The slide deck was never competing with TikTok before — now it is, every single day, in the same pocket, on the same screen. And it's losing. A presentation is a format. A film is a structure. Only one of them was ever built to hold attention for an hour.
Presentation software was designed for a specific century: one projector, one room, one captive audience who couldn't leave without being noticed. None of that holds anymore. A learner today opens your course in the same window they just closed a 23-second video in — a video built by people whose entire job is winning the next eight seconds of attention. A bulleted slide was never built for that fight, and it shows.
The problem isn't that slides are ugly or that bullet points are evil. The problem is structural: a deck is a container for information. A film is a structure for tension and release. Information delivery competes on clarity. Tension and release compete on attention itself — which is exactly the terrain TikTok already won.
This doesn't mean dumping the literal slide file. It means borrowing the one tool every working film already has and almost every course doesn't: a deliberate three-act spine. Setup. Confrontation. Resolution. Not because it's clever — because it's the oldest, most tested way humans have ever found to keep other humans paying attention for longer than eight seconds.
Forget slide design for a moment. Pull up the learning experience you're building — video, course module, live session, whatever it is — and audit it against the structure of a film, not a presentation.