Well-placed Presentation Audio

I was working with a group of high schoolers kids recently on their presentations for a Junior Achievement project, and their advisor asked me for help on making their pitches “more professional.”

“Anything you can recommend to them,” she said. “Transitions, sounds…”

I instinctively blurted out, “No crazy transitions or sound effects!” But later I told myself secretly that careful well-placed sound clips can actually be really awesome. I’ve long used a few in my presentation training including “Make The Logo Bigger” to kick off a discussion about logo usage, but recently good audio clips have made some other presentation appearances…

At Saatchi & Saatchi’s 7×7 event earlier this month Joe Park, CEO of Bluefly.com, gave a totally entertaining talk. To set the stage for a discussion on the attempted IPO of his first start-up Kosmo.com years ago, Joe took the audience back to 1997 courtesy of a few examples: Amazon having just gone public and Steve Jobs returning to Apple. Then Joe put up the slide below and used an audio clip that received a roar of laughter from the audience. Click to play…