Who says we need our logo on every slide?

“Brand” is one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in use today. “Branding” is perhaps even more misunderstood. Many people confuse the myriad elements of brand identity with brand or branding. PowerPoint critic Edward Tufte, for example, has referred to the simple (and admittedly annoying) act of placing logos on every PowerPoint slide as “branding,” implying that branding doesn’t go much deeper than catchphrases and identity symbols. A logo, though, is but one visual symbol of a brand. The logo is an important part of the outward expression of a brand (part of brand identity), but the meaning of brand and branding goes far, far deeper than simply making one’s logo as recognizable as possible. Though logo placement itself is not branding, I do share Tufte’s distain for logos/trademarks appearing on every slide of a presentation. If you are presenting for an organization try removing logos (and other clutter) from all except the first and last slide. If you want people to learn something and remember you, then make a good, honest presentation. The logo won’t help make a sell or make a point, but the clutter it brings does add unnecessary noise and makes the presentation visuals look like a commercial. And people hate commercials or being sold to. We don’t begin every new sentence in a conversation by re-stating our name, why do we bombard people with our company logo in every slide?

It’s about them, not about you
Branding is not about how hard you can yell, how much you can interrupt people, or how much you can manipulate the market to look in a certain direction or think and feel in a certain way simply because you tell them to (over and over and over). More than anything, to me a brand is a promise and it is built on trust. And trust takes time. No brand can be built overnight no matter how much money is spent on media and marketing communications designed to get the message “out there.” Over the three-day weekend I read Brand Gap and Zag by Marty Neumeier. These are now two of my favorite books on the subject of branding (I love the simple presentation of the material as well — excellent!). I highly recommend these two books for anyone in an organization and especially for entrepreneurs and those in start-ups or small firms. Neumeier sums up “Brand” in this way:

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.”

Organizations, then, should worry less about advertising and spend more effort in making insanely great products and services that are worth talking about. That is, they should show us (prove to us) how great they are rather than just telling us how great they are through expensive media buys, and placing their identity graphics in every conceivable place, including PowerPoint slides.

When brand identity substitutes for content
No wonder logos and other visual brand identifiers have gotten such a bad rap. Just look around you. Perhaps the worst offenders of putting “branding” (using the term in the most superficial and largely incorrect sense here) and logo placement ahead of actual content are the cable news programs. For example, here is an interview (below) on The O’Reilly Factor (Fox News) with the program host Bill O’Reilly and guest Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is an Oxford professor and the author of The God Delusion. He is a very famous author in the world these days and a very popular speaker. Dawkins spoke at TED a couple of years ago (see video of TED presentation).

When (self) promotion gets in the way of content
Presumably, if you fly a bestselling author like Richard Dawkins to your show and want to discuss such a deep, complicated issue you would allot more than four minutes and forty seconds for the interview. And if your were necessarily limited to such a short segment surely you would like the guest to get a chance to do most of the talking. If the host’s objective was to get a better understanding of the guest’s ideas and arguments and allow the viewers to see those arguments then we’d have to conclude that the interview was a failure. In fact the host spoke about 75% of the time. If the goal was to promote the host and his show (and presumably sell more ads) then we can conclude that the interview was a success.

 

At no point during the 4:40 interview did you not see either Bill O’Reilly’s face or his name displayed in three large signs hovering around the guest. Why not just have guests wear Bill O’Reilly sandwich boards or at least “Factor” T-shirts? By placing guests between two large “O’Reilly Factor” signs (above) they have introduced visual elements that do not help viewers better understand the guest speaker; they have cluttered the display and turned it into a commercial. Obviously this was no accident. According to the design principle of Ockham’s Razor if we have two functionally equivalent displays — such as the display of Bill O’Reilly (right) and Richard Dawkins (left) on the TV screen — we should select the display with the fewest visual elements. One would assume that the intended function of the displays is to provide an aesthetically pleasing setting for presenters to appear and have their words heard and understood without visual distraction. But if the function of the displays (including backgrounds) are equivalent, then why not frame both presenters in displays with the fewest extraneous visual elements? Which presenter above appears in the display with the fewest visual elements?

A bit better
In this interview (below) on CNN with Paula Zahn, Richard Dawkins gets more of an opportunity to make his case. This time Dawkins spoke for about 75% of the time. This may be a better (albeit far too short) interview compared to The Factor appearance, but CNN largely suffers from same fluff and promotion-over-content problems seen in the other cable news networks. Moreover, the first time CNN’s Paula Zahn moderated a discussion about atheists and discrimination in America in January of this year, they neglected to put an atheists on the panel. Not good journalism, perhaps, but the set looked fantastic!

Get that clutter off the screen
One of my favourite comedians is Lewis Black. Below watch this short clip of him appearing on CNN and getting fed up with the extraneous graphics on the display.

See Cleaning up our act, a post I published on August 20th last year for more on the issue of on-screen clutter. You can also see the full Lewis Black interview there.

Where do we get this stuff?
We learn bad habits from many places. How many people still put two spaces after a period, for example (an old habit left over from the era of the typewriter)? I'm not sure where we learned that putting logos and other superfluous elements on every slide was a good idea; perhaps the slide master in PowerPoint made it too easy. Most companies with a PowerPoint template certainly insist that their employees use the company logo on every slide. But is this good advice? Slide real estate is limited as it is, why clutter it with logos and trademarks, footers, and so on? I don't know if the visual clutter found in many TV news broadcasts is a cause or just a symptom of a decline in visual literacy in combination with shorter attention spans. But one thing is for certain: if you want people to hear and understand your message the answer is not to add more clutter but to remove it all. As Lewis Black says, "Get that %$#@! off the screen!"

LINK
• Richard Dawkins interviews the Bishop of Oxford (34 min video)

Comments

[John Windsor]

Great riff, Garr. And in addition to not needing one's own logo on every slide, it's not necessary to put the prospect's or client's logo on every slide (as many people are conditioned to do). They don't need a reminder of what their logo looks like, or some false reassurance that this presentation is really about them (when too often it's not).

Thanks for adding the Lewis Black clip!

[ed kavanagh]

Garr that was a great piece, and i see this alot too but in my case in an academic setting. The lecturers more than often use the "university template" which features and unusually large college crest on it, I know students get a bad rep, but we still have the ability to rememeber that we are indeed sitting in a lecture hall in college, we dont need to be reminded. Although this also delves into my views on most academics being terrible TEACHERS of their field...but thats another days rant.

[Chris]

But, but.... I *like* putting two spaces after the period. I think it makes stuff easier to read. Point taken, though.

[Mitch]

Why do you have to be compelled to go into amount of time Dawkins got to speak on the respective channels? It's as if you seem to think that's an arbiter of whether or not the presentation style of the channel is successful. I submit to you that metric for measuring the success of the presentation would be the ratings, but you probably don't want to go there.

[emlak]

thank you very good very nice topic thanks :)

[emlak]

thank you very good very nice topic thanks :)

[jeremy]

One of the origins of logos on slides traces to people generating the handouts for the presentation directly from the PowerPoint file. Thus - any paper trail needs to logo.

I have been fighting within our organization to squash the idea that presentations should be managed with a single-source of material. I encourage a quality handout - written in a narrative format - to support the presentation. This way people get their fix - for logos and other wordy descriptions - without cluttering slides.

[Mehrdad Rashidfarrukhi]

Wonderful point for “eliminating waste” principle. Thank you.

[Fred Woodbridge]

Interesting post, as always, Mr. Reynolds. While I can't disagree with you on O'Reilly's screen "dump" as it were, when you contrast his style with that of Paula Zahn's, I'd say you are mistaken in your conclusions in that O'Reilly's is not a traditional interview per se; it's more of a combative, prove-me-wrong, argument whereas Zahn's is a direct, information gathering interview.

Keep up the good work, I enjoy your blog tremendously.

FW

[Morgan Ramsay]

I agree with your position on branding. I wrote an article "Introduction to Branding". I'm from the school of thought that branding is all about the total experience that stakeholders derive from interacting with organizations.
http://www.americanheretic.com/2007/04/08/introduction-to-branding/

I disagree to some extent, however, with the following statement:

"Organizations, then, should worry less about advertising and spend more effort in making insanely great products and services that are worth talking about."

Yes, organizations should worry less about expensive advertising campaigns devoid of any real-world relevance. Yes, organizations should allocate more resources to creating great content. But content, great or not, is cheap for both consumers and manufacturers. It's the point-to-point communication and relationships between people that makes a business a worthwhile endeavor.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/

You even said yourself that building trust is integral to branding. People trust people. They don't trust products. They don't trust international conglomerates. They trust the people behind the products and the people who comprise the corporate clockwork. Engaging people to cultivate meaningful relationships is a far more expensive activity, but it's also far more valuable to business and branding than great content, great products.

________________________________
Morgan Ramsay
Chief Brand Architect
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ramsay

[Jon]

Like the post very much. Company logos on all slides seems to be a corporatised decision that most people are afraid to go against. The counterargument from your corporate communications division will be that standard templates (with logos) are there to impose a minimum level of "professionalism" on people representing the company in presentations.

One tiny cavil: there's no such thing as "the design principle of Ockham's Razor". Ockham's Razor can only apply to our attempts to explain what we observe (i.e. it's a protoscientific principle). You can of course say "I like to apply the spirit of Ockham's Razor to my design decisions"...and I'd tend to agree with that.

[.m]

What are your thoughts on using visuals a part of musical/ bands performances?

Can it be considered as 'misleading' the focus of the audience from the main content?

massive attack:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBMqsAZMVOk

U2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EllNmUwbOKE

thankYu,

m

[Maile]

Brilliant post! Thank you. The side-by-side screen shots of the Fox News interview made my day.

[Rajan Rishyakaran]

You should check out Aljazeera English. While the Arabic version contains the onerous amount of logos, the English channel has only one logo visible at all times--but the size of it is similar to logos used in every other TV station.

Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgnncfYRPxk

[Rajan Rishyakaran]

Here's another example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=8TU4uQsGArc

The news-ticker down there been through a lot of downsizing, and now only appear on Newshour.

[Martin]

You can see the full Brand Gap presentation on SlideShare.net http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap

[Bill Harris]

Great comments, as usual, except for the "two spaces after a period." :-) Those of us who find Emacs a great way to put text on paper (or in electrons) make heavy use of Emacs' ability to navigate, copy, paste, and otherwise process at the character, word, sentence, and paragraph level, and the way it tells the end of a sentence is by the two spaces after the period. It's painfully obvious (okay, only mild pain, but still a productivity loss) when you have to edit text sent by someone with the one space habit. Somewhere there's a Richard Stallman essay about that. See, for example, http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/Sentences.html#Sentences

[Timothy]

I have a lot of sympathy for Garr's point here, but also a contrarian observation:

I think many service firms (e.g. banks, consultants) put their logos on every slide to (1) protect intellectual property and (2) promote recall after long periods. Perhaps there are also liability issues.

[Niko Neugebauer]

Brilliant article, Garr !

As for the service firms, they overuse the branding so often - and even worse, a lot of times they include all of the client firms and subfirms logos into every page of powerpoint presentations. It looks like a visual rubbish to me.

[SEGuy]

Garr, I think most of the companies in enterprise software are guilty of this sin, and it is so refreshing internally when someone shows their presentation without the corporate template.

Putting into each slide only the things that need be there as a minimalistic approach, but making sure each item on a slide tells the story is a fantastic idea.

However the conflicting thing is you need to communicate to your listener/customer all of the main features you wish to get across, in a limited number of slides. Of course this is the challenge of quality vs content...

[vinay kumar]

brand architecture

[Jeb Archer]

What people dont realise is that green homes and buildings are not only worth more (resale value) but are creating more reveneu as well. Higher occupancy rates paired with higher rental premiums equals more money in VC's pockets.
www.initred.com

[Jeb Archer]

What people dont realise is that green homes and buildings are not only worth more (resale value) but are creating more reveneu as well. Higher occupancy rates paired with higher rental premiums equals more money in VC's pockets.
www.initred.com