For the first time at Leeds Digital Festival, we didn’t put on an ostensibly marketing-based event. Instead, we arranged ‘Get to the Point’, which is based around a Japanese presentation style called Pecha Kucha, where speakers have a limited time and number of slides, to speak on a subject.
For 7 years I was the co-founder of Bettakutcha (the name was a purposeful play on Pecha Kutcha), but I left that when I launched The Marketing Optimist back in 2016.
The full return to face-to-face events at this year’s Leeds Digital Festival brought me back to the idea of really quick talks, and the introduction of constraints, as a way to share ideas. And,‘Get to the Point’ was born.
The rules of ‘Get to the Point’ are simple:
- 20 slides
- 15 seconds each slide
- No sales pitches
The event’s simplicity, and set of constraints, are what makes Get to The Point so compelling. These are the only rules our speakers had. Beyond this, they could talk about any subject they like.
And these rules appear to be the making of the talks we got on the night, as you’ll see from the videos we made of all the talks.
As a curveball we also had two Random Slide Challenges which are only 10 slides, 2.5 minutes long with slides no one has seen. They are always really entertaining.
Simplicity at it’s best
I didn’t connect the dots before we did ‘Get to the Point’, but it really is the embodiment of how The Marketing Optimist works. Marketing is full of fluff, hype and data overload which actually I think clients don’t really need or want. They want us to get to the point and deliver the marketing campaigns and results that will drive their business forward without using language they don’t understand, talking about pie-in-the-sky technologies they can’t use and chasing objectives that don’t make any difference to their businesses.
We’ll be putting on more Get to The Points events, so if you’d like to talk, please email richard@marketingoptimist.co.uk
Here are all the fabulous 5-minute talks we had at ‘Get to the Point’, I really hope you love them as much as we did on the night.
