The simplest way to keep an audience’s attention is to break a pattern. In other words, change it up.
That’s exactly what Apple did in its first all-virtual presentation to kick off the 2020 WorldWide Developers Conference.
Apple CEO, Tim Cook, walked onto the stage of an empty Steve Jobs Theater on the company’s campus in Cupertino, California. He sat on a stool to address the serious issues of race, social justice, and the Covid-19 pandemic. After speaking for about five minutes, Cook tossed the presentation to Apple’s senior vice president of software, Craig Federighi.
Federighi delivered his presentation from an entirely different studio on the Apple campus. It was the first sign that this virtual meeting would be constantly changing to keep people’s attention.
Over the next 20 minutes, five different speakers delivered parts of the presentation, describing new features on iOS 14 for the iPhone.
The rotating cast of speakers continued as updates were introduced for the iPad, Apple Watch, Mac OS, and finally, Apple’s transition from Intel chips to its own silicon.
By the end of the presentation which lasted nearly two hours, the audience saw 20 different speakers involved in Apple’s product development. No one spoke for more than ten minutes, and many of them spoke for just two minutes to keep the action moving.
People attending a virtual meeting aren’t exactly a ‘captive’ audience. Distractions are everywhere. They can ‘attend’ the meeting while checking emails or scrolling on their social media feeds. Who’s going to know?
Grabbing and holding attention is a field of study among neuroscience scholars. What they’ve learned is that the human brain gets easily bored. People tune out of a presentation in as little as ten minutes. The secret is to re-engage them.
Novelty is one way to re-engage listeners. Novelty simply means that the brain craves surprise. When the brain detects something new or unexpected, it immediately snaps back to attention. Although there are several ways of creating novel experiences in presentations, the simplest tactic is to change speakers. A new voice, a new face, and a new topic is an instant attention-getter.
The human brain is attracted to new stimuli. Social media app designers know this all too well—they create apps to give us dopamine hits in small doses. Tired of that TikTok video? Don’t worry. In a few seconds, you’ll get a new one. Addictive apps don’t leave you time to get bored.
In the same way, an engaging virtual presentation won’t leave you time to be lulled into a boring pattern. We become habituated to patterns very quickly. If your viewer sees ten PowerPoint slides in a row—all text and all delivered by the same monotone voice—they’ll tune out.
The brain is easily bored.
Keep your virtual audience engaged by taking a page from the Apple virtual presentation playbook:
- Share the stage and let others speak.
- Use visual slides with photos, images, and animations.
- Break up slides with videos (Apple’s 2020 WWDC keynote had several different videos to engage viewers).
It’s likely that we will all be holding more virtual meetings even when the economy is complexly re-opened and we can return to our places of work. Make your virtual presentations engaging to keep your audience’s attention. Rule #1: change it up.