AVIXA POV
A Closer Look At Corporate Events AVIXA’s market research investigates the opportunities and challenges.
By Sean Wargo AVIXA
O
ne of the forest-for-the-trees issues within the broad commercial AV industr y is an assumption that, at the forest level, project work in this space is all about the sale and permanent installation of audiovisual technologies. However, a trip down into the trees reveals a different reality. Although integrated solutions are a sizable portion of the industr y, temporar y utilization through pop-up events or experiences is an important component of the AV solution set, generating strong revenues. Because of the contributions of these applications, and to help facilitate broader understanding of them, AVIXA has undertaken two distinct studies on live events this year. Those are in addition to ongoing efforts to measure the revenues they bring to commercial AV. What follows are 26 Sound & Communications November 2019
some of the key findings of the most recent of the two studies, covering the corporateevents space. Corporate events represent a growing market, and its dynamics are distinct from both the installed-AV and the performance markets. Of the $247 billion global AV market this year, the live-events component represents $26.7 billion—a sizeable portion. The term live events includes both live-performance events (touring concerts, primarily) and corporate events. However, the fact that the corporate-events market is not a separate AV vertical, but, rather, a set of solutions that cuts across all AV verticals means that corporate events represent a great opportunity for growth. And corporate events’ growth dovetails with the booming global business-travel market (worth more than $1.3 trillion in 2017). That’s good news by any measure. Attendees are treating “work events” as if they’re leisure events, showing attendance discretion based on high expectations for technology benefits and performance. A corporate live event at a convention or trade show, although work related, often has to compete with concurrent events; as such, attendees have choices about which events to attend. In addition, respondents frequently attend events that are not strictly required for their job; thus, they are not a “captive audience.” Their responses to our sur vey questions reveal what providers can do to make people excited to attend their