Intrepid Velocipedes Doug Kessler and Stuart Rothwell attended the first ever D&AD Pecha-Kucha night last night.  Nine creative supremos (mostly digital marketers), each delivering their first Pecha-Kucha presentation to a packed house of 400-ish trendy digirati.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of a Pecha-Kucha night yet:

• It’s a fast, fun, freaky new medium from Tokyo
• Speakers get just 20 powerpoint slides, each on screen for 20-seconds
• So the whole thing lasts six minutes and 40 seconds
• It’s pronounced kind of like p’CHOK-cha and it means ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese

We went because we were curious about PKs (we call them 20/20s in-house) and have done one of our own to introduce Velocity to new prospects.  We’re also experimenting with doing some of these for clients, so they can boil their stories down to under 7 minutes (we do a lot of boiling down  at Velocity — hence the industrial extractor fan).

The potted review?  An entertaining and thought-provoking evening, though the thoughts provoked were mainly about the appropriateness, artificiality and advantages of Pecha-Kucha for the world of B2B.  It is certainly an artificial constraint, but a lot of good can come from constraints.

The evening wasn’t as diverse as expected, but given that it was essentially a parade of like-minded, hip, creative narcissists, we probably shouldn’t have expected diversity.

Watch this space… we’ll publish our next Pecha-Kucha soon.

Most B2B technology copywriting is so boring because its so neutral. The best copywriting looks the prospect squarely in the eye and says, “I’m going to sell to you and you’re going to enjoy it.”

Boring copy is all the same:

It uses the passive voice
“The interaction is further enabled by automated screen-scrape optimization technology…”

It’s jargon-soaked
“…utilizing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that combines traditional Business Process Management (BPM) with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) into a seamless, scalable Blah-De-Blah (BDB).

It’s abstract instead of concrete
“…enabling better processes through systematic automation of yadda-yadda-yadda.”

It’s all in the 3rd person
“The software helps financial services companies better manage their customer-facing…”

This last point is rarely talked about but is especially crippling. Pick up your last data sheet. Now go through it and change the third person phrasing into second person singular: the subject is “You” (the reader).

You’ll have to rewrite the copy to make it sound right. And once you do, you will have made it better. More engaging. More down to earth. More personal.

I’m not suggesting you only use the 2nd person. That would be weird. But try using it and see if it doesn’t help you focus on a specific reader or listener — and help them focus on your message.

Case in point: you’ve probably noticed that the first half of this post is written in the third person. The second half is written in the second person singular. And it’s just that extra notch more engaging. Don’t you think?