Al Gore’s Real Inconvenient Truth, the Wizards at Duarte Design

Extra! Interview with Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design and the new presentation book Slide:ology

The Meeting Planners podcast source for what’s new and exciting in meetings and events industry!

Mike McAllen interviews Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design and the new presentation book Slide:ology. Buy it!!! Presentation Zen writer Garr Reynolds said about Slide:ology “it’s the best book on the art (and science) of creating and delivering presentations with the help of multimedia written to date.”

Duarte Design also were the designers of the Oscar winning presentations for Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth movie and talks Mr. Gore gives. Nancy talks with Mike McAllen about Duarte Design, Slide:ology and working with Al Gore.

We hope you enjoy it.

Transcripts

Female: You are listening to the Meetings Podcast with Mike McAllen, Jon Trask and Tom Hillmer. The Meeting Planner podcast source for what’s new and exciting in the meetings and events industry. The information and opinions expressed in this podcast are of Mr. McAllen, Mr. Trask and Mr. Hillmer and are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of their past, present or future employers.

Please send in your question and comments to MeetingsPodcast@gmail.com and make sure to visit our website for pictures, video and show notes at www.MeetingsPodcast.com

Mike McAllen: Hi, this is Mike McAllen with MeetingsPodcast.com. Today, we have a very exciting interview with Nancy Duarte. Her company is called Duarte Design. Her husband and her founded it and their claim to fame which is not really a claim to fame. It is what they’re famous for. They did the slide – they produced the slide presentation for Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and they have a lot of very cool clients and they’re doing a lot of cool stuff at Duarte Design. Her husband founded the company. She just wrote a book called Slide:ology which Presentation Zen book and blog writer Gar Reynolds called, “My favorite presentation book of all time,” which is a pretty cool quote. You can pick up the book probably anywhere at Barnes and Nobles but you can also get it off of our website, MeetingsPodcast.com right on the front page there. I really recommend picking it up. It will really help your presentations or your client’s presentations or somebody you know who does presentation.

A little bit about Nancy, she passionately pursues the presentation development and design niche. They own one of the largest design firms in Silicon Valley. Duarte Design is one of the few agencies in the world focused solely on presentations whether they are delivered in person, online or via mobile – a mobile device. Nancy’s 20 years of experience working with global companies and thought leaders has influenced the perception of some of the world’s most valuable brands in many of humanity’s common causes. So I was very lucky to go and talk to her and I hope you enjoy the interview.

Hi, Nancy.

Nancy Duarte: Hi.

Mike McAllen: Thank you for meeting with me.

Nancy Duarte: Thank you.

Mike McAllen: And I thought we would first ask you a little bit about your company, how you got started and I’ll try to roll it along here.

Nancy Duarte: So it’s interesting even though I own a majority now, my husband actually founded the business in 1987 and he started it right when the desktop publishing revolution was starting and he has this big vision and I was working my butt off at a “real job” and I was like telling him, “Get a real job.” And I was sending out his resume and he was like, “Oh, it’s a vision I have. I really think we can make this into a valuable business.” And so, when I was pregnant with my son, I picked up the phone because I came from sales and marketing background and tried to pitch his business because I was going to show him and I pitched his business and we won three accounts right away.

Mike McAllen: Nice.

Nancy Duarte: Big accounts.

Mike McAllen: Nice, nice.

Nancy Duarte: One at Apple, Tandem which is now HP and NASA. And so, ever since then, I have just been on the phone and selling it. And you know, he always wanted to work from home in his underwear like any guy does and so once it started to grow into this bigger entity, you know, it just wasn’t as fun for him anymore. So he still works here. He runs finance and IT and I run strategy and the customer and kind of, I mean the ambassador of the companies though.

Mike McAllen: Nice. So unless you have all the glass panels here so – his office, is it like [00:03:29] off so he can work in his underwear?

Nancy Duarte: No, he doesn’t work in his underwear anymore. He doesn’t get to that. He has to get to work now.

Mike McAllen: And so, we’re both going to talk a little bit about your Chico office because we’re both from Chico area.

Nancy Duarte: Yes. So we opened up this little office in Northern California in Chico in the Dot-Com craze because you know, office base per square foot was 20 bucks a month.

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: Per square foot which meant we were going to – you know, get in the – get to have $1 million a year and …

Mike McAllen: Yes.

Nancy Duarte: Overhead, right and so, we what we did is we placed a little ad in the local Enterprise Record and saying, “Hey Bay area entities looking to open a [00:04:08] office” and at the time, Rocky Mountain Chocolate was possibly going to get acquired by Whitman and the whole Creative Services Department came to us on a silver platter. We got this …

Mike McAllen: Really.

Nancy Duarte: … place, the people, everything.

Mike McAllen: Wow.

Nancy Duarte: And so we went from not having an office to suddenly having an office of five people who worked closely together already so worked up really well.

Mike McAllen: Nice. That’s great.

Nancy Duarte: So now, our Chico office is like our right arm. I mean, we can’t live without it. A lot of our Cisco work is done at that office.

Mike McAllen: Oh, fantastic.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, so we don’t have any local clients in Chico whereas Sacramento. It’s all work from our main clients down here.

Mike McAllen: Great.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, great people up there.

Mike McAllen: You’re outsourcing but to Chico.

Nancy Duarte: Yes. Anyway, yes.

Mike McAllen: Plus it gives you guys an excuse to go to Chico.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, my in-laws still live there and my daughter lives there so …

Mike McAllen: Oh, great, great, great, great, yes.

Nancy Duarte: Yes.

Mike McAllen: So, I guess one of the big questions is The Inconvenient Truth Presentation and wondered how – if you could give a little background on how that, how you got involved in that and …

Nancy Duarte: Yes, it’s funny. We were working with Mr. Gore, for I think three years before it was even the hope of a movie, right? So he came to us, was referred by Apple because he was on the Board of Directors at Apple and he needed somebody to help him with his presentation. So some of this slides were still in 35 mm format because he had brushed off an old deck that he used to give in the 70s.

Mike McAllen: Wow.

Nancy Duarte: And he – I think with, you know, his own personal journey, he wanted to go back to what he was passionate about and this was it. So for about three years, we worked with him, and you know, help build out the deck and he delivered it. Well, at least a thousand times before the movie happens. So by the time it came around to be in the movie, he knew his material and I guess Laurie David, who I thought Larry David who wrote Seinfeld and stuff. She saw him presenting and wanted to make it into a movie and when I first heard that, I laughed. I’m like, “Who in the world is going to see a movie about a science show?” And it’s kind of sad that I felt that, okay? I was like, “No, nobody is going to see it.” And then here, it all just happened. So, it’s really interesting. It has been – he’s a great client and he still comes in and we still are working with him to this day because he’s translating it and plus all the new regional weather events and all those things so we still are doing an enormous amount of work with him.

Mike McAllen: So that was – so you – are you doing – constantly, are you updating it?

Nancy Duarte: Yes.

Mike McAllen: Or if that movie is on that giant wide screen, and then – so does he have different ones or different size.

Nancy Duarte: So we actually – he still works in Kino and at one time, when he was training all the other people to give the message, we converted everything from Kino to PowerPoint but yes, he works in mostly three by four aspect ratios, sometimes 16 by 9 but his gigs, hundreds of gigs and material.

Mike McAllen: Wow.

Nancy Duarte: And he just moves around and he reshuffles the deck depending on the audience that he’s talking to but we make sure that whatever area he’s going into, he has very relevant content for that area.

Mike McAllen: And do you guys do – do you go – do …

Nancy Duarte: Sometimes.

Mike McAllen: … you have operators that go with him?

Nancy Duarte: Yes, sometimes we do. We went with him to the Oprah Show so that was really fun. My employee got to meet Oprah and be on the stage there with Mr. Gore during rehearsals and stuff. It’s really fun for him and so we’ve gone to different conventions and not that much. Just a few times where there was going to be last minute changes or some technical things that they thought would be particularly or technically challenging.

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: And we helped him out, yes.

Mike McAllen: Wow, fantastic.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, it’s fun.

Mike McAllen: So, let’s see. What else was I going to ask you – what is the process like working with him. Is it – does he.

Nancy Duarte: It’s funny. You know, he is probably one of the most gracious customers we worked with which is funny. So, yes, it’s kind of weird. Here was this powerful global leader who treats us with enormous respect compares to these 22-year-old CEOs who think they own the world, right? And they are telling us what to do. So, he’ll – we’ll propose ideas and he’ll sit and he’ll really just quietly, he’ll think about it for 30 seconds and really consider it and say, “Yes, that’s a great idea,” or, “Yes, I like that. Let’s modify it like this,” or say, “No” or whatever but he’s very considerate that we’re the professionals and we know what we’re doing and so we get to propose a lot of ideas and then he accepts or he doesn’t or builds on them which is really fun.

Mike McAllen: Yes. It’s a fantastic presentation. I mean, very, very cool. I mean the [00:08:13].

Nancy Duarte: Yes, thank you.

Mike McAllen: So does he do – be with them often now or is it just like he used to – you know, every time he just shoots you an e-mail and he says …

Nancy Duarte: Yes, lot of it is virtual. I’d say he only comes in a couple of few times a year now but a lot of it is over e-mail and all of that and then we’ll put it all together like maybe, we’ll get this splattering of stuff and we’ll pull it all together and then, get together and present it to him and then, he’ll pick what he likes and doesn’t like. So it’s just kind of different. Each project is a little different. It all depends on where he needs to be, where he’s headed and who he’s talking to.

Mike McAllen: Yes. You guys, you made history which is pretty fantastic.

Nancy Duarte: Isn’t that weird? I sometimes – sometimes, it doesn’t click, you know, but now, I think – now, that we’re on the other side of it and it has actually created a catalyst and a tipping point, now I feel like, if you think about it, the world hasn’t had a true hero, at least not in our generation, right?

Mike McAllen: Yes.

Nancy Duarte: And in many ways, that’s what he is. He’s a global hero and a catalyst and at least a personality or a person that we can attach to say, “Hey, this created the spark that’s changing the world.”

Mike McAllen: Yes.

Nancy Duarte: Not because a lot of other people that were doing a lot of work for a lot of years but he’s the one who kind of busted the [00:09:21].

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, so, yes.

Mike McAllen: You know, I always think it’s kind of you know, open up these big stages and do production stuff and then it gets torn down and it goes away but here you’ve done something that’s going to last.

Nancy Duarte: Right, this sort of indelible event.

Mike McAllen: It is. It’s a legacy thing. I think it’s very cool.

Nancy Duarte: Thank you. It has been very, very cool.

Mike McAllen: So that kind of switch gears then. Can you talk a little bit about the virtual content in a box? I was telling you earlier that I watched your presentation on your website, one of the presentations and that really caught my eye …

Nancy Duarte: Yes.

Mike McAllen: … able to resell a conference or …

Nancy Duarte: Yes. I think it’s a …

Mike McAllen: Because again, the content again, like I said, the stage goes down and everything goes away, you know.

Nancy Duarte: It’s a really missed revenue opportunity. If your content at your event is the primary focus, if you take an event like TED – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ted.com. They are masterful at packaging it all up either online or – and they actually package up the DVD also and then the event lives on forever. Now, that’s awesome because their content is awesome, right?

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: So in some conferences where you just want the content to die. You know what I mean? So, when you have …

Mike McAllen: [00:10:32] likewise.

Nancy Duarte: … so Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, they do a really good job of this or they record the presenters and capture it so we actually can either capture the video or capture the audio and synchronize it with the presentations, send it out in video either DVD or on an iPod and then what’s cool about it is you can get sponsors even to also sponsor the box. So you can get their material like any of the expo material that you thought was important where sponsors are going to sponsor that and then you can actually tell the story of your conference in a controlled way so you can have your own brochure, and talk about the experience, have testimonials, point people to certain tracks because we’ll edit out the one that weren’t any good, right or it flopped and …

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: All that stuff and then you pack that, you can resell it for the same price a little bit later.

Mike McAllen: That’s fantastic …

Nancy Duarte: Yes, so it’s actually a really smart thing to do. We do it for a few people. It’s just really smart to do.

Mike McAllen: And this is a real box?

Nancy Duarte: Yes or, you know, or it’s online video.

Mike McAllen: Right, right.

Nancy Duarte: Some of it can be online but it is always nice to send something so …

Mike McAllen: Something physical.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, yes. So, sometimes it’s real DVD. Another time, it’s a password to whole environment where the ads are there, a whole experience is there like an actual event, like the event. So it’s a whole another controlled environment that they have to pay to come to or not. It just depends.

Mike McAllen: Yes, it’s a great idea.

Nancy Duarte: Yes.

Mike McAllen: Can you tell us a little bit about the green screen work thing you did.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, so what we’re finding is a lot of times, presentations now live on after just the presentation. Al Gore’s is an interesting version of that. Now, his was captured in video and so it was all there but what we’re finding is when there’s a really important presentation in your CEO of maybe it’s even the sales guys just telling – the sales manager telling the sales guys how to sell. What we’ll do is we’ll capture them and put them actually in their slides, in their slide environment with the green screen or where they’re talking to the graphics, interacting with them in some way. So it’s a really good way for training – as a training tool or just as a more compelling way to watch a presentation, you know. So we’ve hired actors to do it too where they learn the script and then they act it out and stuff too because some people are more comfortable in video.

Mike McAllen: So they’re in the presentation.

Nancy Duarte: They’re in the presentation or the presentations beside them and they talk to it, yes.

Mike McAllen: That’s a great idea.

Nancy Duarte: Yes.

Mike McAllen: And you have that, all that facility here.

Nancy Duarte: Yes. So we have a video studio in the back. It’s rigged up different ways but yes, so we’ve done some here. Depends on – if it’s above the chest, chroma green, then we do it here but if it needs to be a full seamless, then we have to go to a studio for that.

Mike McAllen: Very cool, very cool. That’s a great idea so I saw on the website that you’re in the webinars now too. Could you tell a little bit about that?

Nancy Duarte: Yes, so I actually host some and we’re actually building out a whole platform where we’ll actually be charging for some of our webinars but right now, we just create the webinars and then put them out there for free. So I’m not sure that’s that interesting of a question in the sense that we create a lot of webinar content for our clients. So we understand the difference between the Citrix platform and the Webx platform and different standard platforms, how to do the graphics for them that translate to the medium so that’s definitely a skill set that we have and then, like I said, we also were investing right now in (2.0 Webinar) platform for our own work around the book, Slide:ology so we have a lot of people wanting to do the webinars and seminars are selling out right now. So we’re actually hosting our own webinars. So right now, there is a few webinars that are really good, out free on the web and those will eventually all become actual seminars and webinars.

Mike McAllen: That’s great. So I guess we should slide into your book there, Slide:ology. I was reading this morning that Gar Reynolds of Presentation Zen called it his favorite presentation book of all time.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, I saw that.

Mike McAllen: Which is pretty cool because he is …

Nancy Duarte: Considering he’s a best-selling author, yes.

Mike McAllen: And he’s the guy that you turn to before, I guess, for presentation, you know for a book. That’s a great book you wrote.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, he has a great …

Mike McAllen: And blog too, I mean his blog.

Nancy Duarte: Love his blog.

Mike McAllen: So tell me a little bit about the book. What made you write the book and …

Nancy Duarte: I think – actually Gar is one of the people that really encouraged me to write a book. He sent me his early transcripts and said, “Nancy, I’m only covering a certain layer and I don’t plan to go into what you do.” Yes, so he really pushed me to write a book. I also started to find these young whippersnappers around that were saying, “I’m starting a presentation revolution. I’m not going to do slides the way my mom did slides,” or whatever. I said, “Wow, I have been doing slides the way, you know, anyone else has done slides for years.” So it felt – kind of felt a little bit like William Wallace at the Braveheart where he like gave up his life, you know, for this cause and never got to see the victory and it kind of felt like that. I was like, wow, if all these younger people start to say that they’re the ones who are changing the world when I’ve been doing it for 20 years. It just felt like I needed to put a [00:15:26] in the ground and be like, no, I [00:15:28] arrogant or egotistical but I felt like the book would bring enormous value and maybe create the same kind of tipping point that Mr. Gore did about global warming. I’m hoping to rid the world of putrid presentations, right?

Mike McAllen: That would be great, yes.

Nancy Duarte: I think that hopefully that the conference room is rejoicing around the world. That’s kind of what my mission was around it so, selling really, really well and they’re going to do a third run already in November and we’ve only been out since mid-August so that’s 45,000 bucks already this year and like four months so …

Mike McAllen: That’s fantastic.

Nancy Duarte: … it’s selling really, really well so and I’m actually pleased with that, yes.

Mike McAllen: And so you have a website and a blog of it along with that.

Nancy Duarte: Well, yes, it’s website blog. The blog covers either current events or just things to make you think differently about your slides but there’s also additional book material up there. So, in different pages of the books, there’s a little www in green and anytime that that’s in the book that means you can go and watch that up online either animated or there’s something to download or something. So there’s a whole separate page dedicated to just extended content around the book.

Mike McAllen: It does, yes.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, so that’s really cool.

Mike McAllen: I’ll put links in our …

Nancy Duarte: Oh that would be awesome.

Mike McAllen: So they will be able to straight over there.

Nancy Duarte: That’s cool. Thank you.

Mike McAllen: And I guess, lastly, I wanted to ask you. No, I didn’t – that’s’ not lastly. I wanted to ask you how do you get executives to buy off on the stuff because that’s, you know, I went to a presentation. I was an attendee at a conference in Dallas recently and they were rolling out their new whole executive. They had a whole new team coming and I couldn’t believe the presentations that they were putting up and this was in front of all their biggest clients and it was all the things that you don’t want to hear. And I was amazed and immediately everybody glazed over on stuff and I know that these people are high-powered people.

Nancy Duarte: Yes.

Mike McAllen: And I wonder that’s – I mean, that’s [00:17:23] how do you get to them or actually since a lot of our people that are listening are meeting planners, you know, and they are people that have our conduit to the executives. How do they sell off …

Nancy Duarte: It’s kind of interesting. They have to kind of catch the virus and understand that they could be better. It’s kind of weird. It’s like how you present yourself and your slides is kind of highly dressed right. It’s like a personal expression of your personal aesthetic and people don’t look at it that way and I look at it that way. It’s a direct reflection of you. It’s out there 20 times larger than you are, right?

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: It’s the dominant thing on the stage. You know, they probably bathed that day to get ready but they didn’t scrub their slides, right? So there’s this interesting phenomenon happening and that’s like one of the biggest questions I get is, “How do I start a revolution?” “How do I tell people about this?” And so we are planning to write an e-book to give people the tools of what the biggest barriers are, the biggest resistance executives give them. But one of the things that’s interesting about executives, they all have pretty clear temperaments, right? So there’s the dominant driver, and the highly-detailed, you know, person. There are different ways you can reach all the different temperaments and so, I think a quick study of their temperament and find what motivates them and appeal for that. So, someone who is highly relational and inspirational would probably want to look good.

Mike McAllen: Right, right.

Nancy Duarte: Right, so, you just have a little different story based on the different executive temperaments to try to get them to adopt the principles because there are different ways to appeal to the creative or the analytical, really expressive or reclusive and stuff like that so, yes …

Mike McAllen: That’s a great way or they could just buy your books, Slide:ology and just push it into the door.

Nancy Duarte: Yes, they could buy the book and hand it to them. That’s a really good idea. I didn’t event think of that.

Mike McAllen: So that would be good. So where do you see the future of all this presentation and also, is there any great new tools that people like you to use?

Nancy Duarte: I think the longer term future, I saw a great Kino that John Chambers did and they’re working really hard on telepresence technology which is making you feel like you’re in the room even though you’re across the country or the globe or whatever and I do think it will be a bit of a kind of a beam me up, Scotty thing where you actually – there’s actually a hologram of the person in the room with you or holograms of people in the room which is interesting and Cisco has been working on hard on that and they just did a really interesting presentation where it looked like three people were standing on stage but the only person really there was Mr. Chambers and this is really compelling and it’s a way [00:20:00] but I do think presentations are going to go there which kind of is – end up baby version of that, that we have today that’s emerging technology is – there’s websites now like SlideShare where you can go put your presentations up there and, you know, hop on the phone with anyone in the world and share your presentations. But the interesting thing is presentations are going to the Web either via flash and green screen and video and some of the higher end tools we do or these lower end tools like slideshow but they’re also going to device this, lots of different devices, IP phones, cell phones …

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: … iPods, you know, video iPods and iPhones and stuff like that. So, now we’re giving PowerPoint – it’s basically an [00:20:40] environment.

Mike McAllen: Yes.

Nancy Duarte: That can build lots of different things and if we had a brochure that was going to be projected and a brochure that was going to be this and handed out an event, we put a lot of care into that but the people are not putting enough care into the message and the presentation because it’s going into lots of different environments …

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: … and lots of different mediums now and so, working on the story and the visuals well and having a really beautiful visual story is more important than ever as technology advances because there is more and more and more [00:21:07] on our presentations on and so that’s where I think it’s headed. It’s going to get more virtual and more global which means we have to be clearer …

Mike McAllen: Right.

Nancy Duarte: … when we communicate.

Mike McAllen: Right, right. Well, thank you very much for talking with – I know you’re very, very busy.

Nancy Duarte: It’s great to meet you.

Mike McAllen: And thank you, thank you.

Nancy Duarte: Thank you.

Mike McAllen: Hopefully, we can talk again in a little while and …

Nancy Duarte: Yes.

Mike McAllen: Be working [00:21:28].

Nancy Duarte: Sure, that would be awesome. Thank you.

Mike McAllen: Okay.

Nancy Duarte: Okay.

Female: We appreciate and thank you for listening to the Meetings Podcast. You can find Mike McAllen at GrassShackRoad.com, Jon Trask at AlliantEvents.com and Tom Hillmer at CreativeGroupInc.com. The Meetings Podcast theme music comes from the Delgado Brothers which can be found at DelgadoBrothers.com and a special thanks goes out to RipTideGraphics.com for the audio editing of this podcast.