The impact of pre-conference advice on academic talk effectiveness

Utilizing a randomized controlled trial, we explore the effect of advice on presentation quality at a prestigious academic finance conference. Employing a panel of MTurk workers to evaluate presentations for effectiveness, our findings show that treated speakers are 0.22 standard deviations more likely to win a comparison for effectiveness against non-treated counterparts. We further corroborate these results by examining the treatment effects on presentation slides, overall presentation quality, Zoom talk attendance duration, and YouTube viewings. This evidence suggests that informing speakers about good presentation practices can substantially improve the effectiveness of conference talks.