On Digital Strategy, Powerpoint

I work at an agency that loves its "decks," which is a really dumb way of saying Power Point. I find deck writing very frustrating - mostly because the people you'll inevitably present the deck to have no desire to sit through 20 to 50 slides of what you're already telling them anyway.



Sure, strategy is really important, and I'm of the opinion you shouldn't even bother creating concept creative without it, but there is a point where you just need to tell a client what the hell you're going to do for them.

I learned this first hand during a recent presentation to a group of people that I would classify as "light-tech" clients. I believe you can classify people in the modern business environment into three tech categories:

*Non-Tech Adopters
*Telecom Adopters
*All Tech Adopters


I, unfortunately, was presenting a very long, strategically sound deck for an "all tech" audience that was very clearly a group of Telecom adopters. How do I know? They were all furiously typing away on their Blackberries, as I presented on some very cool Web 2.0 applications we planned to use to build their brand. Not to mention, when I asked how many of them knew what a "blog" was, only two of the 10 in the room raised their hand.

So, we ditched the deck after five slides and proceeded to wing it on the strategy. In the long run, it went very well. Maybe I need to ditch the deck more often.