Corporate meetings have come a long way since the days of overhead projectors. Many companies no longer spend hundreds of thousands of dollars flying employees and business partners to a location. Instead, modern audio and visual production companies have transformed the corporate meeting from a cattle call to a broadband-enabled virtual experience.
“Corporate meetings are more and more involved,” said Bill Murray, general manager of ATR Treehouse, a Providence production and presentation-technology company.
More specifically, the teleconference has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, in part due to the downturn in the economy.
“Teleconferencing is a way for companies to reduce some of their travel expenses. Instead of flying everyone in, they can broadcast meetings via the Web,” said Murray.
Advancing technology has made the audio teleconference via phone lines or Internet connection a rarer occurrence. Rather, live video streams have become a more common method of communicating. Throw in presentations at the event, and the result is every major corporate meeting or convention revolves around a highly orchestrated production that takes weeks to prepare.
But with those expectations come greater technological challenges – and headaches. As a result, more and more of the work of preparing for remote connection-enabled meetings is being contracted out.
Some production companies, like Ocean Creative in Portsmouth, try to differentiate themselves by adding personalized touches and themed entertainment to corporate meetings.
“It sometimes takes a whole team to put a meeting on,” said Kathy O’Connell, executive producer of Ocean Creative.
When O’Connell is contracted to produce a corporate meeting, she is responsible for selecting a location, booking the venue, reserving the meeting or conference rooms, setting up staging and installing lighting and sound infrastructure. Sometimes, at her client’s request, she even inserts audio response systems behind every chair, so employers can take polls of their employees’ opinions.
Sharon Sullivan, president Sullivan Custom Planning, Inc. in Providence, Newport and Middletown, said corporations are cutting their costs by hosting fewer in-person meetings or conventions, but they still need that personal connection to communicate the big ideas.
“The whole meeting industry is vastly changing. A lot of the extra frills – like off-site events – are being eliminated. Companies are really just focusing on the meeting part of it,” said Sullivan.
In order to keep things simple, some audio and visual companies such as Constant Technologies Inc. in North Kingstown simply focus on technology integration.
Company President Brad Righi said many of his clients are Fortune 500 companies that reduce the need for employee travel by hiring Constant Technologies for a one-time installation of audio and visual equipment.
The success of integration companies such as Constant Technologies is not necessarily the downfall of contracted companies such as ATR Treehouse or Ocean Creative. Sullivan said she expects 2010 to be a booming year for audio and visual production companies.
“This year is all about survival mode, but I think corporations are going to come back big time,” said Sullivan. •
