Denuo - denuology.com

There is a monster that haunts the world of business, and it rears its ugly head especially in the world of marketing. We all know of its existence, and we all call it up from time to time. Yet we dare not speak its name, for fear that it might destroy us—its very creator.

This monster is immediately recognizable: it’s the PowerPoint presentation that has been assembled from disembodied slides of dead presentations. Used as its building blocks, these slides come from everywhere and anywhere. You know what I’m talking about…

“Let’s see, I can just drop in the company vision slide, copy over that ’10 trends to watch slide,’ a placeholder here, and oh, where is that slide that shows spending by sector—yeah, the yellow one? That can go right here.”

We’ve all done this. I’m guilty too. I admit it.To keep ourselves here in Denuo honest, however, we call out presentations like these. The content, when taken altogether, usually doesn’t make all that much sense. The slides are poorly formatted—different fonts and color schemes, animations and images. They look like what they are: roughly stitched together abominations of mismatched body parts. And so, in Denuo, we call these presentations what they are. Frankensteins.

I don’t mean Frankenstein in the Mary Shelley Modern Prometheus way. The metaphoric creature in the novel is intelligent, articulate and sensitive. I mean Frankenstein in the Boris Karlov, Phil Hartman ‘Fire Bad’ kind of way—with bolts sticking out of its neck and a flat head.And just as the ambitious doctor brings his monster to life by zapping it with The Great Ray, we do the same with our digital atrocities when we click ‘Slide Show > View Show.’ It’s Alive!I’m not suggesting that we should never re-use slides. Of course we should. But there is a huge difference between incorporating ideas contained in other presentations and the straight CTRL-C – CTRL-V. The former is prudent and responsible. The latter is the business equivalent of pillaging graves for spare body parts.

In the long run, crudely Frankensteining (it works as a verb, too) decks together serves nobody’s interest. So I encourage you to join me. Pick up your torch and your pitchfork and recognize these crimes against nature for what they are. Only when we acknowledge the existence of the Frankenstein presentations and call them by their rightful name will the world be free of these thought monsters.