Presenting from the cloud, part one

 Recently we participated in a review where it was important to demonstrate to the prospect that we understood their highly digitally engaged target audience, and that we as an agency were very "digital" as well. We tailored our presentation to demonstrate both these points, chucking PowerPoint overboard along the way.

Here's a run-down of how we ran the presentation:

• Core slides (not many) ran off a presentation in Google Docs
• Ran a video with our account planner talking about research highlights from Vimeo
• The planner presented some theme boards about audience insights, which were built in Scrapblog
• Clicked over to Coroflot for our some case study creative
• Created comic-book illustrations of our clients and presented client references from Comiqs

Seem like a stunt? Maybe so. But when we said to the client

"We're not showing you anything from our local computer.

Everything you are seeing was created using tools your audience could seek out and try on the web."

The reaction was... great. Un-tethering the presentation physically helped our clients un-tether themselves from their expectations of what a presentation was supposed to be.

Of course, we had a backup plan - we downloaded the Google Docs presentation and all the graphical assets, and could have presented them from the laptop if we needed to. And don't forget to make sure the client has live internet access in the room!

Let me know about your adventures presenting from the cloud.

Comments

[Robert Davis]

Oops - just updated names and links to services used. My bad.

[Kyle Studstill]

This morning someone shared with me a link to Slidy, an open source and entirely in-browser/XHTML presentation platform. Kinda takes the 'power' out of 'Powerpoint' but could have some interesting uses:

http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/