The Audience Matters — This is how to connect with them
When I was about 10 years old I recall watching the film Jaws in the lounge room of our family home with my parents and a couple of neighbours. The TV was not very big and the film was on VHS cassette but the one thing I recall was how many times I had to go to the bathroom during that 2 hours. Like most people at the time, Steven Spielberg scared the shit out of me with this movie and even baths were avoided for a short period. What I did not recognise for another 3 decades was just how perfectly the audience was conditioned in this movie. The experience was curated perfectly in a way that we rarely see today in films.
Not everyone will have seen this film and when I look back on it now I recognise that it has probably done a lot of damage to the way we view sharks which are truly magnificent creatures. Nevertheless I cannot help but be impressed by the audience conditioning. In the first half of the movie we are carefully trained by the director and the composer of the musical score (John Williams) to expect the shark to be approaching when the famous ‘Jaws’ theme is played. This happens multiple times to keep us on our toes….to condition us….to expect the shark. When the shark finally appears off the back of the boat in front of Chief Brody (played by the late Roy Scheider), there is no music at all. People jumped out of their seats because the conditioning with the music was so well done that the appearance of the shark was completely unexpected without a musical prompt. Steven Spielberg actively set the audience expectations.
This sort of conditioning of an audience is used often in films, although less so today. It can be an effective tool to add ‘weight’ to a scene or make the emotional impact deeper than it would otherwise be. Steven Spielberg seems to be one director who uses this in many of his films. He strongly curates audience experiences so that we remember, are moved, and feel connected to characters he creates.
Of course, we see audience conditioning in many places and it seems to be one of the hallmarks of the entertainment industry. If you ever go to a live recording of a comedy show, you will often be treated to a ‘warm up’ act to get you in the right mood to laugh. In the retail space, we see the effects of audience conditioning very clearly, although the term audience expectation is probably more familiar. Ultimately, when we are interacting with an audience we have the capability of setting up expectations. We can use this expectation setting to achieve many goals with our audience — in Jaws it was to scare, in retail it’s to make people feel satisfied, in a car dealership….well that’s another story. So what about when we give presentations or write articles? What about when we write applications for funding or do job interviews? Why can we not use these same tools to our advantage? Why don’t we actively set the expectations of our audience and curate the experience for them? At the most sophisticated end it would be called conditioning, but what we should probably start with is just setting expectations. I think of these as being all part of a continuum. When you get to the highest level of sophistication you need to make sure you have not become a faith healer!
One of the biggest issues with most areas of communication, whether we are talking about the psychology of an audience, the way we give and receive feedback, or how we condition our audience is that we simple don’t get nuanced training to do this. Whenever I run workshops on this sort of thing I find that just a couple of hours can be transformative. The baseline ‘toolkit’ most people have is so limited that I find we are almost starting from scratch.
So Let’s Begin
One question I like to ask people in my workshops, especially those who work in the University sector, is ‘when a student goes to a uni lecture, who sets their expectations?’ The correct answer of course, especially for new students, is that it’s the university marketing departments that do this — or more correctly some combination of advertising, course handbooks, career advisers, open day excitement and myths seen on television. The actual lecturer often does little to set expectations of the audience in any way.
When we teach we must take matters into our own hands and be sure to set the expectations of our audience — to prepare them in a way that makes what we do enjoyable and memorable. What we must be careful of first is how much we do this unintentionally. If we don’t think about setting our audiences expectations, we tend to do it unintentionally and not in a good way!
Often when I give workshops I carefully provide two pieces of information to demonstrate audience conditioning. The first thing I do is say something like “I apologise if I’m a bit disorganised today but I had a late night last night and didn’t get to look at this talk until this morning”. The second thing I often do is quickly flash up a random slide pack I have made so they can see that I have hundreds of slides to go through. I then wait a moment to see how they react and then simply ask them ‘is this okay’? We proceed to unpack what I have just said and explore how many times they have experienced this sort of thing. Typically these comments prepare the audience to expect something poor from the speaker. I use these comments to help me prepare my audience to expect something different.
There are more subtle examples of things that will set audience expectations. The way a speaker walks onto the stage, their ability to use the systems they are given, whether they hide behind a lectern or other barrier, how much they ‘connect’ with the audience, and the list goes on. Of course, these are all examples of ‘minor conditioning’. They adjust the expectations of the audience in subtle but definitive ways. Whenever I give plenary presentations I am always very careful to make sure I’m introduced with as little information as possible — I prefer to accurately promise and accurately deliver. There is a broad range of audience expectation setting that we can do, some of it subtle, some of it more elaborate — the key to both though is that we make it deliberate so we can control the impact.
So how do we ‘prepare/condition’ an audience when we are giving a presentation? What is the equivalent of a musical score by John Williams? Well the first thing we need to do is assess the starting point for our audience — what do they expect to happen when they walk into the room? Will this just be like any other talk that they have come into? One of the things that is always problematic for an audience is not knowing what they are going to get. I’m not talking about the detail, I’m talking about the quality. The majority of people have sat through so many bad talks, read so many badly written documents, and agonised politely through so many job interview candidates that they almost feel a sense of dread of what is to come. Typically the first 10–20 seconds confirms that once again they are in for a rough ride. It’s important to remember that us humans have very good and rapid pattern recognition — we can determine the upcoming quality very early on.
When you are presenting you are setting and re-setting the audience expectations constantly from the moment you stand up. It’s important to set a certain tone or standard and then stick to that. This can often be done very effectively by indicating to the audience that you are very conscious of their experience and the time they have given you. We can be overt about this. I will often say “I appreciate that you have given me a chunk of your time today — so I intend to keep you amused and informed for the next 30 minutes, I’m very aware that some of you may have heard a boring talk in your life — we are not doing that”. There is also value to really owning the speaking area — deconstructing elements of it to show that you understand how the audience psychology works. For example, I will often point out that I will not be hiding behind the lectern — I don’t want any barriers between myself and the audience. This combination of expectation setting combined with a small amount of education on public speaking can resonate well. It also conditions my audience to expect something a little different. It’s amazing how much you can get from your audience when they suddenly believe that you have the audience experience front of mind.
If you are going to use PowerPoint then make sure that you focus a lot of attention on that first slide — it will often be on the screen for a very long time and you can use that to great benefit. You can make it humorous. You can make it informative. You can use it to give instructions or set expectations. And sorry but your name, talk title and long list of bullshit credentials does not inspire me to want to hear what you have to say — it tells me you are just like everyone else. I want to see something different. I want to be surprised. I want to know that I am in for something special.
One thing I often suggest to people is that they make a list of ten things that they will do in the first few minutes of a presentation to make the audience feel valued, able to contribute, and the very reason you are there. This is hard to do but it can really be a worthwhile tool to set expectations. For example, I will often do the following before and during a talk:
1. Walk into the crowd and ask a number of people why they are there and what they are expecting.
2. Speak to somebody sitting at the very back and tell them I will be checking the volume with them at some stage to make sure they can hear.
3. Take the information you learn from 1 and include that in my talk somehow.
4. Double check the lighting to make sure my presentation is easy to see. To do this I need to go and sit with the audience for a moment — it’s their perspective that counts.
5. I will often ask the audience a question in the first minute to get a feel for who is in the room — try and work out what they know.
6. Once I have done 5 I can try and use the audience in my presentation. The key is to make it a conversation rather than a lecture — lectures are one way and generally suck.
7. At multiple points in the discussion I will seek information or input from the audience.
8. I will acknowledge if there are people sitting where I may not often face — they will see my back or side a lot and I want them to feel important too
9. If I am using slides I will make it very known that I put them together specifically for the audience in front of me — sometimes I will ask for their reflections on slides.
10. I like to periodically ‘check-in’ with my audience — sometimes humorously — to make sure they are with me on the journey.
Essentially this is all about curating the experience for the audience in a very deliberate way. The list above is one that I have worked on over a long period of time and it varies from talk to talk. Lists like this should not be implemented in one go — they need to build up slowly. We add the next piece when we are comfortable with the last one.
By contrast, here is a list of things I have observed people doing that inadvertently curates a negative experience for the audience:
1. Act as though they are better than the audience — body language does this.
2. Not interact with any member of the audience before the presentation.
3. Have trouble with the audio visual because they turn up too late to test things before the audience arrives.
4. Skip the slides that are not relevant to this audience — clearly the talk was put together for somebody else.
5. Make the conversation one-way (I find people who do this are easily replaced by videos!).
6. Hide behind the lectern — or find any other barrier to separate from the audience.
7. Be clearly unaware of who the audience is — this just says ‘f-you’ to the audience in front of you.
8. Demonstrate clear gender, racial or other biases that essentially lose part of the audience.
9. Go over time — there is very little that shits me more as an audience member, especially if the talk is bad and I want it to end.
10. Put all of their talk on the slides so I get to read it as well — kill me now!
I have made this a short list but I often encourage people to write these things down whenever they go to presentations, read books or go to movies — to actively try and articulate what makes an experience negative so that you can avoid doing it ourselves. This can actually be a lot harder than it sounds because so many of these judgements are ones we are accustomed to making in a subconscious fashion. Dragging these decision points into our conscious minds is hard work.
A few last words?
There are a number of key points to preparing our audiences and setting their expectations that I want to be very clear on. Here’s a simple list:
1. When I say ‘know your audience’ I mean a lot more than just being aware of ‘who’ they are. I expect you to also be engaged with them, learning from them, setting their expectations, and utilising their knowledge. You must curate their experience — and to do that you should understand their psychology and what makes them like or dislike an experience.
2. It’s very important that we start to take notice of what makes us like and dislike pieces of communication. Often we do this subconsciously and we never explore why. If we want to improve our own forms of communication we need to be able to identify good and bad aspects in what we see.
3. We need to be deliberate about setting audience expectations. That means actively thinking about what we will do to make sure we set their expectations appropriately and then at the very least meet those expectations.
4. Above all, we need to expend considerable energy on the design of how we communicate — we need to think about the purpose of our communication and how we make it memorable. It’s never enough to just go out there and ‘wing it’.
So the next time you are sitting in a talk or reading an article that makes you want to poke your eye out with a spoon, be thankful to the presenter because they are giving you a wealth of information on just what not to do.
Other articles by the author:
Scientists: Use PowerPoint as a Tool, don’t be a Tool for PowerPoint
How to be an Excellent Communicator — You Only Need 3 Axioms
The Architecture of Feedback
https://medium.com/@DrShaneRRR/the-architecture-of-feedback-63d37482043
