Two essential ingredients to make a speech successful

I had gone to a meeting during the last weekend. The meeting was about a cultural program that was being planned to be put up in front of a large audience. There were various aspects of the program that were touched upon by different speakers during the meeting.

Speaker 1: He welcomed the audience, and introduced the agenda for the meeting. He also set the stage for the next speaker, introducing him to the audience, and initiating the subject on which he was to speak.

Speaker 2: He spoke about the objective of the cultural program, and what role each of us, in general, will be playing the program. The audience appreciated his speech, and the tempo was set for the allocation of tasks to the various members in the audience.

Speaker 3: The third speaker was not introduced well, and more so, his subject of speech was not mentioned by anybody. He started well, and spoke with fervour & enthusiasm, but most of what he said was already known to the audience. He used a Power-point presentation, and out of the 15 (approx) slides, only 3 had the information that was new to many in the audience. Once he was through these three slides, the audience lost interest. They started watching what the others were doing, and hardly anybody paid much attention to him.

Speaker 4:He did a great job. As the audience comprised of people from 2 different groups, he broke the ice between the groups by making amusing, but not insulting, comments about either group to keep the audience interested. Finally, he also allotted the tasks to various individuals in the audience and achieved the objective of the meeting.

As the meeting concluded, I picked up two points about public-speaking:

Important ingredients to make a speech successful, among others, includes:
(a) Knowing your audience.
(b) Repairing the damage done by previous speaker.

Speaker 3 ignored the first point, whereas Speaker 4 realised that he has to take the second point also into consideration.

As I was leaving the venue, I saw Speaker 4 being congratulated for his eloquent speech by many.