The autocue is a mixed blessing.If you know how to use one, you appear able to perform acts of magic, persuading audiences that you can speak absolutely word perfectly and passionately about a subject for as long as you need to.
TV presenters do it all the time of course, and they have learned the art of bringing a script to life and making the written word sound conversational and easy on the ear.
That’s the strength of autocues. But for anyone who’s tried one, it can be really difficult to read from a verbatim script and make it sound like you’re doing anything more than, er, reading from a script. And being seen to read from a script instantly loses a measure of authenticity and puts up an invisible barrier between the speaker and the audience.
As a peripatetic priest as well as a seasoned PR man, I know it’s possible to write out a sermon in its entirety and read it aloud word for word. But unless you’re really careful, the congregation soon disengages. The truth is nobody wants to spend a Sunday morning hearing an essay being read to them.
I went through a stage of preaching from mind-maps with broadly positive results. Yes, there were “errs” and “ums” and sometimes things went off-track a little bit, but the upsides are it makes what you’re saying feel real and human in a way that a script never can.
It also allows you the freedom to cut things out, or expand on points, because you can tell if the congregation is engaging with your material or if they aren’t.
The same rules apply to a script running on autocue. Yes, being able to look at your audience as you’re reading helps to some extent, but unless you use an autocue correctly you will almost inevitably lose their attention.
A problem for people in business or politics is that autocues help deal with two main issues. The first is that they can cover up the user’s lack of confidence in their ability to give a decent speech. And the second is that they disguise if a person lacks time to prepare their speech properly.
Self-confidence was of course never an issue for Boris Johnson – and it showed in his speeches. Sure, his speeches lurched around and often got him into hot water, but they were passionate and off the cuff. Love him or loathe him, Johnson may well on occasion use an autocue but us not being sure whether he is or not is part of what makes him a brilliant orator.
Johnson also has the gift of bluffing his way through a lack of preparation. This is unusual, even for a politician. When the autocue is used to mask the lack of preparation this is often a fatal mistake.
Picture the scene – the speech is still being finalised by the director of communications ten minutes before it is due to be delivered, and the speechmaker is given a false sense of security that this doesn’t matter, because it is going to be loaded up in its entirety on the trusty autocue so nobody will notice.
But, be warned, if you don’t know your material really well, the autocue won’t help. You will end up delivering a speech with the wrong things emphasised, with punch-lines delivered poorly as they don’t carry enough weight and with jokes that fall painfully flat.
Recent examples, from our current Prime Minister in his first national address since assuming the role and from Prime Minister Liz Truss at the Conservative party conference, both demonstrate pretty effectively how not to use an autocue.
Rishi Sunak’s first speech as PM should have been triumphant and reassuring. But it came over as wooden, lacklustre and bland because the autocue sucked the life out of it. What’s more, you can see he’s focussing on the autocue screen and not the audience, which gives him a disengagement from his audience that is the polar opposite of what he hoped to achieve.
And who can forget Liz Truss’s autocue-delivered conference rant in 2014 about the disgraceful level of cheese imports to the UK? She hasn’t got any better, to be honest.
What’s the solution to this? Well, it is possible to be trained to use an autocue well. Some people do it much better than others, and of course most people get better if they use them regularly.
We would never allow a client to deliver a speech on autocue without first having been properly trained, not just on the technology and how to use it to give a realistic result, but also on the content. It’s worth the investment.
By Tom Buchanan, MD and Founder of Paternoster Communications