Pecha Kucha and Ignite: How the short formats differ and what they do for speakers

Pecha Kucha and Ignite are short talk formats with exactly 20 slides that advance automatically, after 20 seconds in Pecha Kucha and after 15 in Ignite. A Pecha Kucha talk therefore lasts six minutes and forty seconds, an Ignite talk five minutes. Both formats grew out of the creative and tech scenes, Pecha Kucha in Tokyo in 2003 and Ignite in Seattle in 2006, and both have spread worldwide as evening series of their own and as part of conference programmes. For B2B speakers they are a visible entry point with a low threshold that shows expertise in a few minutes and starts conversations.

What is Pecha Kucha?

Pecha Kucha is a presentation format in which you show 20 images, each on screen for 20 seconds before the next one appears without any action from you. The name is Japanese and roughly means chit-chat. The format was devised by the architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, whose practice Klein Dytham Architecture hosted the first evening in Tokyo in February 2003. They wanted to draw people from design and architecture to their event space SuperDeluxe in Roppongi and to stop designers from talking their work to death in endless slide shows. The format's guiding idea is therefore to talk less and show more.

That single evening became a worldwide series. Under the name PechaKucha Night, cities host evenings at which eight to fourteen people give one talk each at the pace of 20 times 20 seconds. By April 2019, according to the organisation, evenings had taken place in more than 1,100 cities. In each city a local team runs the series by arrangement with the organisation in Tokyo, so that there is one series per city. The organisation spells the name PechaKucha as one word, while Pecha Kucha with a space is common in general usage.

The content of these evenings is open, from buildings and start-up projects to research and private collections. For B2B professionals this is a mixed audience in which your own clients sit more or less by chance. The second way the format has spread is therefore more interesting for winning business: conferences, association meetings and universities put Pecha Kucha blocks into their programmes to bring many voices onto the stage in a short time.

What is an Ignite talk?

An Ignite talk is a presentation of exactly five minutes with 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. The format started in Seattle in December 2006 as a personal project of Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis, both then working around the publisher O'Reilly Media and MAKE magazine, which supported the first evening. The idea was an evening at which people from the tech scene share ideas over a beer, and the motto to this day is „Enlighten us, but make it quick“.

O'Reilly ran the series for several years, and in 2015 Brady Forrest took over the brand and set up a public benefit corporation for it. Worldwide, more than 350 teams in cities, universities, government bodies and companies now host Ignite evenings. Ignite counts as a particularly strict form of the lightning talk, the short talk of five to ten minutes that many conferences use to fill a block with several speakers. Which other session types exist and how they differ for winning clients is covered in the article on formats at a conference.

What is the difference between Ignite and Pecha Kucha?

Ignite and Pecha Kucha differ in pace: Pecha Kucha keeps each of its 20 slides on screen for 20 seconds, Ignite for only 15, so an Ignite talk is 100 seconds shorter. Both formats advance automatically, and in both the speaker can neither pause nor go back.

The pace shapes the character of each format. Twenty seconds are enough for a complete thought with an example, which is why Pecha Kucha talks often tell a development in images, such as a project from its starting point to its result. Fifteen seconds hold barely one or two sentences, so Ignite talks feel faster and sharper. Their origins still shape the audiences: Pecha Kucha comes from architecture and design, and its evenings are strongly visual, while Ignite comes from the tech and start-up scene, where people expect a thesis with arguments.

Why the short formats are so demanding

Short formats are considered difficult because the automatic slide change makes every moment of uncertainty audible to the whole room. In a thirty minute talk you recover a lost thread with an example, while in an Ignite talk the slide has already moved on by the time you find it again. Experienced speakers therefore plan the script as precisely as a television segment, with one thought per slide, and they rehearse many times with automatic advance switched on until the end of each sentence meets the slide change.

The effort stands in an unusual relation to the speaking time. In practice, speakers spend about as many hours preparing five minutes of Ignite as they would for a twenty minute talk, because every slide has to work as an image and every sentence has to land on the second. How many slides a talk without a fixed pace needs, and why one statement per slide improves understanding, is explained in the article on how many slides a talk needs.

Research on teaching supports the impression that audiences respond well to the format. In 2011 the psychologist Alisa Beyer compared student presentations in the Pecha Kucha format with conventional slide talks and found that the short talks were at least as good and were rated more highly by the audience. A follow-up study with two experiments confirmed the better ratings and found no difference between the formats in how much the audience remembered. By these findings, the fixed pace with images in place of text slides does not harm understanding, and audiences prefer to follow such talks.

What do Pecha Kucha and Ignite do for B2B speakers?

Pecha Kucha and Ignite give B2B speakers visibility at a low entry threshold, and they work as a first stage or as a second appearance at a conference where you are already speaking. Short formats offer many speaker places on little programme time, and a programme team filling a block of eight short talks is more likely to take on new names than for a forty minute slot in the main programme. How smaller stages of this kind work as an entry point is described in the article on meetups, user groups and barcamps.

The business value comes after the block. Five minutes are enough to present one thesis and one example from your practice, and they are deliberately too short to explain everything. Anyone in the audience who has the same problem comes up to you in the break, and that is where the conversation starts that can turn into an assignment. A short talk does not replace the longer expert talk in which you show your method in detail and build the trust a buying committee needs for a decision.

Fees play no part in the short formats. At PechaKucha Nights and Ignite evenings, speakers as a rule present without a fee, and at conferences short talks are part of the programme filled through the call for papers, the public invitation a conference uses to collect talk proposals. A single assignment won from such an appearance is worth more to a consultant or service provider than any fee the format could pay, provided the right people are in the room.

Who gets you onto the right short format stage

Short talk blocks often appear in calls as a category of their own, sometimes as lightning talks, sometimes as Pecha Kucha or Ignite, and they come with their own deadlines and their own requirements for the abstract, the short description of the planned talk. If you want to use these places deliberately, you have to find the conferences where your clients sit and which offer such blocks, and you need a suitable submission for each format.

Stage Starter takes on this work for you: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it, for short formats as well as for the longer expert talk. We bring experts onto professional stages where their clients are in the audience, and we work with figures from our own submissions for clients: at conference level we reach acceptances of up to 19 per cent per conference, while the market norm at this volume of submissions is 5 per cent at most. The engagement starts from 990 euros net per month. How the whole path from topic to stage fits together is shown in the guide to becoming a speaker.