• Features

• 27/11/2015

Bigger screens, brighter lights, and a range of locations that’s wider than ever – can the corporate events market really keep growing in the face of customer belt-tightening? Dan Goldstein finds out.

If there’s one area of the pro AV business that’s immediately vulnerable to the prospect of economic slowdown, it’s the corporate rental and events market. After all, if you’ve bought a plot of land, paid an architect and started building your luxury hotel, casino and conference venue, you might as well go ahead and finish the thing so that you can turn on a revenue stream. Events are a different kettle of fish – scaling back a launch party from 1,000 guests to 100, or indeed cancelling the bash altogether, is as easy as ABC. Always assuming you haven’t already mailed out the posh gilt-edged invitation cards, that is.

Talk to some of the companies involved in this sector, though, and you don’t get the impression that any of them are struggling for work. “We’ve had a really, really busy year so far,” says Sara McKenzie, Area Manager, North-East England and Scotland for Saville Audio Visual. “An event can pay itself easily and be effective for the customer, as long as you have the right people, in the right place, with the right experience and training.”

From her base in Newcastle, McKenzie has overseen a number of notable corporate projects recently. These have included a glamorous cruise ship-themed conference for Debenhams to launch a Christmas fragrance range; an annual conference for web services provider Interwoven; and a ceremony to commemorate the 30,000th Caterpillar articulated dump truck to come off the production line at the company’s factory in Peterlee. Of these, only one was in central London, and McKenzie reckons Saville’s ability to deploy talent regionally is becoming a key asset.

“People are moving their events out of London and going to other cities to give them a bit of variation. We’re a big company but we have local knowledge. When a client can deal with a local office, they don’t get burdened with the cost of bringing a whole production team up from London.”

As McKenzie points out, cost control is key to the success of any event. Historically, this has been hard to reconcile with the end customer’s desire to have their product – or at least, its launch party – distinguished by unique, state-of-the-art technology. That desire is still very much alive and kicking, with the result that, as Dave Crump, recently appointed as Managing Director of Creative Technology (CT) London, points out, the lead time from project green light to the event itself is visibly shortening.

“We’re as busy as we’ve ever been, but there are times when we’re struggling to get confirmation of an event in time to actually fulfil our side of it,” says Crump. “Everything has become very last-minute. Our customers are the production companies, and because they can’t get the green light from their clients, that impacts on our ability to deliver. The shows are designed in principle but not in detail because the budgets have not been signed off. It can be very frustrating, especially if you are trying to sea-freight equipment to the Middle East, for example, to keep your costs down.”

Logistics and inventory management have always been crucial to the events business – far more so than in installation where, if costs need to be trimmed, a certain amount of value engineering can be carried out before the technology has even been ordered from its supplier. This trend looks set to continue as the industry’s end customers re-evaluate the way they plan their events.

“We’ve just completed a 13-event roadshow around Europe for a client, and the logistics of that alone were a huge task – getting the crew from one place to the next, as well as the equipment,” says McKenzie. “Rather than doing one big conference, some clients are taking their event directly to their customers because they believe they can reach a wider market that way.”

One of the drivers here is the desire to reduce the corporate carbon footprint. Environmentally, as well as financially, it makes more sense to send a few key members of staff around Europe than it does to fly 500 customers to London, Paris, Frankfurt or Milan for a huge gala dinner. In this respect, AV technology is helping corporate clients meet their responsibilities, as McKenzie explains:

“We’ve invested in a [Sonic Foundry] Mediasite conference recording solution, so that the presenter, the on-screen graphics and the audio can all be recorded, and anyone who couldn’t attend the event can download it and view it at their leisure. Videoconferencing is also becoming more popular because it enables a particular speaker who can’t attend a conference, for example, to make a contribution from a remote location.”

Innovations in other areas of AV are also making a difference to the way events are designed and staged, enabling production companies to contemplate projection and display on a much larger scale than before, and with fewer constraints in terms of viewing distances and angles. One recent example is the Dutch pavilion at Expo Zaragoza, the world exposition dedicated to water and sustainable development held in Spain this summer. Onno Hekman, Project and Account Manager at Holland’s BeamSystems, says that designing the AV system for the pavilion stretched his company to the limit:

“The projection screen was 18m wide by 6m high, and the audience was only one metre away, so the quality was very important. We had four Panasonic 10,000-lumen HD projectors, two PowerMacs running software that we designed ourselves, four HD content players and edge-blending in a separate box from Barco. Technically it was a challenge. We had to make everything easy to use and create a Dutch-language user interface for the staff operating the system, and we also had to configure it so that we could monitor the system remotely over IP here in Holland, because for us to have somebody on-site all the time would have been very expensive.”

BeamSystems’ work in Zaragoza neatly exemplifies two key trends in the application of AV technology to events. The first is the shift away from standard, 16:9 aspect ratio displays; the second is the viewability of those displays from closer positions. “Multi-image projection and multi-format display have become much easier to do as the software has become simpler to set up,” Dave Crump believes. “That’s useful when you’ve got a large event space and a very wide screen area to fill. On the other hand, we’ve invested heavily in Barco’s NX-4, and what 4mm LED allows you to do is bring that level of brightness into smaller spaces, because you can get quite close to it as a member of the audience, and it’s not unpleasant to be next to.”

Crump also points out that the use of low-resolution LED walls is migrating from the ‘early adoption’ markets of touring and TV into the corporate space. “We’ve seen a huge growth in lo-res LED – 60mm pixel-pitch screens with diffusers in front of them, products like G-LEC or Martin LC40, and more large deployments of [Barco] MiTrix and [Element Labs] Stealth. Music and television are the obvious applications but they’re going into corporate events as well.”

Not every event production can afford to sit right at the cutting edge, however, and the reason for that conservatism may have as much to do with education as with budgeting. As Onno Hekman observes: “Things like HD, edge-blending and large screens are not a standard yet. Customers know that they want to make an impact, but they don’t know enough about what they can show. For example, they may say they want HD, but they only have a VGA source to play the content. So it’s up to us to advise them – tell them how they can combine screens together, use different aspect ratios, warn them about what kind of problems they might run into. They need a lot of hand-holding.”

Hekman believes BeamSystems’ technical and creative expertise have been key to its success and that, just as CT leverages its experience of music and TV into corporate rental, so his company creates a point of difference from its work in the arts and culture market. “We produce a creative experience for our customers, working for people who want something more than regular AV. Because we work in the culture sector, with video artists at the Andy Warhol exhibition for example, we bring a more creative, more thoughtful approach to our work than regular AV companies.”

QUOTE FOR PAGE 14

“There is no Olympics, World Cup or European Championship. But against that background, our customers still want the technology. They want their shows to look good and sound good. That desire isn’t going to go away.” Dave Crump, MD of CT London.

A rental operation’s ability to mark itself out from the crowd becomes all the more critical at a time of economic uncertainty. For Saville AV, the key is versatility. McKenzie says the company is happy to work alongside event management companies but equally at ease producing shows directly for corporate clients. One thing almost everyone seems to agree on is that investment in technology remains key, even though it might seem risky to have capital tied up in equipment that’s only used from time to time.

“We’ve invested in outdoor, colour-changing lighting so that we can project company logos onto buildings,” says McKenzie. “That way you can start to create an atmosphere the moment people arrive – and long before the event has actually started. It’s one way of delivering more value to the customer because you’re making an impact over a longer period of time.”

For the rental market generally, 2009 is unlikely to bring huge growth, for reasons Dave Crump is quick to point out. “Next year is an ‘odd’-numbered year and they are always tough, because there is no Olympics, World Cup or European Championship. But against that background, our customers still want the technology. They want their shows to look good and sound good. That desire isn’t going to go away.”