In August 2008 Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in August 2009 for 21 nights. He won the bet!
A little while ago Marek Kriwald from Parliament Communications, introduced me to a new presentation concept from Tokyo called “Pecha Kucha”.
The concept is simple, you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images forward automatically and you talk along to the images.
So a whole presentation should take no longer than 400 seconds (6 minutes and 40 seconds).
I like the idea at networking events but like Marek, I’m not sure if I’d like it to become the industry standard.
At an average corporate event you have six 45 min to 1 hour presentations. If we went to the 20×20 format that could mean 54 presentations in a day! Or of course we could have all 6 presentations in the first forty minutes and the rest of the day at the bar (which one would staff prefer, I wonder?).
However there is a useful lesson to be learned from this discipline. If you have a slide – why is it up there, and what is the quickest amount of time you can talk about it and best explain it?
I love the cinema however it’s very rare that I don’t think it could have been 20 minutes shorter (or in the case of Transformers 2, two hours twenty minutes shorter!) however, I’ve seen brilliant and interesting 2 hour presentations and dreadful 45 minute ones.
The amount of time isn’t everything, what’s more important is interesting and audience relevant content!
Something to think about… You can find out more about Pecha Kucha here.
Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.
