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If you are one of those people who come back impressed by flash presentations at trade shows and plan to use animation in your next presentation, beware! Visual tricks and razzmatazz in your presentation may just rub your audience up the wrong way. Animations can definitely add pizzazz to a marketing presentation, especially in a trade show, where the idea is to catch the visitors' gaze. Here the audience is mobile. But when you have a captive audience like in a sales and marketing presentation, you had better not distract them with flashing or zooming words on the screen!

However, animation, if used effectively can help you convey your message and communicate successfully. Animation is to a presentation what body language is to a speaker. A gesture used at the right place at the right time can convey the correct meaning of the message. Likewise, animation used appropriately can drive home the point that the speaker is trying to make. Here are some ways in which animation can help.

1. Using timed entry of text can help the speaker to direct the audience's attention away from the presentation as and when required. Quite often, you find the audience reading the text on the screen while the speaker presents.

2. Animated graphs and charts can help to accentuate important statistics, for instance, showing a year on year growth in sales with a rising block can depict the rise perfectly.

3. Animation is very useful when explaining process flows, as the speaker can synchronize the appearance of blocks in the process with the oral explanation.

4. Animation can also help the speaker use humor prudently to capture the audience's attention. An appropriate caricature inserted at the end of a dense presentation serves to lighten up the situation.

5. Animation can be effectively used to depict sales scenarios or customer interaction scenarios.

It is also important to note that animation is not liked by everyone, and for every person who likes to see animated presentations you may find three others who hate them. It is better to avoid animations when:

1. Talking about sensitive and unpleasant issues like layoffs, decline in revenues/sales etc.

2. Presenting crucial topics like pricing, terms & conditions, justifications and so on

3. Presenting to a high profile group with busy schedules, like CXOs, who would rather avoid the two seconds of animation, than borrow two seconds from some other important meeting

A good thumb rule to follow is the idea that animation serves the same purpose as gestures. Animation should allow you to focus or distract the audience's attention from the on-screen presentation, as and when you require. It should not work the other way round; that is distracting the audience from you and making them focus on the screen, while you try hard to catch their eye.

Learn more about this author, Sudeepa Nair.
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