5 Tips On Creating A Great Multimedia Presentation

Multimedia Presentations are a great tool to communicate ideas and messages. We all know that. But in our years of experience of creating multimedia presentations for brands and companies, all sizes, we’ve realized that it’s easy to make a really bad presentation. Especially because of the variety of tools out there in the hands of everyone.

So here are a few important tips that can help everyone to create a nice multimedia presentation for your message, school, business, project or brand.

1. Plan and deliver the Primary message carefully – Most people lose sight of the primary, one or two key points that they wish to communicate to their audience via the presentation. Remember, the audience is already doing you a favour by watching you’re the presentation. Don’t lose track. Carefully, or preferably, cleverly build the story to impress and deliver the key messages. Most presentation designers lose sight of these messages and pile information on the audience. Drive the point quickly and effectively, even if the message is as simple as “Buy my product!”, or as complicated as “Economics and Implementation of Oral Rabies Vaccination Program”. Yea, you might NOT want to Google That one!


2. Choose your media Smartly – Multimedia presentations are called “Multimedia” for a reason. The sheer options of media available to you can make you go unchecked on their use. Be smart, careful and tactical in choosing the media for a particular type of data or message. For example, when faced with lots of facts and figures, I choose Bold Info graphics to reduce the clutter, or I choose to not use any Voice when I have a powerful Video to convey the message. Type can be a powerful media too. Audience like to look at beautiful, sparse, color-smart Type conveying powerful messages.


3. Give the Audience time to Absorb an idea (unless you are developing for hyperactive teens!) – Most presentation designers commit the common mistake of poorly pacing their presentations. Research your audience. Are they a business audience you would perennially be short on time? Or are they retirees who have all the time in the world? Or for that matter middle school students with varying degrees of attention deficit?
   
   Audience Research Matters.
   
   It also matters as to how much attention span and information absorption speed you are creating for. Pace your presentation content per the audience and you will never go wrong.


4. Reinforce the key message at the very end – Once you are done taking your audience through the presentation contents, you would have shared a decent set of ideas. But there would be one or at the most two key messages you would want them to remember. End the presentation smartly and weave those key messages into the ending. You could use humour or emotion, Statistics or Special effects, or all of the above. Reinforcing the key messages in the end make for a smart closing and help the audience prioritise the messages you wish to deliver


5. Be Copyright Conscious – Have you used a client logo in your presentation without their permission? How about having used a case study naming a customer directly? Or used an image you just picked from Google? These are actions best avoided. Do take the time to put in the diligence required to respect the content owner’s copyright for all media that finds its way into your multimedia presentation. This will eliminate unpleasant events and potential copyright issues.