Bored with PowerPoint? Try Prezi

Over the years TED has hosted some of the best speakers from a diverse set of fields. Ideas presented at TED Talks are often life changing. TED Speakers are outstanding not only for their ideas, but also for their carefully chosen words, passionately constructed arguments, heartfelt sentences, pauses, and for their presentation styles. Many such memorable presentations were created using Prezi, a cloud based presentation tool that is redefining the way we present our ideas.

So what is Prezi?

According to company’s website, ‘Prezi is a virtual whiteboard that transforms presentations from monologues into conversations: enabling people to see, understand, and remember ideas.’ We all remember the famous quote from Arthur Brisbane: A picture is worth a thousand words. Imagine the power of a large canvas that can accommodate hundreds of images and text lines and yet delivers an idea or a story seamlessly through a single window. Unlike PowerPoint, Prezi captures content in a spatial context making it captivating for audience. This is particularly helpful when you want to engage your audience through a story telling experience. The website claims, ‘with Prezi, you move seamlessly from brainstorming your ideas to presenting them. Create a more cinematic and engaging experience and lead your audience downs a path of discovery.’

According to Wikipedia, ‘Prezi employs a Zooming User Interface (ZUI), which allows users to zoom in and out of their presentation media, and allows users to display and navigate through information within a 2.5D or parallax 3D space on the Z-axis.

My tryst with Prezi began a couple of months ago while doing a short course from Stanford on Design Thinking. At first sight it reminded me of Adobe Flash. I was completely bowled over with the style and format of Prezi presentations. Later I learnt Prezi is developed in Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR and built on top of Django. It is therefore compatible with most modern computers and web browsers, and tablet devices. I also learnt Stanford uses Prezi quite often for delivering their course lectures.

Like most of you I too am a diehard PowerPoint person. It took a couple of weeks before I could sync in with the philosophy of this creative tool. I decided to give it a try. A friend of mine who was also doing the same course helped me a great deal. We ended up doing all our assignments using Prezi.

One of  my early Prezis during the Design Thinking Course: 

What I like most about Prezi is its ability to surprise the audience on every click. There is always a new trick hidden somewhere, a sense of anticipation as what is next and that compounds the fun. Though Prezi was not developed in the US, it is a hot shot start up today in the Silicon valley. The software was developed by three Hungarian men Péter Árvai, Szabolcs Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy. The word prezi is the Hungarian short form of presentation.

When should you use Prezi?

Prezi boasts 26 million registered users and adding over a million new users every month. During the first six months of the year over 500 million Prezis viewed online. As such Prezi can be used for most of your routine presentations. And if you enjoy adding a bit of creative touch and fun to your presentations then Prezi is certainly for you. However after spending a couple of months on the software I have developed my own code of guidelines on when Prezi works best and perhaps when not. I would certainly not use Prezi to show how my sales figures going southwards month on month in my sales monthly review meeting with boss. I would rather use simple static charts to present the facts and figures and avoid drawing further attention to my creativity. However, I would definitely use Prezi to brainstorm ideas, present growth story, showcase achievements, announce new products, or to simply tell a story.

Why should a marketer care?

Marketing managers are often challenged with building presentations. Be it a product presentation or a corporate overview, be it a client presentation or HR deck, marketers are asked for help. Prezi offers a fresh breath of air to marketing fraternity. Imagine you are able to review, comment, and edit the work of your creative agency or able to brainstorm a launch idea with your product team in real time. Fun to use, rich text, high quality vector graphics and images, easy to embed audio and video links, social media enabled and easy to share features makes the software worth a try.  

Pricing model 
Prezi offers flexible and affordable subscription based pricing including a basic version for free. I have been using the cloud based free version that serves my purpose. The only catch for the free version is your work will be visible in public. It has two paid license model starting at $59 a year.  

Here’s a Prezi you would love:

How Coca Cola became digital marketing rock stars!

 

Prezi Tutorial

The only true drawback of Prezi is it takes a little bit of time to learn –getting used to. But if you want to make your presentation fun, engaging, and classy it is worth give it a shot.

Ready to zoom into Prezi?

Look forward to hear your views, stories, and experience.