The surreal entertainment of elevator pitches
Among the more stultifying ubiquities of corporate life, the business presentation is perhaps most reviled -- an eerie combination of a dryly-delivered grade school book report, the faux-enthusiasm of a campaign speech, and the practiced, neutered cadence of a local newscaster. Not just boring, but unnatural. Delivered in halogen-bright rooms by poor public speakers who've somehow found the uncanny valley of their own existence.
In an attempt to fun up the presentation routine, some inveterate gabbers have converted their Powerpoints into info-chocked song and dance routines, e.g., Larry Lessig's minimalist slides, and the near-mythic, Micro Machine Man-esque visual rapidity of Dick Hardt's Sxip lecture. Corporate presentation culture even has its own devoted blog in Presentation Zen -- whose author, though accomplished in the dispensation of business maxims, is perhaps unaware of the tension between the concepts of Buddha-like asceticism and effective corporate sales techniques.
But, we want to be entertained. And so it was somehow inevitable that Techcrunch, that infamous arbiter of techie 2.0-ness, would develop a site devoted exclusively to videos of corporate presentations.
Specifically elevator pitches, or business plans distilled into thankfully-brief vignettes. Typically the province of conferences -- Web 2.0, O'Reilly's ETech, WhateverCon -- Techcrunch is now publishing these pitches as minute-long vids, exhorting viewers to vote yay or nay on the idea.
Not typical entertainment fare. But what makes Elevator Pitches so strangely beguiling is how the site tries to entertain: by schlacking each presenter in a rudimentary Photoshop-like paintbrush effect, rendering the videos similar to (derivative of?) Schwab's rotoscoped commercials, or perhaps the surreality of A Scanner Darkly.
And then there are the comments, like this one under video search engine Viewdle: "The pitch was kind of boring." Well, yes. It's a presentation. But the expectation is there, isn't it. Entertain me.
According to Bob Sabiston, the MIT lab veteran who developed the rotoscoping for Schwab, the effect's meant to distract a viewer from the visual and concentrate on the words being spoken. The effect works for Schwab -- there's an evident pathos in each actor's voice -- but used with the elevator pitches, all you're left with is the speaker's monotone.
There's only so much lipstick you can put on a pig.
