FIRST LOOK
Marco Niedermeier, Founder, AO Multimedia & Drones The longtime Dubai resident and creative brain behind some of the region’s most spectacular shows invites TPiMEA inside the fabled AO creative villa…
While drones are a reasonably modern development in the world of live events, many of the people who are driving innovation in this emerging medium have long and distinguished careers in the industry and a wealth of experience to call upon. This is certainly the case for Marco Niedermeier, Founder of AO Multimedia & Drones, whose varied career so far has seen him not only producing shows all over the world for some of the top rock ’n’ roll stars but also pushing the boundaries with the manufacturing and deployment of his own technology. Here, the German national and longtime UAE resident looks back on his journey from searchlight distributor to multimedia drone show producer, charting some of the many highlights along the way and speculating on what might be next in the fast-moving and ultra-competitive business of drones. What sparked your interest in the industry? I started my career as a steel engineer working for my parents’ company in Germany. In 1995, my brother and I took an interest in searchlights, and he found a manufacturer in Italy called Space Cannon, which was making amazing lights at the time. We wanted to purchase some lights and ended up doing a deal to become the manufacturer’s sole distributor in Germany. We first went into the discotheque market, installing Space Cannon searchlights at several venues and renting them for events, and the brand took off from there. Our first big show with the lights was with Scorpions when they played Bremerhaven, Germany, in 1996. They are wonderful people who I have stayed in touch with and funnily enough I met them again in Vegas last year. Our journey into the Middle East started in 2000, after we had done the millennium show in Berlin with Mike Oldfield. After the show, we received a call from an interested party in the UAE who had seen the production and asked if we would be open to bringing our lights to the country. The rest, as they say, is history. Middle East
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How obvious was the opportunity in the UAE even in those early days? At the turn of the millennium, Dubai was unrecognisable from the city you see today. There was no Dubai Marina, no Burj Khalifa, and Sheikh Zayed Road wasn’t much more than a service road. It was a blank canvas, but the leaders, especially Sheikh Mohammed, had the vision. We had a vision of our own, which aligned with the vision of the leadership and to see how far the country has come in the past 25 years is incredible. Operating in both Europe and the UAE, our business started to diversify into TV production with LED lights and architectural lighting, which led us to launch AO Technology in 2002 in Abu Dhabi. The Dubai Shopping Festival at this time was one of our first big gigs in the UAE, and it’s one that I’m proud to say we are still doing to this day. In 2007, we made the decision to move away from Space Cannon and start manufacturing our own searchlights in Germany. We created the FALCON, a long-life, high-quality, state-of-the-art searchlight with long-term performance, high brilliance and great visibility. We manufactured this fixture until 2018, selling more than 1,000 units to permanent installs all over the world, from Disney in the US to Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore, and putting them on some of the world’s biggest shows, from the Super Bowl, to Rammstein, to the Special Olympics in Shanghai 2007, to the Winter Olympics 2010 in Vancouver, and many others. When did drones start to come on the scene? It was around 2017. I remember because it was around the time that we were first creating the Burj Khalifa New Year’s Eve show for Emaar under the direction of Jerry P. Appelt. I started to get into drones in the same year, investing in our first fleet of 120, working on coding the system and expanding the team. Those early stages of drone shows were very exciting. Only a few had ever seen the technology before – some even thought that we had 120 pilots controlling each