Your Audience Can Listen to You or Read—Not Both

George Lois, who spoke last week here at Edelman, is a more interesting and entertaining speaker than most. I really can't say enough about him and his career, and yet...he presented with slides...badly.

I have to cut George a great deal of slack though: As far as I know, he doesn't present that often, and he certainly didn't create bad PowerPoint slides for this talk. What he did do though, was put up the actual spreads from his book, Damn Good Advice, to speak about the pithy numbered lessons in it.

And herein was the problem... 

What George may or may not realize is that as entertaining as he is to listen to, and as good a writer as he is, his audience can only do one thing at a time:

LISTEN or READ

An audience cannot do both!

During George's 1.5 hour talk, I spent far too much time reading his book spreads rather than listening to him! And the reason is that I simply succumbed to human nature:

Reacting to visual change in my environment (a new screen on information), I gave my attention to this new stimulus and read what was in front of me. And unfortunately, I was close enough and the screen was high res enough to allow me to read. I tried to read as quickly as I could, but I still ended up missing a good portion of George's opening words for each segment. Every time a new "slide" went up, I stopped listening to him for as long as it took to read or at least skim the text on the screen. Did he offer the magic secret to successful advertising in these moments? I'll never know...

Glance Media

So, what could he have done? He could have very simply designed slides that were, in Nancy Duarte's words, "glance media"—visuals that could be processed and read in mere seconds. If he had, I could have re-engaged with George and his spoken words almost immediately after glancing at the screen. His slides could have looked like this...

Or, since this particular rule concerned a story about the famed designer, Willam Golden, it could have looked like this, which might have communicated the story more visually and been stickier...

In either case, with slides like this, much more of my attention would have been on George himself from start to finish. And if I wanted to read his words, I could have read the book later (which I did anyway!)

I'm far from the first to make this observation. Nancy Duarte talks at length about glance media and slides that can be quickly read in her awesome book, Slide:ology, as does Garr Reynolds in his books. Many others have also written about the read/listen choice audiences must make. Still, speakers continue to shoot themselves in the foot by all but telling their audiences to stop paying attention to them in favor of the screen. If you're boring and ugly, this might not be a bad strategy. But if you're someone like George Lois, it's a bit of a crime!