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Guidelines for Writing Successful Business Video Presentations
- Preproduction and Video Treatment Development

Successful presentations directly create a bridge between your client’s purpose and the audience’s motivation. As writers and producers, we search for ideas to help us make that match. We find those ideas–by asking the right questions.

Communications and training presentations support a problem-solving process initiated by our clients. Our challenge is to relate our client’s goal to the needs and desires of the audience. While our clients focus on how the goal benefits the organization, our focus is how it benefits the audience. There must always be a benefit for the audience.

Audience expectations

What does an audience want from a corporate or educational video presentation? Learning theory tells us:

·People learn what they need and want to know right now.

·They are most interested in information and skills that give them greater control over their life experience.

·They see themselves as experts in their own lives and want to be treated as such.
Responding to audience expectations

As video professionals, we need to support these needs and desires, build on them and never diminish them. We satisfy the audience’s needs in the following ways:

·The presentation neither over nor underwhelms by presenting too much or too little information.

·The information is immediately usable.

·The pacing allows the audience to feel they have control over the experience by going neither too fast nor too slow.

·The format or creative treatment engages their imagination in ways that allow them to identify with the problem presented and see themselves taking control and succeeding at the solution.

The video environment provides an opportunity for the audience to reevaluate and adjust their viewpoint, and try out new behaviors. They rehearse new behaviors and skills in their mind’s eye. By the end of the presentation, they decide whether change is worth the risk.

Waiting for answers

Screenwriter Syd Field says, “Writing is the process of asking the right questions then waiting for the answers.” This also is an excellent description of the preproduction process. During its early stages, we focus on left brain, logical analysis concerning our client’s goal and the audience’s motivation. In the later stages, we begin the right brain work of trying out various treatment ideas–ways we can use the medium to convey our message. The essential questions are:

·What creative vehicle will work best? Do we need drama, parody, comedy, documentary, an interview or panel discussion?
·What’s the right answer, how can we determine that answer–and then be sure of our professional recommendation?

Visualization and the creative concept

We now look for answers. It’s time to visualize. Go to your imagination and become a member of the audience. Block out the censors and critics, and delight yourself with images, sounds and music.

·What do you want to see, hear and feel?

·What interests you?

·What would move you from complacency and comfort to risking something new?

Allow time for images and ideas to come to you. Never reject an idea. And don’t miss those bits and pieces of ideas that present themselves as vague, ill-formed, or too avant-garde. Welcome them. Let them grow and identify themselves.

Reexamine your ideas in light of your client’s goal, the audience’s motivation, the budget and resources). Look for the best fit and select your creative concept.

Structure

Now you have one more consideration–structure. Surprisingly, our audiences don’t care as much about creative concept as they do about structure. Their perceptions are carefully developed by commercial television and Hollywood films.

Their first perception concerns “seat time.” Seat time refers to the amount of time the audience is willing to sit before taking a break. They are conditioned by commercial television to 10-minute (or less) segments separated by commercial breaks.

The second perception concerns storytelling. Hollywood films (and other forms of storytelling) influence audiences to expect a journey. They hope for a structure built on a series of twists and turns that leads to a new awareness where significant problems are resolved. This doesn’t mean structure depends on character-based stories. It does mean we need to structure even a straightforward presentation of information according to the principles of good storytelling. Information is always meted out in ways that build, pique, and then satisfy our audience’s interest.

The treatment

Finally, it’s time to write the video treatment. This includes your goal and audience analysis, and the structured creative concept.

Every successful treatment solution is unique. It results from the time, thought and care you put into asking the right questions then waiting, searching, and being available to the right answers. It begins with a solid relationship with your client and ends with a solid relationship with your audience.

The treatment now is your vehicle for communicating with the client and the guide for developing a successful presentation.

Through your talk, you’ll provide information. However, you really want your audience to do something with that information. Even if it’s only that they think about what you’ve said and then smile. So many great presentations go off the rails because the speaker concentrates on what they’ll say, without having spent sufficient time on why. It’s vital that you know what you want your audience to do. Answer that question before anything else. Then build everything in your presentation from that base. For instance, you might want your audience to:

1. Know more about health and safety in the workplace, (you inform) so that they create a better environment for everyone working there (they act);

2. Understand Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) better (you inform) so that they can support their family or friend who has recently been diagnosed (they act);

3. Gain a better understanding of the wonderful work done by your charity (you inform), so that they donate to your organisation (they act);

4. Understand a film better (you inform) so that they can better answer questions about it on an exam (they act);

5. Be very clear about your political Party’s policy platform on Aged healthcare, (you inform) so that your audience of elderly people vote for you or your Party in the next election (they act).

For All Speeches and Short Talks, Answer These Questions

(1) Is your role to inform, persuade or entertain – or all three?

(2) What is the key objective of your talk? Write it out in a few words. For example, you might write: I’m giving this talk about _________ to _________ because I want them to:___________________.

In that last, very important, part of the sentence you must know what it is you want people to do. Two examples are:

1. I’m giving this talk about AIDS to the local Rotary Club because I want to raise money for a new hospice program.

2. I’m giving this talk about the new Occupational Health and Safety legislation to senior hospital administrators because I want them to develop appropriate programs to protect Nurses’ safety, state-wide.

Once you know what you want people to do, and why, it will be much easier for you to brainstorm the content of your talk. Your next step is to spell out clearly what you want the audience to do, how, and in what timeframe.

For example, if you’re keen to recruit more volunteers to help your organisation, instead of saying: “we desperately need more volunteers”, provide information about a definite task, a time and a place where they can help with that task. That can be much more motivating to your audience than a vague claim that you need volunteers. Why? People can easily see themselves cleaning up one beach on one Sunday morning with lots of other people. So spell it out.

If you want their money. Say so. Tell people about your amazing achievements, all done with minimal government help. Then spell out very clearly that the new building renovations will cost $120,800 because you’ve secured a special in-kind donation from Company X – valued at $Y. Then be even more explicit. You need to raise that amount in three months. Ideally, you and your group will have organized raffle tickets or some tangible means to raise money. If not, it might be that you’re looking for sponsors whose names will be placed on a special plaque.

If your talk has been about passing on knowledge – eg how to set up a small business – you need to be very clear and specific about how your listeners can learn more. Have some hand-out material for them as a follow up guide to more study, books (preferably yours) and multi media resources. Apply what you’ve told them in your talk: if you gave people an outline of the planning process, you could tell them to “start this very day with the first part of my plan.”

Then, because you’re a lovely person, you’ll tell them again what the first three steps were. Finally, let people know that you are available by e-mail or at a particular organisation to work with them through any point that wasn’t clear. Not everything in life is about marketing. Please don’t finish your presentation by blatantly ‘selling’ your advanced courses and your books and so on. By all means, include that sort of information as part of your introduction, and as part of hand-out material.

It’s interesting to realize just how important the skill of negotiating is to CIOs. Sure, we all know about the importance of information technology, but when you think about it, we spend a great deal of our time negotiating no matter if it is with vendors, other departments, or even members of our IT team. Since we do so much of this, we should always be looking for ways to get better at it…

3 Ways To Become A Better Negotiators

First off, when we dive into a negotiation be it with a vendor or with someone who works for our firm, all too often we just start things off with a vague idea about what we’d like to accomplish. We know that we need to create a deal, but we’re not 100% what that deal is going to look like. However, we believe that we’ll recognize it when we see it.

What this mean to you as the person with the CIO job is that before your next negotiation starts, you really need to do some homework. By taking the time to prepare for a negotiation, you’ll have an advantage over the person that you’ll be negotiating with. Doing your homework can be as simple as coming up with a plan for what you want to propose to the other side. When you do this, the next step is for you to highlight the key details in your plan that you want to make sure that are part of the deal that you reach.

When we are negotiating with someone, all too often it can be easy to assume that they have more power than they really do. They may represent a big company or a powerful internal department. We need to take a step back and realize that they are just a peer – no more, and no less. If you can see them as someone just like you, it can remove a great deal of the intimidation that they may be presenting to you and you can focus on getting what you want from them.

Finally, don’t worry if what you are asking for has never been done before. Hey, there always has to be a first time, right? Make your case and explain to the other side how things will work. If they still seem nervous about agreeing to a deal, you can create checkpoints that will allow them to determine if the deal is being implemented in the way that they agreed to.

What All Of This Means For You

At the heart of what it means to be in the CIO position is the ability to communicate well. One form of communication that we all need to take the time to master is that of negotiation. Since we negotiate so often and with so many different types of people we need to get better at doing this.

There are three ways that we can become better negotiators. The first is to make sure that we always show up prepared to negotiate – we need to do our homework. Make sure that you see the person that you’ll be negotiating with as a peer – they do not have any special powers. Finally, just because something has never been done before does not mean that it can’t be done now.

As a CIO, you never seem to have enough time to get everything done. When you are trying to decide where to spend your time, learning to become a better negotiator is one thing that will be on your plate. Among all of the other things that you have to do, this is a good way to spend your time. Time spent becoming a better negotiator is time well invested.