Velocity at Pecha-Kucha night

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.