Emily, a very good event planner, was running a corporate sales meeting for a client at a hotel outside Miami. The hybrid event expected 500 people in the room and another 250 online.
Two days, packed with breakout sessions and workshops, all of it to be live streamed. Five presenters, every one of them remote. And to close the awards ceremony, a surprise keynote, also delivered remotely.
Emily and her team had done their diligence. The hotel’s A/V department had confirmed it would provide all the equipment and staging, while a third-party vendor would manage the live stream to the stage.
She checked in the day before and went to find the A/V team for a walkthrough. Nobody answered. She called the sales manager she’d worked with before.
The A/V manager was out. His counterpart had called in sick that morning. And nobody else at the hotel knew how any of it worked. The event was hours away, and none of the A/V was set up, let alone tested.
To say Emily was anxious would be an understatement. The event would be a total flop without A/V; it doesn’t matter who you booked as your keynote if nobody can hear them.
So she called the third-party vendor who was handling the stream, explained the situation, and asked whether they could possibly help with the on-site A/V too. They could. Even though they weren’t on site, they walked Emily and her team through the entire setup. The event went ahead, on time.
We won’t name the client or the hotel. The third-party vendor was us. From that day forward, Emily’s team stopped relying on a venue’s A/V department alone.
What we actually do
We coordinate with the venue’s A/V team. Hotel A/V departments are notorious for charging a premium on their own equipment. We act as the liaison, and we routinely save clients money simply by stopping them from renting technology they don’t need.
We plan the production months out. Presentations, panels, live streaming, playback, audience engagement, lighting. We work through the whole shape of the event early, so the technical plan matches the scale and complexity of what you’re actually doing.
We set up and test the equipment. Sound, cameras, microphones, projectors, screens, in working order, in the right place, checked before anyone walks in.
We check the bandwidth. Connectivity makes or breaks a large event, and it’s not just about the speed of the line. The number of people hitting a single wireless access point directly affects performance for everyone on it. This is the failure nobody plans for.
We light it for both audiences. A room can look fine to the people in it and terrible on the stream. The lighting has to serve both.