Page 22 - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo

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Plan in Analog

Marketing is really theater.
It‘s like staging a performance.
JOHN SCULLEY

teve Jobs has built a reputation in the digital world of
bits and bytes, but he creates stories in the very old-
world tradition of pen and paper. His presentations are
Stheatrical events intended to generate maximum pub-
licity, buzz, and awe. They contain all of the elements of great
plays or movies: conflict, resolution, villains, and heroes. And,
in line with all great movie directors, Jobs storyboards the plot
before picking up a “camera” (i.e., opening the presentation
software). It‘s marketing theater unlike any other.
Jobs is closely involved in every detail of a presentation: writ-
ing descriptive taglines, creating slides, practicing demos, and
making sure the lighting is just right. Jobs takes nothing for
granted. He does what most top presentation designers recom-
mend: he starts on paper. “There‘s just something about paper
and pen and sketching out rough ideas in the ‘analog world’ in
the early stages that seems to lead to more clarity and better,
more creative results when we finally get down to representing
our ideas digitally,” writes Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen. 1
Design experts, including those who create presentations for
Apple, recommend that presenters spend the majority of their
time thinking, sketching, and scripting. Nancy Duarte is the
genius behind Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Duarte suggests
that a presenter spend up to ninety hours to create an hour-long
presentation that contains thirty slides. However, only one-

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