Kodak PowerPoint Presentation is no Digital Delight

Using a PowerPoint presentation to explain your Chapter 11 insolvency protection might not be the first thing you’d expect Eastman Kodak to do. Yet, the once omnipresent face of photography, did just that last week when it filed for bankruptcy protection in the US courts.

The investor relations team at Kodak–who prepared the PowerPoint presentation–has been very busy.

The presentation sets out the context of the dramatic fall in the fortunes of Kodak, the digital onslaught and their expectations for eventual restructuring. That’s no tall order for any presentation. So it comes as no surprise that the presentation doesn’t deliver.

From the very first slide you sense that their material would be more useful in a report format. There’s too much text, font sizes are too small and there’s too little emphasis upon the imagery with which Kodak made its name.

Bullet point lists abound and financial performance graphs are loaded together onto one slide to an extent that makes them impossible to fathom.

Text overload is most obvious with the slides dedicated to financial transactions and cash-flow.

This was a disappointing presentation from the former masters of creative imagery. In essence, the job of serving this amount of information to shareholders would be better done with something other than a presentation.