Well, teleprompters are definitely in right now, especially since our famous President Barack Obama has shown us how powerful reading a teleprompter can be in building a brand, in his case, a political brand. Interestingly, reading a teleprompter is not as easy as you might think. This is simply because not all of us are erudite and capable of reading something once, allowing it to become a photographic memory in our mind, and then simply reciting it once we get up on the podium. Actually, there are Hollywood movie stars who are quite cerebral and have such a good memory that they can memorize the lines perfectly, and then they just have to get into character to act.
The other day, I was talking to an expert teleprompter technician, who now works as a consultant helping corporate titans, world leaders, and politicians with the perfect delivery. He has worked in and around Hollywood with several very talented people in the media and also with actors. In addition, he assists and teaches other teleprompter technicians on how to do the perfect scrolling and how to sync up with whoever is at the podium, taking into account crowd interruptions and the change of pace as the speech is read. It matters.
The cadence and speed at which you read are just as important as your voice inflection, eye contact, and delivery. If someone moves too fast, they can get ahead of the speaker and cause them to make a mistake, or end up going too slow at the wrong time and the audience falls asleep. If the connection between the speaker and the audience is not established, they stop listening. Similarly, someone who watches TV turns off, perhaps doing a channel check or mentally scheduling their time to think about something else. This is how discourses die and stop working.
The delivery of the speech is of the utmost importance, and it is a skill in leadership that is extremely important, because if the followers do not listen and do not accept the words or the speaker, everything is wasted. You could say that reading from a teleprompter is as much an art as it is a science, and you’d be right. There are many things that go into the perfect execution of a speech read from a teleprompter, and not everyone can do it. But those who learn to do it right can become powerful voices in our lives, in our politics, and in our world. Please consider all this and think about it.
