Joby Blume
Director
Describe what you do at BrightCarbon
Sales messaging for clients & BrightCarbon, marketing strategy, help others do their jobs, account management, partnerships, HR. It varies.
Kids
2 daughters, aged 9 and 6, and a newborn son.
Pets
None of my own. The family have three rabbits and a cat.
Drinks
Water, coffee, wine – at different times.
Degrees
BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford (where I learnt sharp analytical thinking); MA in Education from the Hebrew University (where I learnt about learning); MBA from Manchester Business School (where I learnt the language of business).
3 words that describe me
Analytical, expressive, honest.
Couldn't do my job without
Surface Pro 4. It’s glitchy but lovely.
Hidden skill
Subtlety.
Recent articles by Joby Blume
Choosing a presentation design agency
Choosing a presentation design agency is a lot harder than buying a product. With a product, unless there’s some defect, you get the same thing as 1000s of others. So you can read reviews, examine specs, and make an informed decision. With presentation design services, you don’t know what you’re going to get until the project is nearly finished. What you get isn’t the exact same thing as what any other company ends up with. So how do you choose the right agency for your presentation design work?
The UK’s leading presentation agency?
Searching online, I find four companies describing themselves as the UK’s leading presentation design agency. Not ‘one of the leading’, but the leading. Four. Which is of course a nonsense. So, who’s lying?
Presentation Zen was published ten years ago. Al Gore won his Oscar for a film based on a presentation in 2006. Amazon sell more than 38,000 books with ‘presentation’ in the title, and more than 7,500 with ‘PowerPoint’. Which all sort or raises the question Why are so many presentations still crap? All those books, decks, all that advice – Is it even making a difference?
Presentation agency or marketing agency?
In the agency world, it’s fair to say that PowerPoint design sits somewhere at the bottom of the pile. So, if you are going to work with a marketing agency for presentation design, make sure they have people who love creating presentations. Working with a specialist presentation agency will generally deliver better results, with less effort, and typically at lower cost. Given these reasons to go with a specialist presentation design agency, why do so many companies just go with their 'regular' agency for presentations?
We exhibited at a large trade exhibition a couple of weeks ago, and I went along to see what other vendors are up to. A lot of exhibitions are a desolate wasteland for exhibitors with nothing but tumbleweed and other vendors to stop the boredom. This show was actually pretty busy though, and by walking around l think I managed to notice things companies were doing (right and wrong). Some of these observations are surprisingly apt for sales presentations too...
Who has read Presentation Zen?
- Sales messaging / Industry insights
- Comments: 1
It's easy when you are immersed in something to forget how small a part of your customers’ lives that thing is. At a recent Better Presentations event in London I asked 60-odd people if they had read Presentation Zen.