Harvard Professors Say Medium Affects Message, Influences Decisions | MediaPost Communications - Data & Programmatic Insider

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"Interactive advertising based on real data that personalizes the message can typically keep the interest of consumers longer because they become part of the experience. Same goes for the way CMOs deliver ideas to their company's board of director or C-suite executives" notes Laurie Sullivan, writer and editor for MediaPost. 

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A study conducted by Harvard University Department of Psychology that analyzes three presentation styles—PowerPoint, interactive Prezi tools, and oral presentations—to analyze the influence of formats suggests CMOs need to begin thinking as much about the medium they use as they do their audience. 

Participants presented live to an audience over Skype. The audience judged the efficacy of each presentation. In the second phase, recorded versions of these presentations were presented to a larger online audience, allowing them to measure the impact of presentation format on decision-making and learning.

Across both experiments, participants ranked PowerPoint presentations comparable to oral presentations, but evaluated Prezi presentations more favorably.

The results suggest that participants who viewed different types of presentations came to different conclusions about the business scenario, but no evidence that they remembered or comprehended the scenario differently. One conclusion:the observed effects of presentation format are not merely the result of novelty, bias, experimenter-, or software-specific characteristics, but instead reveal a communication preference for using the panning-and-zooming animations.
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Source: MediaPost Communications