Allie Wilson once had a job designing movie posters in Los Angeles, and remembers the task as deceptively simple: take a two-hour story arc and distill it into a single image. Years later, as CEO of GhostRanch Communications, she’s doing something remarkably similar for marketing leaders, except now the canvas is a PowerPoint deck and the stakes are significantly higher.

“What I learned along the way is this work can look beautiful and still completely fall flat if the idea is not set up to land,” Wilson said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Atlanta marketing conference. That realization, she says, pulled her from product design into the world of presentation design, where strategy and storytelling collide.

Her message to chief marketing officers is straightforward but often overlooked: presentations aren’t just a box to check. They’re where strategy either holds together or completely falls apart.

The Hidden Cost of Bad Decks

The numbers tell a grim story. Humans create 30 million presentations daily, yet sales and marketing misalignment costs the global economy a trillion dollars annually. That’s roughly 10% less revenue per company that simply evaporates, according to Wilson, who has spent over a decade partnering directly with CMOs across industries.

In a recent survey of 50 marketing leaders, GhostRanch Communications found that for every presentation delivered externally, five are given internally. “That means there are five times more presentations happening inside your org than outside,” she said. “That’s shaping understanding, alignment and execution long before anything ever hits the market.”

The ripple effect matters. When marketing creates a deck and hands it off to sales, product teams, and customer success, that original story multiplies outward to customers, analysts, and investors. If the foundation is weak, the distortion compounds at every handoff.

Wilson frames effective presentations around three essential components: story, screen, and stage. “Presentations rarely fail for just one reason,” she said. “Usually it’s not that the story is bad, or that the slides are ugly, or that the presenter isn’t confident. It’s that one leg is weak and the whole thing starts to wobble.”

Story: The Power of Distillation

Despite CMOs’ deep understanding of narrative, most presentations fail to truly tell one. Instead, they offer what Wilson calls “a real estate tour”—click, feature, click, another feature, another screen. This approach is informative, but it misses the opportunity to show the transformation: what life looks like before your solution exists versus after.

The problem is density. Research from the American Press Institute shows that sentences around eight words are remembered nearly 100% of the time. Once you reach 43 words, retention drops essentially to zero. Yet the average PowerPoint slide contains far more text than that. “We see slides that are closer to 100 or 150 words,” Wilson said. “Which means we’re designing slides that are almost impossible to remember and then wondering why our message doesn’t travel.”

She points to Steve Jobs as an exemplary distillation master. At Macworld 2003, Jobs used just 20 words across his first 20 slides. His headlines, like “1000 songs in your pocket” and “Apple reinvents the phone,” were short, crisp, and easy to repeat. “He put those headlines on a silver platter for his audience,” Wilson said.

Screen: Visual Storytelling That Sticks

The second component addresses how strategy shows up visually. When slides are cluttered or inconsistent, focus drifts and trust erodes. But when visuals do their job, they dramatically increase retention. Research cited by John Medina in Brain Rules found that people remembered about 10% of a purely verbal message after a short period. When paired with relevant visuals, retention jumped to 65%.

Wilson emphasizes that design isn’t about beauty; it’s about bridging the gap between what you mean and what people understand. “You should be able to feel the contrast between a problem and a solution,” she said. “The before and after shouldn’t be subtle.”

She warns CMOs about brand erosion, particularly with the rise of AI-generated imagery. While these tools can save time, they can also lead to inconsistency if not guided carefully. “Throwing imagery creation entirely to the bots can be a really big shortcoming,” Wilson cautioned, sharing examples of AI-generated images that botched specific brand assets.

Stage: The Personalization Gap

The final component is delivery, which breaks down when messages aren’t tailored to audiences. While B2B marketers excel at personalization in emails, ads, and landing pages, that discipline often disappears in presentations and enablement assets. Over half of B2B buyers say they will switch brands if communication doesn’t feel personalized.

Wilson shared the cautionary tale of Nike allegedly losing basketball star Steph Curry to Under Armour due to a presentation that wasn’t personalized and reportedly left someone else’s name in it. “That’s a $14 billion mistake,” she said, “because the story didn’t feel like it was for the person in the room.”

Treating Presentations as a Discipline

Wilson’s core argument is that presentations deserve the same strategic rigor as any other marketing function. When story, screen, and stage work together across the entire ecosystem, strategy holds together longer, teams align faster, and sellers show up with confidence.

“This isn’t about better templates,” Wilson emphasized. “It’s not about prettier slides, and it’s definitely not about being the font police. This is about treating presentations as a discipline, one that helps you differentiate, create alignment and build momentum across your org.”

For CMOs navigating constant complexity (setting strategy only to watch it dilute as it moves through the organization, fighting inconsistent messaging, dealing with sellers who go rogue, etc.), presentations are both the problem and the solution. They’re where all that complexity shows up, but they’re also the lever for fixing it.

The challenge isn’t perfection. It’s reducing distortion as strategy moves from leadership to execution to customer. When the message is clear, intentional, and well-built, what ripples outward actually holds together.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, GhostRanch, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. 

Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.

(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)