Which presentation style is the best one?

I was responsible for preparation a half day action for our customers about collaboration technologies. Lazzy enough I invited IBM and Microsoft and asked them to do a presentations about their products. And that was the moment when I realize that I don’t know which presentation style is better, as Microsoft and IBM has different presentation styles. As far as I know, there are different styles based on what I want to show, the question is what and how to show when I want to speak to new people, who know nothing about technology, this specific part of IT market and don’t know how to leverage all the possibilites the system provides.

What are the ways how to present, I found so far?

• just the plain, mostly marketing, presentation with a lot of text and pictures
• specific examples how to work with it and pictures how does it look like
• video of the user experience when using system, how does he use it
• real time example of the user experience in final version of system (eg. portal specific for their needs)
• real time example what and how is possible to do (eg. show how I can change the portal site, add a new widget, basic setup of DMS system and so on) while you present this to normal users, not technical guys

And what do I think so far?

• the marketing presentation is perfect for sleeping 🙂
• I like the idea of specific examples with pictures, I have enough time to look around and think how I can use it
• video or real-time – I have to concentrate on it and I’m not sure there is enough additional value compared to pictures. And combination of the „picture style“ with video after that is just too long for me.
• real-time example how can I setup something – perfect for technical people (and for them it is also important), don’t think it is so important for normal user to know that I’m able to easily change the amount of versions in DMS or so on.

What do you think, do you have some special style which you prefer?