Hi everyone. This is the beginning of the study week, and I just want to say that you should try to mix in some leisure amidst your revision schedule. Most of us are overtaxed by now, so if you find that your mind has decided to call it a day, it sometimes will benefit you more to take a whole day of from studying. This will allow you to come back refreshed; it sometimes requires 2 steps back to take that 1 step forward. So good luck with this!

Anyway, I have all your presentation grades already, but we're still trying to work out how to get these scores out to you. I have also compiled the feedback from the CNM staff who guested, which are supposed to go into the IVLE gradebook together with the grades. My own comments are more qualitative in nature, so I'm going to send them out by email. Since this presentation is over already, I'm also more concerned with giving you guys some tips that can be carried over to any of your presentations henceforth. So here goes:

First, all presentations should ideally open by first having a contents page. Some groups did this, while most did not. And if you do have a contents page, spend some time on it so that you can preempt your audience as to what they can expect from the presentation. This is especially important since time is short and you have a lot of material to go through. So, if your audience has already been told how the presentation will flow logically right from the beginning, this will help them to understand what you are saying a lot.

Next, when I say logically, this also refers to how you move from one slide to another. Just like in an essay, you need to close out each paragraph/slide by stating the logical link. So for example, if you have just finished going through an analysis of a client’s past advertising campaign, close out the slide by saying something like, “As we have shown, the problems with the past campaigns are ~~~. Based on this analysis, as well as from what we have gleaned from our research, we would now like to present the following creative draft to remedy these shortfalls that we have identified.” I noticed that many groups just jumped from very one section to a completely different one without warning the audience, which is extremely jarring. While I know that adding this one line here and there will eat into your time, do remember that your aim is to make your audience understand what it is you are saying, and this will definitely benefit your ability to communicate your ideas across more effectively.

When presenting, I noticed that many groups positioned all its members behind the computer even if not everyone would be presenting. This felt a little strange actually, to have so many pairs of eyes peering from that dark corner. So, what I would recommend, and which was what some groups did, is to sit those members who aren’t presenting down in the front rows. And, if all group members are presenting, it’s also ok to sit down until your turn is up. Another thing I noticed is that many groups weren’t presenting to the whole class, but only to the examiners. Well, your classmates are your audience too, so you should make eye contact with everyone single person who has come down to listen to your speech. Similarly, any materials shown in class should have been flashed to them as well.

Next, I would like to say some things about the slides’ content. First, if you are presenting graphs, please don’t speed through them. Just like the content page, please spend time explaining what all those figures and bars mean! Or, one group actually circled the relevant figures on the graph, and jumped straight into to explaining their significance, which I think is a great idea. The point here is that graphs and charts (usually) present a lot more information than bulleted points, so you need to really go through the numbers, once again, so that your audience knows what it is they are looking at. Don’t forget that they probably have never seen these before, so they need time to digest the information. And on this point, I also noticed that some groups would change the slide even before the presenter was done presenting. This is very distracting, and can be mitigated by the presenter first calling out “next slide please” as a prompt. Finally, and I make this mistake myself so I understand your difficulties, try not to include information or slides that you are not going to talk about at all. This is not only distracting, but it draws attention to the fact that you haven’t prepared well for your presentation.

Next, a word on the presentation of statistics. There is actually no need to state the tests you were using or your critical values unless you are asked to at the end. In a presentation, these details are like statistical hypotheses in a journal article: it is always left out. So when you present, rather than your alpha values, what is more important is the conclusion. i.e., “There was a significant difference between the attitudes of males and females towards the brand….” This is all you need to say IN A PRESENTATION. This being said, your written report is not a presentation, and should contain your Chi-square tests and alpha values, alright? So, understand the medium of delivery, and organize your contents accordingly. And, just a note for an advertising presentation: because it is important to know who your target audience is in order to understand your creative draft, it would have been necessary to cover the nature of your target and sampled audience in greater detail.

Lastly, I want to cover the use of 'gimmicks' in your presentation, which is great by the way, to induce some kind of interactivity with the audience in spite of the limited time and all. However, while handing out product samples and all is great, it is also important to remember to elaborate on these gimmicks. For example, in DW3, I wanted to see more being done the SIA girl (your group did an excellent job by the way, so don't take this singling out the wrong way). Think about how the air stewardesses were presented when SIA announced its tie-up with China Eastern; they may have been in the background, but they stood in a certain way, and conveyed a certain kind of image of the companies. So, this idea could have been developed further rather than just to allow what could have been the focus of attention become just another group member. Another case in point would be the Yeo's group in DW4. The drinks were handed out and then forgotten. I wish you could have seen how FLUXUS in DW3 did the same thing, but ultimately made it more meaningful to have the drink in your hands. So anyway, if you're going to do something out-of-the-ordinary, you might as well make it count, right? You can do this by relating the gimmick with your presentation objectives in order to milk the idea to the very end! Don't waste all that effort you've put in!

In summary, remember that your objective is to communicate your idea to an audience that doesn't have a clue to your presentation's content. So, always think about what information you need to give your audience systematically, so that you can lead them to agree with and understand how you got to your conclusion.

Ok, that's all from me. Your scores and the guests' comments should follow shortly. Thanks for being patient!