The PowerPoint-Driven Product Launch: One Giant Home-Shopping Show? | QDaily Research Lab

PowerPoint! A whole discipline of office life, the business world's beauty-filtered seller photo, the star of every internet launch event, the script of professors who can't teach… These days there are few problems in the world a few slides can't solve. If there are, a hundred slides will do.

"Because of PowerPoint, though she still couldn't get through a long English sentence smoothly, she scored 16 points in a thesis defense marked out of 15; because of PowerPoint, she took the runner-up spot in a U.S. national graduate speech competition packed with talent; and it was because of PowerPoint that a PepsiCo global senior vice president interviewed her in person and happily hired her at a high salary. Once PowerPoint came into her life, her life became endlessly brilliant…… "

This life-changing PowerPoint story comes from Don't Tell Me You Know PowerPoint 《别告诉我你懂 PPT》, published in 2010 and one of that year's ten best-selling books on Amazon. Seven years on, PowerPoint remains an indispensable martial art for making your way in the world, and stories of masters who trained in secret and used it to win promotions, raises and glory are as popular as ever.

Somewhere in your long list of "bookmark now, read never" folders, there is still a place for "PowerPoint tricks you wish you'd learned sooner — wait, you can do THAT?", "A giveaway of minimalist PowerPoint templates", and "A collection of elegant PowerPoint color palettes". You never know when they'll come in handy. Better safe than sorry.

Not only that. In an earlier QDaily Research Lab survey called "Which things do you think now get solved with a single PowerPoint deck", we found that PowerPoint is no longer just a stat-boosting item. In many fields it has replaced the original substance of a thing and become the thing itself. For example:

• University professors have turned into "PPT readers," teaching classes and giving lectures entirely off slides packed with long blocks of text, which they read aloud.
• Consultants call themselves "the people who make slides"; making slide decks ranks as the second most useful workplace skill, right after filing expense receipts.
• In some business competitions and case contests, the main event is a "PowerPoint competition": 15 percent of the time goes to thinking up ideas and drafting the project plan, and 85 percent to adjusting fonts, colors and layout.
• Well-known internet companies get called "PowerPoint companies" — at their launch events there is sometimes no new product at all, but the slides are gorgeous, and after dissing the competition they proudly announce that they are No. 1 in the world on performance.

Someone saw this inversion of means and ends coming fifteen years ago. Edward Tufte, PowerPoint's best-known critic, published a piece in Wired in 2003 called “PowerPoint Is Evil”. The Yale professor of statistics and graphic design was already shouting that PowerPoint is bad in itself: its form outweighs its content, and it no longer merely supports a presentation — it has replaced the content of the presentation and become the presentation.

Another common charge is that PowerPoint breaks up thinking and content: whole sentences are chopped into scraps, and complicated problems get flattened. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway says PowerPoint pulls off a miracle — it makes things both too simple and too complicated at once. What is complicated is the length and the endless fiddling with formatting; what is simple is the content itself.

Peter Norvig, now Google's director of research, once built a PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address to mock the PowerPoint style of presenting. The speaker, Lincoln, introduces himself while wrestling with the cables — hello, I'm your President Lincoln, uh, do I just press this button, oh, maybe I need to restart it, you see, technology always brings these little troubles, but we simply can't do without it. The deck finally opens, full of bullet points like "dedicate," "sacrifice," "consecrate," "add or detract," plus a self-important chart whose main data point reads "New nation founded 87 years ago: 1, now: 0"…… If this deck interests you, you can click here to see it, though without the president's text beside it you probably won't have the faintest idea what it is saying.

In his paper “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, Edward Tufte cites a study from the Harvard Business Review to show how PowerPoint simplifies thought:

PowerPoint's design turns content into bullet lists made of single words or short phrases — the kind of bulleted list we used above to illustrate PowerPoint in its native form. The main trouble with bullet lists is that they can carry only three kinds of logical relationship, which are — and this is exactly the moment to demonstrate them in bullet form —

• A linear sequence, such as chronological order from first to last;
• A priority ranking, such as most important to least important;
• Or plain membership in a set, such as the three items you are reading now, in no particular order;

And one list can hold only one of these logics at a time. Those limits mean PowerPoint naturally encourages people to skip the work of building more complicated connections between points.

Drop the key words into the tidy, page-by-page order of a slideshow and even the most muddled thinker will appear to have a plausible line of reasoning.

Based on the QDaily Research Lab's observation of launch events from recent years that called themselves "historic," we have drawn up the following rules of the launch-event deck:

Every Effect a Successful Deck Needs

1. A dark background

At a launch aimed at the general public, the audience is not only the friends sitting in the hall. It also includes the consumers behind the camera, clutching the money they are about to spend on a phone. Anyone with that much audience awareness knows a dark background — one that still reads clearly on video — is a must. But go with a dark blue gradient and it will look like you copied Apple too openly.

2. One core element per slide

Talking about the new product? Show one detail shot. Talking about price? Show one number. Two elements and the energy fades, three and it collapses; too many and you look unsure of yourself. So a successful deck is very spare — even with no chart, it makes the hierarchy and the focal point clear. Rivals' sales are drawn in gray, your own product always in a bold red line, for maximum contrast. The audience doesn't need to know whether, to get that contrast, the successful manufacturer picked partial sales figures from a self-invented niche market sold through eighteenth-tier distributors.

3. The straight-man effect

A good launch deck works like a seasoned straight man in a crosstalk duo: it never steals the show, but it is always ready to catch the speaker's punch line. A half-hour talk needs at least 50 slides to have any chance of a perfect match between sound and picture. That does not mean the images say exactly what the speaker says, but they can echo it at the right moment — mention Luo Yonghao and a chubby silhouette appears; mention "the most perfect phone in the world" and your own product appears. You know, timing is everything.

4. Specified animation effects

Most built-in animations — fly in, fly out, honeycomb, vortex, typewriter — look like the work of a schoolchild from the last century, shoe covers on, using the computer lab. The safer choice in a launch deck is pan and zoom, effects that resemble film cuts; they lean hard on the Flash-derived Magic Move and other smooth transitions to create a fluid, cinematic feel, and save on video production costs along the way.

5. Hand-built animation

Of course, to keep things fresh and reinforce the identity of a high-tech company, it is also common to pile 40 motion effects onto eight or nine images: a magnifying glass panning across product details, sticky notes flipping through the company's history, and other flourishes. Be aware that this will be the most technological, most craftsmanship-signaling element of the entire event.

Every Word a Successful Deck Needs

1. Typeface

Among Chinese typefaces, Microsoft YaHei is too common and STHeiti doesn't feel technological enough. Founder Lanting Hei has wide letterforms, tight spacing and balanced proportions; it stands out at large sizes, and it comes in a rich range of weights, from Light to Extra Black, which gives it a built-in volume knob. It is the first choice for a launch event's look. But given their love of a high-tech feel, speakers rarely stop at the first choice — they will also try giving phrases like "disrupt the future" a metallic sheen. Consistency? Never mind. They don't really care about type anyway; that famous Steve Jobs speech simply taught them the concept that "type is art too."

2. Plain talk that rings in your ears

The rule for a deck meant to be read is that "someone should understand what you wrote without you saying a word." On a successful deck the important information is all spoken aloud, and what stays on the screen is the product-comparison chart that lies with a straight face, the dubious graph that finds some way to show you are first in the industry, and, most important, the text itself: lines like "no ecosystem, no super," which redefine the Chinese language, or Boss Jia Yueting's unfortunate prophecy, "Even if it means eternal damnation, I will go forward without regret."

3. Loudspeaker type size

When there isn't much text, a successful deck often goes big; big type gives a slide a "strikes straight at the heart" bonus. A full screen carrying "1.9 billion," "837 patents," "10,715 technical improvements" achieves a stunning sense of scale without the speaker shouting himself hoarse like a home-shopping host. Call it a loudspeaker for the eyes.

4. Jargon on display, like a peacock's tail

Technical terms nobody else understands only draw gasps when they appear on a slide. They are usually delivered by a technical lead stiffly reciting a script, who does not talk without pause — however dry the material, he remembers to stop and nod at the right moments, leaving the audience ample time to marvel at some huge, incomprehensible term on the screen, such as "cellular (honeycomb-style)."

5. Humble qualifiers

Even though they take it for granted that their own product is the most perfect one, presenters of successful decks won't say so themselves. They offer blind-test videos with dubious sample sizes and no interview details, and let passers-by deliver the verdicts: "the design is moving," "the feel in the hand is stunning," "the UI is unbelievably smooth." When they must judge it out loud, they modestly add a hedge — "possibly" the best fingerprint unlock so far, "perhaps" China's first smartphone with an all-metal mid-frame and no break lines — a full display of the nation's modest character.

6. What the founder says

A large, smiling half-length portrait of the founder, paired with a "change the world, benefit humanity" quotation, is a standard page in every successful deck. Enjoy this combo of founder quotes we have collected for you: "We do things differently to make them better, not for the sake of being different"; "One small step for Smartisan, one giant leap for the evolution of the smartphone"; "Make the best TV in the world, and make it affordable for everyone"; "Bring technology down from the altar, make it universal, let everyone enjoy the fun of technology"; "The scenery on the road to greatness is bad enough to make you swear, but what an entrepreneur cares about is the destination."

Every Invention That Belongs Only on a Slide

1. Moving the lab and the factory into the deck

Thank PowerPoint: showing off a concept product no longer requires even a model. One 3D draft, one rendering of a car interior, one vaguely futuristic and rather dodgy ad…… and the concept sermon is complete — sorry, the shared witnessing of the birth of a new species.

2. The villain

A successful launch always has a villain, to manufacture dramatic conflict. For Steve Jobs it was a bloated Microsoft; for Chinese phone makers it is Jobs's Apple. This is a battle in which the target of the dissing is not in the room, and the winning conditions are extremely generous: Photoshop your own product a little thinner in the deck, raise the resolution figure, and you are the self-made hero who beat the industry benchmark.

3. Sleight of hand

A bare "first" or "most" carries no weight; it needs detail. Your color gamut reaches an unbelievable 90 percent, unmatched anywhere in the world today (except Samsung's SA display, which tops 95 percent, and the Xiaomi Note's IPS display at 95 percent). Your color TV leaves every rival in the dust (within the 55-inch segment only). Even if someone in the hall spots it, nothing much happens. The microphone is in the speaker's hand.

4. Innovating the Chinese language

If a launch deck can't produce a few thought-provoking word combinations, how is it supposed to show a technological breakthrough? Apple's iOS may be a classic, but its closed, closed-loop system dooms it never to break past its own limits; only an "open closed loop" is the universal, elegant, investment-worthy new design. As for how exactly a closed loop opens up — who cares, why argue with a slide deck.

5. Vague new concepts

When a technological breakthrough is not among your strengths, the most advanced launch decks know how to learn from nature and blend everything together, borrowing design concepts from the life sciences to create ecosystem cars, ecosystem TVs, ecosystem phones, ecosystem UIs and a whole line of so-called "cash technologies." Content and platform connect perfectly, and hardest of all to imagine, every single hardware product can stream video from the very same website — an interactive experience quite out of the ordinary.

6. One more thing

Just when the audience thinks it is over, the speaker says calmly: oh, one more thing. The presenter of a successful deck builds suspense and saves the "breathtaking" part for last. As Carmine Gallo put it when describing Jobs's talks, "A good novelist doesn't give away the whole plot and the ending on the first page; he does it by slowly piling up material and building emotion." This isn't easy, of course. Most of the time you should be thankful if the whole event manages one genuine climax.

In fact, plenty of leaders of big companies are anti-PowerPoint. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has explicitly forbidden its use inside the company; he believes a well-structured written narrative explains a problem better than a deck, and helps employees think more carefully. Jobs's biography records the same attitude: "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. I want them to engage, to hash out the issues at the table. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint."

And yet Jobs, who discouraged his own employees from using PowerPoint, was the one who made the new presentation-slide style described above popular. His tradition of pairing minimalist Keynote decks with a theatrical product-launch show continues to this day.

Following the teachings of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs 《乔布斯的魔力演讲》, his many followers warmly embraced a new premise: good ideas need dressing up, and mediocre ideas need it even more. "Prepare a launch event the way you'd prepare a movie, so the whole event is full of conflict, drama and tension, like a film" — and in that movie the deck is a crucial part. It is the set, and it is also one of the actors.

This special breed of launch deck now rarely even uses bullet lists. It runs on images and one keyword jumping out per page, with the logical links between them thinner and more fragile than before. A sudden phrase like "ecosystem UI" may leave you baffled, and after the speaker flips through a few more slides and plays a short video, you still won't work out what this thing is — "a UI experience connecting the user to the whole ecosystem," which turns out to be a set of redesigned icons.

So we must regretfully announce one plain fact: however much these launch events may have been prepared as movies, the final result? They are all one giant home-shopping broadcast.

Cover image: Lin Xiaoyao

Animated images: Giphy