Stanley Moss
DiGanZi
diganzi@gmail.com

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
ph@ph8.fr

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

GENERATIONS AGO in the time of the Ancients, and long before the current era of peace, two kingdoms lived side by side, separated by a mountain range and unending war. They had been enemies for as long as anyone could remember. People had forgotten what started the quarrel in the first place. There were years when an uneasy truce would prevail, but one side or the other would eventually break it, causing the kingdoms again to lay siege on each other, advancing, retreating, attacking, defending, plundering. They understood nothing but perpetual struggle.
   Finally, in the Year of the Hawk in the 10,000th Dawn, the advantage fell to the kingdom of the west, Jandrigar. They had worn down Indrigar, to the east. The ruler of Indrigar was an elderly monarch known as Karek the Wise. It was his misfortune to have presided over a disastrous campaign, which left the countryside in ruins, his subjects starving, his fortress surrounded. His councilors and generals were summoned, but they were of no help, and he dismissed them in exasperation.
   He had the further disadvantage of an impatient and disrespectful son named Prince Lorono. This short-tempered youth knew one day the throne would be his own. This particular prince kept his head in the clouds, and had a romantic notion about the power of political causes. He would often admonish his legions, urging them on with the hollow words claiming that together they could change the world. He pretended that he trusted and believed in his father, and falsely asserted that he knew in his heart there should always be hope.
   But behind closed doors, in the dark throne room of the king, amidst the light from torches hung upon the stone walls, and in desperation of their dire circumstances, he accused Karek. ‘You led us into this battle, and it is because of you we suffer now. We have no weapons left.’
   ‘Weapons will not win this war,’ his father countered. ‘We need to listen to the ancients.’
   ‘Will the ancients feed our families?’ the son asked. ‘All the food is gone. We have no sorcerers.’ He shifted his heavy shield to the other arm, and moved his sabre to the opposite shoulder. ‘How do we live today?’ the prince asked. ‘How do we live when your solution is not working? In the world of the ancients the king ruled, and you do nothing but recite the old words. Your father used to tell us, let the throne look to the mirror. I’ve looked in that mirror a hundred times and I don’t know what it tells me. I am trying to find acts which can change the world, or at least learn a way to behave in this situation.’
   ‘You don’t know what to think,’ the king said. ‘You don’t remember the great heroes—so how do you expect to act if you do not study our legends?’
   ‘Exactly,’ the prince thundered. ‘I am looking for a solution, any solution. I seek the ancient knowledge.’
    ‘The greatest person is the one who holds the blue box,’ the king said wearily. ‘It is so written. Let the throne look to the mirror. The person who holds the blue box will not be touched. Look to the mirror,’ the king repeated. ‘The truth is in the mirror.’
   The prince said, ‘That old story had been often repeated, but it does not help us with the invaders outside our walls.’ He knew the words by heart from childhood, yet the meaning eluded him. Still, he decided to placate his father, so he said loudly, ‘Yes, I think I begin to understand. We are supposed to look deep inside ourselves for the wisdom, as in a mirror, and the blue box represents the answer.’
   ‘The answer,’ his father said, ‘is something you deserve to get. You receive it at the moment you need it. Soon a secret will be revealed to you.’
   The Prince could take it no longer. He thought of the ragged people huddling along the walls, starving, frightened, sleepless. He remembered the army encamped outside the city walls, its bonfires blazing, war machines at the ready. Soldiers standing in a menacing line along the western horizon. He thought of the hardship of the war campaigns.
   ‘There is nothing left to do!’ he shouted. ‘Nothing left to think! I have seen enough of the mirror!’ And saying that he hurled the heavy shield at the mirror, which broke into a thousand shiny pieces. Behind the space where the mirror had been they could see the entrance into a chamber. Inside the chamber, all could see that the legendary blue box rested on a mountain of gold.
   ‘All you needed was the right key,’ Karek the Wise said.
   ‘We are saved,’ Prince Lorono exclaimed, and ran to the treasure, taking the blue box in his hands. He reached the parapet, where he stood facing the enemy. Then he held the blue box above his head.
   The enemy knew what had been written, that peace would come from the blue box. Nobody really believed in the legend any longer. But the time had come to sue for peace. One by one, the enemy put down its arms.
   Three days of feasting reunited the kingdoms of Indrigar and Jandrigar. And thus from the frontiers of the kingdom of the East to the deepest ends of the kingdom of the West began an era of lasting peace and joy.

Summary: In January 2011, the Medinge Group’s annual Brands with a Conscience (BWAC) awards will be announced for their eighth consecutive year. The awards, created by a Stockholm-based international think-tank on branding, single out exceptional organizations and individuals for distinction in humanistic branding. What does this term represent? What are the awards, how were they created, how are they decided, who has won in the past and how can they be viewed in retrospect? This paper assesses the BWAC initiative, its evolution and possible significance.

OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS, we have lived through a generation of disillusion with organizations and the brands they represent. Criticized in works like No Logo by Naomi Klein, corporations were handed blame for all of the world’s ills, and brands demonized as sinister and insidious forces bent on the destruction of society. There has even been the suggestion that brands contribute to an irreconcilable east–west divide. A great dialogue grew out of these accusations, challenging the idea that financial gain was the only driver for defining an organization’s success or merit. It was out of this dialogue that the Medinge Group was founded in 2000, when a group of interdisciplinary brand professionals came together to debate, foster and articulate ideas of what they called humanistic branding. The group asserted that brands had the potential to do well by doing good, that ethical behaviour needed to become a cornerstone of corporate governance. The group’s annual Brands with a Conscience awards were created out of this extended conversation. Over a period of seven consecutive years (2004–10) companies large and small, known and invisible, young and old, drawn from all categories, have been singled out for distinction as recipients of Brands with a Conscience awards. There is no monetary prize attached to the awards, though winners are permitted to use the BWAC logo in their own communications. But an array of categories, sizes and nationalities can be seen, even in a short list of names drawn from past winners: Grameen Phone, BP, IKEA, Toyota Prius, Sanrio, Pictet et Cie., Slow Food Movement, Innocent, Happy Computers, Alibaba, architect Paolo Soleri, Virgin Fuels.
   The Medinge Group initiated the BWAC awards concept in 2003, intending to recognize brands whose conduct demonstrated humanistic values, and to call attention to or to encourage them. The first nominations were made via group-wide emails. Lively internet-borne debate followed. In making their nominations, members were asked to evaluate from brands’:

• reputation and self-representation;
• history;
• direct experience a member might have with the brand nominated;
• media presence of the brand;
• and an assessment of the organization’s expressed values of sustainability.

   Over the years the system of nominations and judging has evolved into a formalized automated process which today employs on-line nominating and voting, while preserving the collegial internal debate in the run-up to the final balloting. The voting is a closed process, and only members of the group may nominate, discuss and vote.
   From August until October, Medinge Group members post their nominations. Members carry out their own due diligence to support their nominations. Once the nominations are posted debate begins among the membership. Medinge members consider six elemental criteria on any nomination:

• leadership: how committed is management to brand and its cause? Does the leadership team live out the values of the brand?;
• authenticity: how well articulated is the brand visually and experientially? How evident is its ethical programme, and the degree to which it is sincere?;
• humanity: how evident are the human implications of the brand? How motivated is the brand’s humanity? How visible is the brand’s conscience?;
• community: how heavily does the brand invest in relationship-building? How deep an advocate is the brand for "caring for one another"?;
• accountability: is the brand visibly accountable for its actions? Does the brand apologize when things go wrong?;
• belief: does the brand take risks in line with its beliefs? Does the brand acknowledge that we are all equal?

   Following the nomination and debate phase, around November 1, a ballot is sent to all members of the think-tank and voting occurs. Members are also given the opportunity to abstain. There are normally 40 to 50 nominees and only seven or eight winners. The first week in December BWAC winners are announced to the membership. In the first week of January the winners are made public through a PR campaign. In the first week of February the Brands with a Conscience certificates are presented at a ceremony during the annual Medinge Group meeting in Paris. In 2006 the group added a unique category commendation, the Colin Morley Award, recognizing exceptional achievement by an individual or non-governmental organization. Colin, a member of the Medinge Group, died in the London Underground bombings on July 7, 2005. The award commemorates his visionary work in humanistic branding. So far the winners of the Colin Morley Award have been Shakespeare’s Globe, Star Schools, Paul Newman and Muna Abusulayman.
   Though the awards are granted by a group of 20 international brand professionals—mostly white, mostly European and mostly male—the variety of BWAC winners over the years has shown a commendable range in size, visibility, location, and segmentation. A small collective in rural Nepal was named in the same list as a huge British multinational petroleum company in 2006. A tea producer in Sri Lanka appeared as a winner in the same year as an American carpet manufacturer. The BWAC awards tend to contextualize historically what the climate of business was at the time they are given. 2009’s awards had several winners focused on issues of water. Twenty ten’s awards lauded two financial institutions in an era of criticism against that segment of business. The same year both an Indian and a Chinese company appeared in the winners’ list, acknowledging the world’s largest emerging markets. The Brands with a Conscience awards are extended not only to acknowledge results, but may be given for the promise they carry, with attention paid to the potential for change they can influence. Virgin Fuels was encouraged in 2007 for their innovative model on alternative energy. Fetzer Vineyards received an award in 2008 in recognition of their sustainable wine-making programmes. BP was lauded for their green reidentification and renewables’ policy in 2006. Yet in some instances the award has been granted in spite of other mitigating factors, such as in the case of IKEA, who were recognized in 2007 for their strong anti-corruption stance in Russia, while no mention was made of their promotion of consumerism or destruction of forests in the manufacture of their products.
   In any altruistic endeavour there is bound to be blowback, and the Brands with a Conscience awards are no exception. Medinge’s 2006 award to Toyota Prius did not anticipate the massive recall of this particular model in 2010, nor the Chairman’s public apology for subjecting its customers to such a massive safety issue; the brand is still in recovery. BP has been a succession of bad-news stories which demonstrate how it has gone nowhere near ‘Beyond Petroleum’. In the year following Whole Foods’ BWAC award it was revealed that the chairman had been manipulating his own stock price and savaging his competition with pseudonymous weblog posts. Virgin Fuels never came close to its own promises on green policy. Kiva was forced to admit that it could not verify disposition of funds dispersed in microlending as it represented on its website. Freeplay Energy introduced a line of visionary alternative energy products but showed catastrophic financial management.
   The Brands with a Conscience awards have also showcased brands whose humanistic qualities endure. Grameen Phone’s founder, Mohammed Younis received a Nobel Prize in 2009 for his innovative work in microfinance for developing economies. Holland’s Chocolonely stands as a brilliant and inventive example of ethical branding, which brought to the forefront issues of slavery and the production of chocolate. Innocent continues to make the world a better place through its recycling initiatives and its abiding relationships with local producers. Happy Computers is consistently named as one of the top workplaces in the UK, with its solid values and productive community work a testament to humanistic vision. Patagonia remains a brand true to its stated values in a conflicted market-place. The American actor–philanthropist Paul Newman posthumously retains his distinction as the most generous man on earth on a per-capita basis, having given away over $240 million to worthy causes during his lifetime.
   Today the speed of information factors in the creation and destruction of brands. A reputation can be built over a century and ruined overnight. The yearly interval for naming these awards could be a fail-safe for their validity. It is the hope of the Brands with a Conscience initiative that organizations which understand humanistic and ethical principles will thrive, and that these annual awards can celebrate their potential and urge their emulation. The Medinge Group’s work continues, questioning the way that brands are built, what they stand for, how they affect the world we live in. Until humans achieve perfection and the world transforms into a utopia the Brands with a Conscience awards will retain a unique relevance.

Special thanks to Patrick Harris, Nicholas Ind, Ian Ryder and Jack Yan for invaluable help in the preparation of this article.

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 3, no. 1, 2009

Quiet brands (PDF format

Stanley Moss
DiGanZi
diganzi@gmail.com

In the canon of English-language writings on brands and brand management, few documents possess the stature of the legendary McElroy Memorandum known as “Brand Man”. Authored in 1931 by a a 27-year old Proctor & Gamble promotions executive, it inserted into the practice of brand-building seven directives which shaped our perception of brand’s purpose and function in the ecology of the marketplace. This single manifesto created the modern Brand Manager. For more than seven decades its enduring words were regarded with a reverence like that for the Holy Grail, and perpetrated a set of attitudes which beg to be re-examined in the face of brand world today. McElroy is at heart a strategic marketing document. It prescribed dynamic relationships be instituted within teams, and dictated a rigid hierarchical schema for the organization. Its application helped P&G separate brand managers into parallel teams, with each team competing internally with other brands in the company’s portfolio. Teams were mandated to market their own products to the sales force.

While the youthful Neil McElroy understood a brand to represent a cold-hearted economic entity, such a narrow presumption no longer holds exclusively true. The McElroy memo was simply the first step in codifying brands as instruments of an evolving, organic process. The memo limits its focus to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), those rapidly-produced products with short shelf lives, which need to be sold in large quantities in order to be profitable; in this particular category new-product creation factors mightily, competition is uppermost in everyone’s mind, and only good performance guarantees brand survival. Business schools, take heed. If McElroy is the foundation for all brands of the future, then we are in for rough waters. That’s because brands are no longer simply tools of marketing departments, or receptacles which hold psychological levers for creating demand and moving product. The equation has upended. Marketing today is a fraction of the brand equation.

We now understand brands to be deeper, broader, more dimensional entities than ever before. But a look at the memo shows why brands became the distorted commercial entities which later came back to haunt Brand Men, and why the discipline engages in such soul-searching, especially in Post-Globalization world.

McElroy’s point 1 shows us clearly where his priorities stand: he directs his Brand Men to take careful heed of units shipped. In the hierarchy of formalization we are dealing with a classic bean-counter mentality. It’s a short-term, simplistic directive which assesses quantity moved as of primary importance. It implies that sheer numbers dictate the highest imperative for brand evaluation. Nothing else takes precedence. There is no future, only an opportunistic present.

Point 2 instructs the Brand Men to examine carefully where brand development is heavy and “progressive”, an interesting and provocative term, especially taken in its historical context. In 1931 “progressive” might have inferred Communist leanings; today the term smacks of fringe cases at the periphery of political movements, possible techno-libertarians advocating secession from the union, free love and anarchy. McElroy asserts that numerical growth is the highest objective, that Brand Men should apply successful treatment to comparable territories. Today’s brand specialist focuses on greater sensitivity to local culture, and pays more attention to local need before overlaying some proven marketing strategy simply because it has worked to sell product elsewhere.

In point 3, McElroy gives five sub-directives for underperforming brands, what he refers to as “light” brand development. He charges his team to study past advertising and promotional history, then evaluate it in the context of the local territory both on supply and consumer sides. Find out the trouble, he writes mysteriously, employing a vast euphemism. Once the weakness has been uncovered, he counsels, make a plan. It’s a statement of pure brute economics, with managers warned to be certain that money budgeted will produce results. Abide by the corporate hierarchy, he goes on, clear it with the District Manager, get buy-in on the local level. In other words, tell your local manager what to do in his own back yard and tell him how to do it. Get him to agree. Next up: hype the sales force, keep them hammering the territory. Write everything down, document, evaluate, assess. In no place does McElroy ask, Is this product needed, redundant, obsolete? Does somebody else make a better one? Do consumers really want it? What consequences does its consumption carry? In 1931 fewer channels of mass media existed for oversight, there was no conception of a problem with disposability and waste, few corporations thought about notions of community, and the term sustainability would not be coined for 40 years. Listen up, brand managers: the world has changed.

Point 4 pins total responsibility on the Brand Manager for the concise communications connected to his brands. This presumes that anything the organization cares to say about product is apt. There is no reference to accurately reflecting product claims, or any consideration of ethical underpinnings. As long as what is said works, it is permitted.

Point 5 addresses the manufacturer’s expenditure at point-of-purchase, quantifying marketing effectiveness at the retail level. We see no recognition of the universe of stakeholder communities which are touched by a product’s existence. Today we acknowledge that advertising adds to mass sensory overload, a form of pollution in an overcrowded environment. McElroy believes if you put the message in front of the consumer, it will be consumed. This is the fundamental corruption of traditional advertising writ large.

Packaging is addressed, but only superficially, in point 6. The Manager is counseled to experiment with and recommend wrapper revisions. We are again firmly in the terrain of marketing, insisting that the package jump off the shelf, differentiated from its competitors, ramping up the claims, doing anything necessary to grab the impulse-driven buying decision. Not a lot of ethics here, and certainly not abiding by Massimo Vignelli’s famous dictum that “the best packages are invisible.”

By point 7, McElroy is back into his corporate ivory tower, advising his Brand Men to see District Managers a number of times a year to discuss any “faults in promotion.” Here is the crux of the unreality: as long as promotion is correctly tweaked, the brand becomes invulnerable. All hinges on the success of promotion, the product lives in a universe independent of any considerations except its own self-interest. Is it any wonder, with subtext like this, that society drifted into a delusional and mindless consumption-driven consciousness?

History is an odd and elastic commodity, which lurches ahead, but mostly plods along, and we have had seventy years of McElroy’s calculating marketing strategies laying claim to the brand. While McElroy is frozen in time, a kind of Peter Pan of brand theory, brand has grown up around the memo. Brands are our silent partners, devices which deliver inspiration, carry promises, help us create our own identities, and stand as symbols for who we are and what we believe. It’s no longer a case of simply selling more units than your competitors. The challenge for Brand Men today is to reflect an understanding of a bigger world out there than one driven by unenlightened self-interest and short-term profits, and that the time is now to focus on truth-telling, to advocate for the greater good, and to always consider the deeper ethical implications of our commercial conduct.

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
p.dhuy@experts-consulting.com

Translated from the French by Stanley Moss
CEO, The Medinge Group
Founder, Diganzi
diganzi@medinge.org

Microsoft Word version | Version original

‘With the device of rhetoric, what is offered at the beginning—and appears at the risk of collective aphasia—are the raw materials of reasoning, of facts, of subject; yet what is found at the end is a complete language, structured and armed for persuasion.’—Roland Barthes: ‘L’ancienne rhétorique’, Communications, no. 16, 1970, B.0.4, p. 197.

PowerPoint is a Microsoft program which allows the user to create electronic presentations in the form of a succession of slides, often linked by simple animated visual effects. These slides can contain pictures, text, films, sounds, moving figures and different computer graphics or hyperlinks. This presentation application is used in great numbers internationally by businesspeople and students alike. Microsoft estimates 30 million PowerPoint presentations are made every day all over the world.

The success of PowerPoint is so considerable that its emergence cannot be explained away solely by the recent fall in the price of computers and projectors. In itself, PowerPoint seems to constitute an emerging medium of societal communication. Such unprecedented success inevitably attracts the eye of the médiologue. Rather than dismiss PowerPoint as a minor event, let us take time to re-examine it.

Over a long period, the uninterrupted use of PowerPoint as reference support has evolved a particular form of speech. It models a distinct manner of thinking, demonstrating, and persuading. Since its creation twenty years ago, PowerPoint has survived inconspicuously, a hegemonic example of constitution of norm.

One is tempted to wager that soon the young generation will no longer be able to express themselves orally without help of a tool of presentation. In this respect, note that PowerPoint is reported to be more and more widely used for wedding speeches. Even more troubling, there may come a day when people cannot listen unless a speaker expresses himself in conjunction with PowerPoint. Faced with the “little music” that a rhetorical machine produces, classical speech could become inaudible.

PowerPoint abets the impression of clear presentations. Steve Jobs made such a demonstration when he launched iPhone at Mac World 2007 in San Francisco.¹ Like a pianist who perfectly controls the independence of left and right hands, he linked a simultaneous projection of text and pictures to illustrate his purpose. Thanks to PowerPoint, the quality of audience reception was maximized, and understanding was made easier.

PowerPoint also allows the manipulation of audiences by the fundamental use of argumentation founded more on effect than on proof. On February 7, 2003 the American General Colin Powell introduced a PowerPoint document to the Security Council of the United Nations, the intention of which was to demonstrate confirmation of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (See attached reproductions of certain slides used).

The perverse effects raised by PowerPoint’s detractors revolve around five major problem points:

• problem of the user: while PowerPoint aids good presenters, it always renders the mediocre ones unbearable. PowerPoint is a complex professional multimedia instrument placed at the disposition of an insufficiently competent general public;
• problem of writing: rare are the PowerPoint presentations which play the game of brevity and are an instrument of the supportive kind. The better part of PowerPoint presentations are talkative and laboured;
• problem of effectiveness with principles of demonstration: the logical fluidity of classical speech is at odds with thoughts broken apart by the succession of PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint often stutters;
• problem of manipulation: the principle of juxtaposition exempts the presenter from the logical necessity of linking reason to effect in written text. To juxtapose is not to show. Often the syllogisms of demonstration found in PowerPoint presentations are weak or contestable. But they are difficult to refute because the presenter can overlook the first parts as he pleases. The mind of the audience is under the control of imposed rhythms and enforced reading in fragments;
• problem of use: explanation is the job of the presenter. PowerPoint is often sent by electronic mail without explanation, as a reference document. This is a bit like giving a person the apparatus of a conjurer and expecting them to competently perform magic tricks on stage. By removing the obligation to support a presentation, PowerPoint corrupts the information which it is intended to carry.

For all these reasons, doubt is growing over the real pedagogic effectiveness of PowerPoint. Associations of parents of American pupils are seeking a ban on its use in secondary schools and universities in the USA.

To look in greater detail at the opinion of its detractors, it helps to refer to the very effective work of Edward Tufte² and to articles such as ‘PowerPoint Makes You Dumb’³ in The New York Times^, or ‘Point of View on PowerPoint’⁴ in The Guardian.

PowerPoint: simultaneous speech
PowerPoint comes from the world of Apple Macintosh, that is to say from the world in the ’80s which first allowed the general public access to computer science. The world of Apple is that of the visual, of “creatives” and of graphic designers, the world of those who free themselves from the dictatorship of the parallel horizontal line, the unmoving characters of print. This is the universe of the mouse, of the cursor which drifts freely across the screen and finishes in the blinking vertical line, of letters arrayed on the keyboard. It is the Macintosh brush and mobile characters in opposition to the static Underwood typewriter. The mind freed from drawings can visualize on the electronic screen. One recollects the freedom of the Calligrams of Guillaume Apollinaire and the technical difficulty of their reproduction.

PowerPoint multiplies the battery of effects at the disposition of the speaker, and in doing so compounds its means. PowerPoint “effects” are the new rhetorical devices of our time. The pictures, schemata, graphs, pop videos, computer graphics, animations, or illustrations are like digital cousins to metaphor or metonymy. This somehow justifies calling the toolbox of its capabilities an ‘auto-content wizard.’ Richard Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied its human features in detail, looking at the system of information, segmented by how it sees itself and those instructions which it agrees to follow. He determined that simultaneous contact to both channels allows the public not only to better understand, but to better persuade. It is the ‘dual channel’⁵ effect, a key element of the mechanics of firm belief in PowerPoint.

Let us pause for an instant and reflect on an interesting mixture of typologies, since in PowerPoint, the visible splits the legible into two distinct parts. PowerPoint creates a new behaviour here: collective reading onscreen. To reference the three ages of Régis Debray,⁶ someplace new has been created which exists between the graphosphère and the vidéosphère, between appearance and publication, since the text is read and seen, simultaneously and collectively. This perhaps explains its success. PowerPoint plays on thresholds. PowerPoint is a machine to conciliate what is written and what must be seen. Picture redeems itself as behaviour through the counterpoise with written text. As the text gets lighter, it is elevated by pictures.

PowerPoint automatically formats and gives life to slides consisting of text, pictures, figures, and effects, all at the same time. Here one rediscovers the simultaneity of the Surrealists, which one can find in La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. In 1913 Blaise Cendrars captioned this poem, illustrated by drawings of Sonia Delaunay, as the ‘first simultaneous book’.

PowerPoint software understands that to communicate definitively and persuade, it is necessary to multiply statements in parallel, all at the same time: see a picture–read a text–hear the voice of a presenter. The rhetorical figures of PowerPoint are built in the gaps between the three dimensions: picture, text and voice. The three statements synchronize, are repeated, or—to the contrary—move, move apart, collide.

PowerPoint: presentation or performance?
First regarded as a simple tool of support, the PowerPoint program is on the way to becoming a universal language used by both professional and academic worlds. These are the places where speech is carefully staged. These worlds seek to prescribe order which successfully coordinates image, movement and writing. Every multinational today has meeting rooms endowed with big screens designed to receive presentations. Any information arrayed there is invariably transformed into presentation. Each presentation repeats, constructs, takes up time, times its interventions. If the medium is the message, then with PowerPoint everything turns into show business. To such an extent, speech becomes more important than the transmitter. To such an extent, the searchlight and the newscaster end up merging.

More and more press websites offer their visitors slide shows in PowerPoint. The Newspaper of the Net, in partnership with the AFP, offers this type of slide show, for instance, designed to explain the economy in 675 frames. Business Week adds slide shows to many of its online news stories. These presentations automatically activate, and display as a programmed succession of slides. They constitute a kind of intermediary between written articles and that of short video subjects. They show wonderfully that a good PowerPoint can very effectively operate without a newscaster or presenter.

This explains why the PowerPoint presenter is compelled to deliver theatrics. It is due to the overlap of information and not the synergy, of competition with the PowerPoint presentation. Facing a huge screen, the presenter is encouraged to make more of it than really exists. A simple purpose then becomes a presentation; a hypothesis suddenly becomes a claim. The presenter is compelled, often in his defending arguments, to prove, to demonstrate, even when he has nothing of substance to offer. Bereft of real reasons, presenters get carried away. They display only glittering facets of their case. It is the most serious reproach which can be made about PowerPoint: PowerPoint does not like stories, PowerPoint kills narration. Narrative migrates in an opportunistic scenario, sequencing inappropriately, defended by the language of firm belief.

PowerPoint: ownership of speech
PowerPoint’s response to Barthes’ idea of rhetoric is to offer a description of the machine, defined by Microsoft, as ‘The most prevalent form of persuasion technology’.⁸ This means that the argument (‘fidem facere’ of Probatio) tells and moves at the same time (‘animos impellere’) and thus persuades by what is seen. PowerPoint directs our attention to the art of persuasion. This art has been left fallow since the time of Napoleon III, the epoch of the last important treatises on rhetoric, when it constituted the backbone of the education of all ruling classes since Athens in the fifth century.

Rhetoric is a contemporary of Democracy, and a language conceived to entice the jury during courtroom trials. It is not by chance that PowerPoint is of American origin, the product of a nation enamoured with litigious business, who first aligned PowerPoint to the principles of computerization. This ‘first rhetoric’ is disparaged by Plato in Gorgias.⁹ Socrates compares the ‘make believe’ of rhetoric, contrasting it to the ‘informing’ of the philosopher. Calliclès answers that ‘rhetoric does not need to know what the things are about which it speaks; it has simply discovered a technique which serves us for persuading.’ PowerPoint has no knowledge as its objective, only firm belief. It lies far from the Socratic maieutics, the search for truth by dialogue and confutation. Rhetoric contents itself with its status as a machine of persuasion. Any likely simplistic assemblage is acceptable, provided that the target is reached.

Barthes said to us in 1964, in his seminary at the École des Hautes Études, that rhetoric is a social practice, as well as a privileged technology, since it is necessary to pay to acquire it. It allows the ruling classes to gain definite ownership of the word. With PowerPoint, one also definitively gains the ownership of speech. This occurs thanks to a format of content, which is taught and which one learns. It is a pure technology of persuasion, in search of firm advocacy from its audience. This is an art ‘of persuasion, a group of rules, recipes, wherein the implementation intends to persuade the listeners of speech, even if that of which they must be persuaded is wrong.’¹⁰

PowerPoint is, finally, a tool of education. Occasionally during some university orals, a student might wonder if the oral was more about a financial year, a lesson driven by PowerPoint, first of all. The question is no longer to prepare students for the job, but to create good rhetoreticians. On this point, Gorgias explains to Socrates, ‘And whoever is the man presenting an argument in favour, compared in debate, the speaker will persuade that his argument be chosen, rather than that of his opponent; because there is no subject on which the speaker would speak in a more convincing manner in front of a crowd, so great and appealing is the potency of our art’.

The contemporary translation of this statement could be that it is better to have a good PowerPoint introduced by an incompetent, than be given a speech by an expert. So, to persuade about the urgency to struggle against global warming, it is better to have the PowerPoint used by Al Gore in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth¹¹ by David Guggenheim than to provide speech of the most erudite climatologists.

PowerPoint: show, to provoke thought
It would be inadequate or inexact to dismiss the success of PowerPoint solely for its triumphant packaging of content. PowerPoint often supports a sophisticated rhetorician, a technician.
The médiologue can also discern the numerical resumption of a more Aristotelian rhetoric, a rhetoric less subjugated by its own power, a rhetoric more in the service of truth and beauty. There is nothing worse than when PowerPoint renders rhetoric heavy, when it is badly used. Of course, one can see it coming, an annoying aspect of the control of the progression of thought. The presenter is there to persuade, but after all, the firm commitment apparent in the flux of a well-written text is worth the artful juxtaposition of a PowerPoint presentation, if the reason is fair.

We have seen a Minister of Finance¹² skilfully use a PowerPoint presentation as a kind of supplement. His bright and open speech was simplistically interspersed by dynamic zooms into a slide or swift transitions from one to the other, to the delight of his audience. By recalling the conditions of a dialectical exchange, reinstituting dialogue with his public like a midwife might, he revitalized the foreseeable fixity of his PowerPoint. Pictures came in support of words and provided more evidence that yes, in order to persuade the young generations one needed to divert eyes taught to dart from screen to screen. Such technique was needed, at the very least. It proves that a good visual speech, that is to say a speech which constructs a “point of view”, is a universal speech bearing firm belief, one which transcends national languages. A picture does not require translation.

PowerPoint is a rhetoric machine adapted for the Doubting Thomases of the world, who believe only what they see. PowerPoint, sits at the peak of the vidéosphère, the worship of appearance. During the first film screened by the Lumière Brothers, the seated audience dropped down under their chairs when they saw an engine entering the railway station of La Ciotat. What sequence of slides could be placed in a row today to produce the same result?

A century later the young generations have an advanced disposition to the screen. Consequently they understand that the picture of the engine signals no danger. Their enormous experience with an ongoing succession of screens has conferred upon them three new talents.

1. They learned to read pictures, and not only texts.
2. They know how to read several speeches at the same time, from multiple sources, without being unsettled.
3. They demand a connection which enables interaction (i.e. Wikipédia¹², continual interaction with a “living” encyclopædia).

PowerPoint answers the first two points wonderfully by arranging the reading of picture and writings hierarchically. For the third, let us note that in its 2007 version, PowerPoint’s new connectivity allows collaborative tasks and hyperlinks with the Internet universe. In doing so, Microsoft upgrades PowerPoint in the hypersphère¹³ of Web 2·0, reinforcing the potential to perpetuate its already considerable success.

PowerPoint is a sign of the times, ardently American, giving everyone the possibility of creating amateur cinema, and of conceiving small illustrated visions of the world. Even when it occurs in a clumsy manner, even if its assertiveness of firm belief is applied for the poorest of reasons, it has its worth. PowerPoint understands that it is necessary to demonstrate in our contemporary world, and thus to compel people to think.

Notes
1. Steve Jobs, MacWorld 2007, San Francisco, Calif. Video of available speech at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/j47d5200/event.
2. E. Tufte: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, 2nd ed. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press LLC, 2006.
3. E. Tufte: ‘PowerPoint makes you dumb’, The New York Times, December 17, 2003.
4. ‘Point of view on PowerPoint’, The Guardian.
5. R. E. Mayer: Multimedia Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001.
6. ‘The most prevalent form of persuasion technology.’ Readers will appreciate the ambiguity of the English word prevalent, which means at the same time spread and predominating.
7. R. Debray: Cours de Médiologie générale. Paris: Gallimard 1991, reissued folio, Paris: Gallimard 2001.
8. Plato: Gorgias.
9. An Inconvenient Truth, film by David Guggenheim, 2006.
10. R. Barthes: ‘L’ancienne rhétorique’, Communications, n° 16, 1970, p. 197.
11. This refers to a presentation by Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
12. Wikipedia is an online-based collaborative encyclopædia, www.wikipedia.com.
13. L. Merzeau: Cahiers de médiologie, no. 6, 1998. ‘This will not kill that.’

Pierre d’Huy is an international consultant specializing in the Management of Innovation, and a professor affiliated with the Management Institute of Paris. He teaches at CELSA Sorbonne Paris IV. His most recent book is Collective Innovation from Éditions Liaisons Sociales. There is more to come in February 2007 in another book, Collective Imagination.
Stanley Moss translated this essay from Pierre d’Huy’s original text in French. Mr Moss is CEO of the Medinge Group, a Stockholm-based think-tank on international branding. He is also founder of Diganzi, an international brand consultancy, www.diganzi.com.