BarTalk April 2005
Volume 17, Number 2

PowerPoint and a thousand (bullet) points of light

by Tony Wilson

I speak a lot, and not just on the phone. I do presentations on Franchise Law, and I also give speeches on why your clients need trademarks. I volunteer to present at trade shows. I give papers at legal conventions and CLE courses. It’s all part of what they don’t teach you in law school or PLTC. It’s called marketing. But if your marketing involves making presentations, as mine does, you will know that PowerPoint presentations have become the staple of any speech, and the sizzle with any steak. PowerPoint is so endemic these days that failure to use it suggests, in no particular order:

1. You don’t know how to use a computer.

2. You don’t have a computer.

3. You don’t have enough money for milk.

4. You cut your own hair.

There is an opposing view on PowerPoint. A few months ago, BBC Radio 4 (isn’t Internet radio wonderful?) aired a program that took this position: PowerPoint dumbs-down presentations to the point where all you get is sizzle, and no steak. Essentially, PowerPoint turns all presentations into sales pitches, and all complicated concepts into movie trailers. Information becomes info-tainment. It has assimilated us, Borg-like, into a pixilated world where resistance to PowerPoint is futile. You have to use it, or your presentation won’t be taken seriously. Those of us who rely on our voices, sense of timing, and very bad jokes to break the ice or make a point are left in a dark hail of bullet points when we fail to bring our laptops. Shamefully, we cut our own hair, too.

With PowerPoint’s Spielberg-esque special effects, the audience struggles not so much to understand the presentation, but to read the bullet points, which in turn, are being read by the presenter. Conclusion? We can all read. That is, when we’re not distracted by the effects dancing on the screen.

PowerPoint reminds me a bit of “Planet Hollywood” (thankfully now Hasta la Vista in Vancouver), where you couldn’t hold a conversation about how bad the food was without your eyes being subconsciously pulled to the restaurant’s obnoxious television screens. The TVs mercilessly (and endlessly) showed the Governor of California firing grenades, bazookas and machine guns at an odd assortment of robots, bad guys and other voters. PowerPoint distracts the audience in much the same way; death by a thousand bullet points, you could say (and I’m not the first). Forget that the subject is more complicated than it seems; never mind that she’s a boring speaker – let’s read along with everyone else in the room and when we’re tired of doing that, we’ll look at those twirling Euros next to the words!

To illustrate the limitations of PowerPoint, the BBC program invited listeners to imagine the Gettysburg Address, Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight them on the beaches” speech and other memorable speeches delivered as PowerPoint presentations. Could Churchill have rallied a war-torn nation using PowerPoint, or might something have been lost in translation (including, of all things, the war)?

Because Joe’s “I Am Canadian” rant is the only great and memorable speech we have in Canada, and in celebration of Molson’s pending amalgamation with Coors, I think I can do Joe’s rant in PowerPoint! In one slide. Watch: “I–WAS–CANADIAN.”

Tony Wilson is a Franchise and Intellectual Property lawyer at Boughton. He’s written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, and Macleans magazine. Email: twilson@boughton.ca

This article was published in the April 2005 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2005, all rights reserved.