Get to the Point

Lately, I’ve noticed that the pure infomercial-style direct response commercials have crept into normal dayparts. Not only are they on things like the History Channel on Sunday mornings at 6am, or the local NBC affiliate at 3am; now they’re on during football games, Morning Joe, and Sean Hannity.

Like pharma advertising, direct response infomercials all stick to the same formula. Obviously, it must work – who am I to judge? But the thing that drives me crazy is that the offer keeps getting better and better over the course of the spot. For example, a spot begins with an offer for the best frying pan ever for $100, and by the end of the commercial, the offer is an entire cookware set, a can opener, and a set of steak knives for $80.

This bothers me because obviously the offer all along was going to be an entire cookware set, a can opener, and a set of steak knives for $80, so why didn't they start there? Think of the time and money the advertiser could save shifting from one and even two-minute infomercials to thirty or even fifteen-second spots if they just got to the point!

Clearly, they need to romance the target for a while, build a case, and then (dishonestly) convince people they’re getting a bargain.

This is the same exact process that virtually everyone in the world follows when they communicate almost anything. In other words, generally speaking, people rarely get to the point.

Think about the last ten meetings you were in. Now, add up all the time you spent in each meeting not getting to the point. You would probably have enough time for another whole meeting, right?

It’s true there are people who don’t allow this to happen. Some companies have rules that prohibit this – usually by restricting meetings to thirty minutes or less. But this is the exception to the rule. Indeed, if you decided one day to insist that people get to the point in meetings, you’d be considered rash and rude.

It turns out the only people who can insist on getting to the point are the big bosses.

Have you ever had to take a twenty-page deck and cull it down to one page so it could be shared with the CEO? Excuse me? If it could have been boiled down to one page, why did I work all day on twenty pages? Why? Because if I present one page to the brand manager, the brand manager will be unsatisfied. They’ll complain. It wouldn’t be a good thing for me. Yet the same brand manager will say, “listen, I’m not about to take a twenty-page presentation to the CEO. I need you to cull this down to one page.” Excuse me?!

Maybe this is one of the reasons why every time you ask anybody in the United States how they’re doing, they’ll say something like “I’m slammed with work.”

This is bigger than a pet peeve. The business world is insanely competitive, and thanks to technology it’s moving a million miles an hour. While I’m working on your twenty-page deck, your competitor is breathing down your neck. And in the time it took me to doll up your deck, your strategy changed and your budget got cut.

Some companies are eliminating PowerPoint presentations. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk famously did this. But an estimated thirty million presentations are still created every day. If we assume an average of twenty slides per presentation, that means six hundred million slides are created every day. If we assume each of the six hundred million slides takes ten minutes to create, that means it would take 11,400 YEARS (6 billion minutes) to create the average daily volume of decks. Imagine what humans could do with another 11,400 years every single day.

What if a company decided that all business and marketing presentations had to be one page, regardless of the audience for it? Think of the time we could put into -- or back into -- other tasks like walking outside, calling our daughter at grad school, or mentoring a junior coworker. In other words, we might have time to be human beings again.

Just keep in mind when it comes time to share your one page with the CEO, it'll probably have to be culled down to the size of a business card.