9 sureshot ways to kill your audience using powerpoint

Lately I have been attending campus pre-placement talks by various leading companies in India. It would suffice to say that I have attended over half-a-hundred presentations of companies “trying to sell themselves” to us. Some of them were really good, and then some of them are so pathetic that it made me feel sorry about the people working inside. Anyways, if you ever plan to kill a customer over a sales call, this post should come handy.

1. Start with a Movie clip: Good presentations tell stories and inspire people. Lethal presentaions instead use a movie clip which fails miserably to tell the story of the company. To target sleeping people, you could use annoying background scores. For starters, you can try the background scores from softcore porn.
2. State the vision & mission: This should make even the soundest enthusiast of your company feel a burning desire to faint before you. If stating mission & vision is not boring enough (as if it is not) you could reverse them by stating the mission as vision and vision as mission. This should make those active, non-sleeping goats in the room scratch their head vigorously and strangle themselves with neckties.
3. Show some graphs: Long long ago, a bunch people with little aptitude for numbers sat in a room and came up with a brilliant idea called bar charts and line graphs. Since they couldnt understand the fact that 4300 is greater than 2300 and 100 is 20% more than 120 (or is it the otherway, whatever) , the graphs and charts worked for them well. Cut to 2006, you can use mind numbingly stupid graphs with all the lines going up to torment the listener. For a good start, try creating a bar chart from various fields in your company’s balance sheet.
4. Slow Poisoning: Excessive thinking hasnt really killed anyone, but with some luck you can prove it wrong. Start with a 100 slide presentation. Show some facts in frist 50 slides. Slowly contradict them in the next 50 slides. For starters you can talk about HR strategy and people policies. Even the most unattentive and lazy person would start worrying about the contrast and ergo, you have him
5. Transition & Slide Sounds: As though the features are not enough, most of the slide making softwares come with some funny transition effects and attached sounds. With a bit of luck and passion, you can figure out the most annoying combinations of transition effects. Add a couple clap/thunder/car start/camera click sound effects and you have a huge casualty list after the show.
6. Flash your Thing: Here is a simple way to kill the prospects. (1) prepare the entire presentation in Flash/Swish. (2) Forget to add show control mechanisms like next/prev/first/last buttons (3) add a background score. (4) Run the show (5) make some mistake (6) since the show cant be ffed/rewinded, subject the innocent people to all slides again. (7) repeat if anyone is left alive
7. Use your imagination: In the days of yore, imagination used to be a thing related to human mind. Thanks to clipart, its available to everyone now. You can use multiclored and attractive images that are highly unrelated to the content to mass-molest your audience. For beginners, you would like to read Economic Times to understand the fine art of excruciation by illustration. For example, they have the image of a blonde with tall legs for the headline that screams “Reliaces multi-pronged strategy”.
8. Psychedelic Shelling: (Not Recommended to below 18) This technique is really simple. Change the base/background color of each slide to a random RGB#. It works best with a combination of techniques 5&7. Even though, it has not been proved mathematically or anything like that, research shows that, one out of every 2 people watching a 700 slide multi-colored ppt have suffered blurred vision and other long term illnesses. so, you have a 50% chance.
9. You: Believe me, nothing works better than a boring and annoying person. I know it could be difficult, for I have tried hard only to fail ;), but you can try becoming one of those rare breed of deadly slideshow assassinators with practice. Good luck.

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