A few months ago, I innocently agreed to speak at the E-Patient Connections 2009 Conference. I say “innocently” because I didn’t know what I was getting into. It turns out that I somehow agreed to do a Pecha Kucha presentation. How hard could that be? Well, it was one of the most difficult presentations I’ve ever had to prepare. This is despite the fact that a Pecha Kucha presentation is only 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Minor detail though, you get only 20 slides and each slide is on screen for 20 seconds. After that, it advances automatically. No mercy. You don’t get to control it. If you want to see more about this format and see some great examples, check out the website dedicated to Pecha Kucha.

My topic was Marketing with Meaning as it applies to pharma, which I’ve talked about here before in a three part post ( 1, 2, 3). After much preparation, I felt I was finally ready. I was the last to go and, because it would have been too easy otherwise, there was a major glitch with my slides. Instead of seeing the slides I supplied them and checked the day before, I saw “slightly” edited slides that had all the titles cut off or otherwise misformatted. Sometimes this resulted in nonsensical statements and, at other times,  the results were quite amusing. Either way, I had to improv my way through not just this difficult format, but also the additional challenge of a little mystery every time a new slide appeared.

If you want a copy of the ACTUAL slides, as they were supposed to appear, you can download them here. You’ll see the titles and, therefore, slides make a lot more sense this way. This also includes my speaker notes as well.

Without further adieu, here’s my presentation:

In the end, it worked out fine and I was told my presentation was even better because I had to fight through the slide format issue. Of course, I think I should be insulted by this because no one saw my presentation the “right” way so they couldn’t actually make this comparison. But, hey, I’ll take it.

You can dig through the Twitter hashtag feed for the conference to see everything discussed and you can find the feedback that I received as well (I’m afraid to look). The hashtag was #epatcon and I’m @jonmrich.

Here are a few photos from my talk as well. (Photo credit to E-Patient Connections/Kru Research)

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Here’s the presentation on SlideShare. Click through to see the notes for each slide.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. How Marketing with Meaning Can Save Pharma — Part 2
2. How Marketing with Meaning Can Save Pharma — Part 1
3. How Marketing with Meaning Can Save Pharma — Part 3