machetes were seldom used for any constructive purpose. In fact, the only time I really needed my machete was during a month long trip with my dad and two older brothers into the interior of the country.

This past week however, I felt a little like I was hacking through the Brazilian underbrush again as I tried to track down the origin of a common presentation related statistic.
If I were to ask you how many PowerPoint presentations are given every day around the world… what would you say?

If you need help answering this question, you can look here, here, here, here, here, here,… or in countless other electronic repositories of valuable information across our great and wonderful Worldwide Web.

The answer of course is 30 million presentations every single day. Most people apparently know this. But is it true? Where does this number come from? How was it calculated? Read the rest of this entry »