The art of f**king presentation.

Cameron Naidoo
3 min readOct 27, 2020

I pride myself in talking, expressing my ideas and cramming an eloquent sell in the form of a magical journey.

My many years as a creative has taught me all about the art of bullshit which gave me great benefit in my many years as an entrepreneur, which translated to the simple art of not giving a f**k. You see, I enjoy solving problems, but the majority of posed problems already have solutions…all you need to do is dig, find and reveal it in a freshly spirited presentation, dressed in Dolce, smelling like Paco…that’s a metaphor for a good looking presentation that doesn’t smell like a deuce.

The art of presentation is actually all about finding a connection with your audience, something relatable…if the audience is young with a head full of hair, use the slang kids are using today without making yourself look like a fool or at risk of being called ‘malume’ during the Q&A sesh. If the audience is older, you can be yourself, I highly doubt that they’re Amish and they would know about amazing discoveries like Facebook and Insta, don’t even bother mentioning TikTok to them…it’s the sound a clock makes.

But…connection or no connection, what you’re selling needs to be good, it needs to be the ‘buzzconanas’ (that’s a made up word but you get the gist), sound like the dogs and look so delicious that they’d want to stick a fork in NOW, cause it’s sizzling yo.

Be on trend with design, nobody likes a Windows 98 ppt presso, in-fact if you’re using Powerpoint to build your presentation…this post will self destruct in 5 seconds for you. You need limitless boundaries and the ability to experiment with transparent background videos, amazing transitions done in After Effects and none of those pre-composed slide transitions with applause sound effects, why do we even need a round of applause sound effect? You need to make your audience believe that work was put in, after all, you’re selling…they don’t need to buy.

In 2019, together with my business partner, we pitched our tech solution in one of the world’s largest tech conferences in San Francisco. What an amazing experience, the pressure in the weeks leading to the big trip, the back and forth, using phrases like, ‘that’s so shit’ to our creatives and fighting for business class tickets with our other partner that stayed back home. It was my biggest presentation to date, these are where companies like Snap, Lime, Bird and other big boys displayed their tech for funding in prior years. We needed something so slick, epic and simplistic…I remember the creative team (lead by myself) putting weeks of work into the presentations that we would take on our trip only for me to thrash everything on our 18 hour flight there…it was business class, I had reason.

This propitious action changed the game for us, when we walked around the battlefield on the first day, changing the presentation in its entirety was the best decision I ever made. We stole eyes like NBC Universal, Walmart and many others…which is a story for another post.

My point being…don’t over think it, keep it simple, keep it slick and keep it real. Entertainment value comes from your connection and relatable content. The first step is them liking you, the presenter, the next step is them liking your sales pitch.

There’s a lot more on this topic but i didn’t want to blow my load this early on.

Word.

More on www.cameronnaidoo.co.za

--

--

Cameron Naidoo
0 Followers

Cameron Naidoo is the founder and creative partner of anti-traditional creative agency, Guerilla JHB and CPT.