Tracking Technology: Points of Power

The reason, he explains, is that a strategy consulting pitch is really a sales call on a sophisticated client — the kind of client whose primary concern is not the consultant's showmanship, but rather the ability of the consultant to listen.

Lending an Ear

Even so, Bahl says that the old rules don't always apply these days. "One of the main drivers for this change," he says, "is that the technology is much better." But more important, Bahl continues, is the fact that clients are more impatient now. With less time to prepare a pitch, consultants are finding better uses for some of the presentation tools they used to hold in such low esteem.

And of these, there is none more used and abused than Microsoft's PowerPoint. "PowerPoint is alive and well," says Gregg Clark, vice president and global director of strategy for DareStep, the creative design unit of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in New York. "It has evolved from the days when it was primarily a way to create lots of boxes, arrows, and pie graphs."

Clark says that he uses PowerPoint as a platform. "We can embed video and other multimedia effects in PowerPoint. Currently, we have a PowerPoint file of about 175 megabytes that we like to show to prospective clients," he explains. DareStep's work more resembles a professionally created movie than a slide presentation, and its high-energy glitz includes a sound track with the group Jesus Jones singing their hit "Right Here, Right Now."

This is just the sort of thing that can still make the strategy folks cringe. But they are starting to mellow a bit. "I am flying to Zurich right now to meet with the global governing body of an international sport, and my presentation has come to front of mind," explains Bahl, who says he'll be touting "a multimedia presentation."

The key here, Bahl explains, is that Kearney is building a Web presence for the Zurich client. "So we feel a little more freedom in using flashy presentation technology to show them what we can create." He notes that, in his experience, foreign boards such as this one tend to be more receptive to media-enhanced presentations.

Still, there is a time and place for everything.

"I would hesitate to take this kind of presentation into a high-level meeting with a client where the engagement is going to amount to a cost-cutting exercise for them."

The Pixel Factor

The tool that Bahl mentions most in the context of building flashy presentations is not PowerPoint. It is, in fact, Flash from San Francisco–based Macromedia. "If you decide a hot presentation is what you need," he explains, "PowerPoint just won't cut it anymore. It is cumbersome to use and just not Internet-friendly."

The reason, according to Neal Mathur, a Web designer at Papaya Nirvana, Inc., a Web design company in Kilauea, HI, is the graphics. "PowerPoint is pixel-based," explains Mathur.

Anyone with a dial-up Internet connection who has had to wait an hour to download an e-mail with a PowerPoint attachment will know what this means. "With PowerPoint images," Mathur continues, "you have to load every pixel to create the image on your desktop."

Flash, on the other hand, is vector-based. "This means," Mathur says, "that when you download a Flash file you are just getting the instructions that tell your desktop processor how to create the graphics. The files are very small, which makes Flash a particularly good tool for creating things like Web-based animation."

This is fine for developers such as Mathur who are comfortable using a variety of creative tools to get the effects they want, but it may not be what consultants want to hear. For many of them, PowerPoint is still the vehicle for creating presentations.

Fortunately there is good news for PowerPoint addicts. PresentationPro, an Atlanta company, has made a business of enhancing PowerPoint since 1993. The company's newest offering, Online Presenter, combines the best of PowerPoint and Flash. You build your presentation in PowerPoint and then, with a click of the mouse, the presentation is automatically uploaded to PresentationPro's Web site. There, the finishing touch converts the whole thing to Flash.

Gary White, president of PresentationPro, says that the product is particularly aimed at consultants. "It builds on the expertise most consultants already have," says White, "— namely, PowerPoint. In addition, you get a presentation that is Web-friendly and accessible by anyone with a browser and a Web connection."

Meanwhile, Microsoft has introduced its own software for putting PowerPoint on the Web. Called Presentation Broadcast, the product converts everything to HTML. "Viewers don't need to download anything," says David Jaffe, product manager for Microsoft Office in Redmond, WA. "And the presenter can locally host and drive the presentation from a desktop computer."

In that case, however, the software will support only fifteen participants. Jaffe says that if you want to broadcast to a larger audience, you will need to have someone else host the presentation from a network server.

PowerPoint is due for an upgrade later this year, when Microsoft releases the next version of the product as part of the Office XP suite. "We have new custom animation features that you will be able to save as HTML for Web viewing," says Jaffe.

In addition, a window, invisible to the audience, gives the presenter a dashboard-like display for controlling the show and driving home specific points.

The new version won't put Macromedia or PresentationPro out of business, because it is still pixel-based. And Diane Li, product manager for Flash at Macromedia, says that Flash can now be used in much the same way as ordinary PowerPoint. "It is great for presentations that require extreme levels of interactivity," she explains.

If technology were all that mattered, it would be reasonable to assume that a product like Flash could unseat PowerPoint as the presentation tool of choice. But, as the tales of many now-forgotten software firms will attest, technology is only part of the story.

As one of the survivors, Macromedia is too savvy to enter into a battle with Microsoft for the presentation software market. "We see Flash as a complementary product to PowerPoint," says Li. "There is a real place for products like Online Presenter that combine the best of both."

Bold Projections

Software products like these won't mean much to the strategy boys and girls who are still riding high on nothing but a white board and a smile.

But the road warriors of consulting, people like Gary Kayye, principal of Kayye Consulting, a small marketing strategy firm in Chapel Hill, NC, are carrying a lot more than software in their traveling kits. "Three years ago, we were lugging fourteen-pound projectors around," says Kayye.

Kayye still hauls a lot of gear — the stuff needed to bring a presentation to life in a conference room — but he says it is now cheaper, brighter, and lighter. "That fourteen-pounder," he says, "cost about $15,000 and only gave one thousand lumens of brightness."

That's just bright enough to be visible in a dimly lit room. Now, he says you can get the same brightness in a six-pound device that costs about $3,500. Or, if you want to spend a little more and can handle 12 pounds, you can get 3,000 lumens — enough to be seen in a fully lit room — for $8,000.

Clint Hoffman, director of marketing for display products at Sony Electronics in Park Ridge, NJ, confirms that the last few years have brought a rapid acceleration to development cycles for projectors.

And, Hoffman says, there are more changes coming. "We have just introduced technology that allows you to network our installation projectors [projectors that are physically installed]. It means that you can now access a projector through the same LAN connection you would use to access a printer."

And you can do it without wires. Sony has adopted the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 802.11b standard for wireless connectivity. It means a presenter could walk into a conference room, turn on a notebook PC, and run a presentation on the ceiling projector without having to plug in a single wire.

It isn't just about hardware at Sony, either. In June, the company will release software for this network, called e-Conference, that will allow the audience to view a presentation on their notebook computers. "They can even exchange comments with each other," says Hoffman.

Kayye is still most excited by the more mundane issues of weight and cost. "These high-end applications are great," he says, "but I think it will still be a while before most consultants start using them."

Probably longer for some than for others. "The truth is," says Larry Vale, vice president of external communications for Keane in Boston, "that the white board is still the best tool there is for presentations."

Vale thinks that far too many presenters use presentation tools as a crutch. "PowerPoint is in the hands of a zillion people, and it doesn't automatically make them better communicators. We would do well to remember the old adage about computer systems: 'Garbage In, Garbage Out.'

"And nothing," Vale continues, "hampers an interactive discussion more than dimming the lights for a presentation."

Vale does say, however, that tools like Flash can be good for setting the tone of a presentation. And, with Sony's new 3,000-lumens projectors, he can even leave the lights on.