Present Beyond Measure

16Harness the Power of Real Imagery

“Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.”

—Bruno Barby

Let's play a little game: close your eyes and recall the last text-heavy slide you remember in a presentation. Here, I'll wait. Hmm…is it taking a while? Having trouble dialing one up? Gosh, I didn't expect that.

Now close your eyes again and call up the last impactful or memorable image or photograph you remember. Boom! I'll bet one is coming to mind for you almost right away. There's a good reason for that, one we're about to exploit for you and your audience's benefit: to increase memory recall and elicit emotion from your audience.

When we think of imagery in corporate presentations, certain types come to mind first: charts, diagrams, and my personal nonfavorite…clipart. I believe focusing on only these kinds of images is a missed opportunity in persuading through presentation because of a psychological effect that many practitioner presenters aren't aware of.

The Picture Superiority Effect

Picture superiority is a phenomenon based in Allan Paivio's dual-coding theory, where he posited that pictures have an advantage over words alone because they encode both a visual and verbal message, which enables longer memory storage.¹

Pictorial superiority is a powerful ally in your presentations and is highlighted at length in John Medina's aforementioned Brain Rules. Medina's research declared that if a piece of information was delivered with text ...