Presentation Summit 2022: Conversation with Kristaps Petersons

    Kristaps Petersons is from Riga, Latvia (Europe). He’s one of the members of the board of Directors at the Presentation Guild. With more than 15 years of experience in national and international broadcast journalism and film-making, Kristaps creates high-stakes lobby, sales and image presentations to his clients since 2015. Among his clients are names like Roche, Novartis, McDonald’s, Carlsberg Group, Volkswagen AG and governments like Canada, the UAE, Switzerland, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia.

In this conversation, Kristaps talks about his participation at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2022, being held on location in San Diego, CA, and virtually this year from October 9 to 12, 2022.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Kristaps, can you tell us about your Short Stories session that you are co-hosting with Nolan Haims at this year’s Presentation Summit? What according to you, would be the audience’s main takeaway from this session?

Kristaps: I certainly can’t talk on behalf of Nolan but from my presentation, I hope, people will take away several thoughts about how easy we can do good and how easy we can harm someone with a powerful message. Only after February 24, 2022, when Russia attacked an independent country in Europe, I woke up and went through all my previous presentation work and looked at that from the perspective of “good cause”, “neutral cause” and “who knows what’s the end game here”.

I clearly remember when just months ago some businessman who wanted to co-operate with Moscow’s pawnshops and build some kind of application came to me and asked for help to build a high-stakes pitch presentation. I remember that I did it but afterward I felt somehow wrong about it. Not that I’ve done something bad but that one particular note hit me and I couldn’t see this project within my professional portfolio. I know that these times require more often than before to go with your gut feeling, with your consciousness but even better – within your principles and values if one has them. So, to sum it up – I’ll talk about the moral aspects of presentations and my own experience being on the front lines of an information war.

Geetesh: Can you share some thoughts about creating better presentations for hybrid audiences so that they are relevant and memorable for both in-person and virtual audiences?

Kristaps: I hate hybrid presentations. I hate them as much as I hate when clients ask for a slide deck that can be shown on screen and sent in an e-mail at the same time. In my view, there are situations when the middle ground does not exist or it looks just awful. For me, presentations work either in-person or virtually. They both have clear standards and good practices. If you ask me to do hybrid, my chip just explodes. I don’t know where to begin. So, as you see, I may not be the best to give the answer to this. If it would be up to me, I most certainly make hybrid presentations illegal.

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