We can't find the internet
Attempting to reconnect
Win over clients by enhancing your remote pitches
YouTube - Watch this post's supporting video.
Winning clients can take a lot of time and effort. But there might be a way for you and your agency to do a better job by leveraging remote video enhancements.
If you can communicate clearly enough on Zoom, you might not have to fly your whole team out to meet your client six times as part of your pitching process!
Video != Powerpoint
Powerpoint and Keynote decks are great when you’re in the room with the client. You can even export them as a PDF so they have something to take away.
But when you’re on video, the worst thing you can do is show a standard slide deck.
This isn’t a corporate meeting room, remote video is a completely different medium.
The cornerstone of remote video is not what you might expect
What is one tool that will instantly elevate your pitch above all of your competitors?
A teleprompter.
It’s a screen that you ‘look through’ directly through the camera lens.
So you can keep confident eye contact throughout your presentation.
And with a teleprompter you can put your talking points directly in your eye line. You can be confident you won’t forget anything you have to say.
With CueCam Presenter, your content follows the teleprompter.
Your cue cards aren’t just words for you to read, they’re video cues, they bring in animated titles and graphics, you can switch to a demo on your desktop with zero fumbling.
It’s like having a production team.
Highlight and annotate with Video Pencil
Use your iPad to draw on your content as you present. You can use it as a laser pointer, spotlight an area or draw arrows as you talk.
We already have a deck, can we still use it?
Of course. If you’ve already assembled your graphics in a deck, you can import it directly into CueCam as slides, except now you can appear picture-in-picture over the top.
Just export it as a PDF and use CueCam’s Import PDF feature.
You can bring in your layouts or if you built the deck in Keynote or Powerpoint you can bring it in as separate elements to make a presentation that is more optimised for remote video, minimising text and bullet points, maximising visual impact while you express your ideas verbally.
Your brand
CueCam makes it easy to brand your presentation.
That doesn’t just mean adding a cheesy overlay with your logo in the corner (although you can do that if you want to).
It means tweaking your presentation’s design system with your own fonts and colours so that each card will reinforce your brand while you iterate on your content, and will let your client’s brand shine at the right moments.
Case Study - From pitch deck to CueCam presentation
Here’s an example of a pitch deck used by a digital agency to win a large client.
It follows a classic strategic structure
Intro → Problem → Insight → Solution → Execution → Rollout
But it’s made to go on a projector, or be emailed or printed not a video presentation.
The first page is a cover or something to leave on the screen as the audience filters into the room. Do we need this in a remote presentation? No. Or maybe you can put it in the Zoom waiting room.
“In the Room Today” is also a little redundant in a video call. In this case, I’d encourage each person to introduce themselves on camera so that everybody understands who’s part of the agency and who are people from the client company. Or get everybody in the team to add (DigitasLBi) to their display name.
You certainly don’t need big white screens like this.
This is the easiest thing in the world to bring into CueCam. But instead of filling the screen with white space, you can do something a bit nicer.
Like this.
I created an overlay for the document in Sketch
And added that into CueCam via the Doc sidebar, where I also picked the right font and background colour for the brand.
It’s easy to make big titles with CueCam. Just use the layout picker and add the title.
BUT, this doesn’t totally match the brand, which uses a different colour for the full stop.
When this is important, you can always just use an image.
Something like this calls for some animation. And I think it’s time to become part of the video again.
I recreated this image in Keynote as an animation. First I separated it into a stack of discs using masking and a filled circle for each group.
Then I put it together in Keynote.
Then brought it into CueCam and split it across multiple cards to make each appear as it is described.
Something like this is easy to turn into a table in CueCam.
But I think it works better across two cards, using colour.
Animating a short clip like this would create huge impact and would be reusable across multiple decks, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.
These brand assets are beautiful
But I think they’d be cooler on video if they appeared in sequence! See how I’ve put the transition time to zero to keep things snappy.
The decks gets pretty complex as the pages go on, but it’s often broken up by full screen images which work well for video.
There are quite a few pages like this. That’s a lot of text. I would edit this down as much as possible and provide references instead. I would dispense with the body copy on the left here, for example.
Here I’ve grabbed the image and added some notes.
Alternatively you could get the background image and use CueCam’s quotation feature. I generated a blurred chef in a kitchen background using CueCam’s “Generate Background...” feature, then I blurred it an dimmed it in Sketch and used the Expert design system to make the text appear over the image instead of being on a solid background.
This is a big deck and there’s a lot more to say.
You can see me quickly go through the rest of this deck with some ideas by watching the accompanying
">live stream.