Slide Tips: Clinton Commits Death by Powerpoint (by Rick Altman)

We bring you an extra Slide Tips this week – an article by Rick Altman with some timely analysis of a presentation from Hillary Clinton.
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As part of her narrative on being the more electable candidate, the campaign for Senator Hillary Clinton distributed a PowerPoint slide deck to Democratic members of the House of Representatives on May 9, to be viewed, she hopes, by many uncommitted super delegates.

I wish the campaign had hired a presentations coach. If Hill & Bill Inc. had sought my advice, at a minimum, I would have pushed for an entirely different approach to the design and execution of this self-running presentation. But if I’m being completely honest, I would have advised them against sending out the slide deck at all.

Those of us who do not work in and around the capitol rotunda did not get to see the actual slides, we just saw low-resolution representations. But there were enough pixels for us to conclude that Senator Clinton did indeed succumb to Death by PowerPoint.

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The slides contained a weak attempt at branding, via a slide header that contained the campaign logo. Beyond that, however, the slides exhibited a near-total lack of cohesion and design. Let us count the ways…

• Headlines shout at you in all caps and all have underlines. I can only wonder how many congressional aides clicked on them, expecting to be taken somewhere.
• The headline isn’t even a headline – it’s more like a running header. The slides do not actually contain true headlines.
• Photo use is haphazard with one photo of the senator stuffed into the lower-left corner on two different slides and then a non-descript and incongruous photo of the capitol building dropped onto another slide.
• The table on Slide 4 is too much for any busy professional to deal with and the pac-man chart next to it does nothing to illuminate.
• We’re not sure where the bar graphs on Slides 6-7 came from, or the pie chart on Slide 8, but they are clearly pasted images. How do we know this? Because on all three slides, the images were pasted onto the slide on top of the text! It is particularly egregious and embarrassing on Slide 8.
• Slide 9 lacks any sort of punch befitting a concluding slide. It repeats the photo from Slide 2, repeats the running header, and offers a concluding sentence that appears to have been massacred by a committee on political correctness. Slide 9 also displays the line “Paid for by Hillary Clinton for President.” We hope they didn’t pay much for it.

As I said, we did not see the actual slide deck, so we cannot say for sure whether the Clinton team attempted to create builds to sequence some of the chunkier data, like the charts and graphs. If we give her content creators the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did create builds for the more dense slides, then they are guilty of creating no navigational assistance whatsoever for the viewers working through the slides. In other words, as they click through a build, they would have no way of knowing when that slide’s sequenced information was concluded.

The Makeover

There is nothing in the original slide deck to move someone to take action – there is only an appeal to the intellectual component of the argument, and as we all know, that is rarely enough to compel someone to action.
The irony in all of this is that this visually unappealing and unemotional slide deck was put together by the same campaign that created a killer website, replete with thousands of excellent photos. In about 90 minutes, I was able to produce an entire makeover of the slides, relying just on low-res screen grabs of website photos.

I did not concern myself too much with a slide master or a color scheme, as I knew the layout of each slide would be determined by the photo I chose for it. But I did set a standard for typeface (Verdana) and size (28 for titles, 20 for text). The other common element I employed is a favorite technique for helping blend text with a photo—the gradually changing transparent fill. Over areas that need less contrast and a darker background, I create a black rectangle and set its transparency to go from 0 (solid black) to 100% (completely transparent). I then set the text over the less transparent part.
You can see this effect in the first “We must fight for those seats” slide and the “Fighting for Seniors” slide.

The remake of the table slide was the most arduous, requiring first a photo with sufficient open space and then a trip into my image-editing software to blur out the background. As is my usual practice, once I create a table of data, I promptly ungroup it so I can better sequence it (PowerPoint’s animation for tables is pathetic).

Still Not Good Enough

While I think that the makeover is much better than the original effort (if you can call it “effort”), there is still a fundamental disconnect that is taking place here with this campaign to appeal to super-delegates.

In short, this message should not have been created as slideware; it should have been a PDF document. Without a live person advocating these positions, the bulleted content is insufficient for fleshing out the argument, in the original slide deck or the improved one.

Clinton’s arguments are too nuanced to be made by static bullet slides, especially poorly designed ones. They require deeper discussion and development, and if that is not going to be made by a live presenter, it needs to be made by printed words. This deliverable should have been a completely formatted document, created in InDesign or Xpress, or at a minimum, Publisher, with evocative photos, fully-formulated paragraphs, and integrated data charts. The whole thing should have been RIPed to a PDF file with relevant links to URLs for yet deeper analysis.

The data and the argument are potentially compelling, but I score this as a missed opportunity for the New York Senator…