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Seeing the light

Director of Ground:zero Productions, Christopher Long, says technical innovations are ready to change conference production.

The production of conferences and meetings has, more than most sectors of the industry, been facing new pressures.

The audience and client still expect to be ‘wowed’ by exciting spectacular staging effects and seamless, smooth execution. On top of this, however, there are new, extra demands for production to engage the audience, be more interactive and demonstrate its value, often within reduced budgets.

This background is providing the catalyst for the implementation of several new applications of technology within events and many substantial changes in the way conferences and meetings are staged. But, we are not seeing the full potential in practice and there is much more that can be done with the technical developments around now.

Why? Despite the demand for innovation, unless clients can be sure that the risks of disappointment are low and that there are cost-benefits, the economic pressures have driven many clients to stick to the tried and tested. Once the recession mindset has passed, this should change and with it the confidence of clients to be more adventurous.

For instance, High Definition (HD) technology is now readily available on TVs and projectors. Yet clients are not realising that they can use this to enhance presentations and video. PowerPoint™ encourages a 4x3 screen format. For this reason clients have been slow to produce presentations using a widescreen template. Embracing widescreen facilitates, HD would enhance the audio visual experience for the type of medical presentations given by pharmaceutical clients, for example. Complex charts and photographs can be seen in greater detail.

Despite all the wishes for something new, PowerPoint™ is still the dominant presentation software and is likely to remain so for the time being.

However, slide and content production is now much faster, flexible and easily integrated with other resources. Clients are becoming more savvy in terms of what they can offer delegates to back up the messages from the event. As delegates leave a conference, they can, within a matter of hours, access a web-based programme of the speaker and their presentation.

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