The tools I started with are unrecognisable now. Thirty years ago, an event ran on a mixing desk and a truckload of flightcases. The rest was nerve. Today, it runs on show control systems, LED and lighting design, broadcast-grade video and, increasingly, AI working quietly in the background. What hasn’t changed is the goal: get a room full of people, whether that’s 40 or 4,000, to feel something they’re still talking about on the way home.
Thirty years inside one event production agency gives you a particular vantage point on that goal, across recessions and booms, hotel ballrooms and broadcast studios. This piece pulls lessons from that vantage point, one from each part of what I have experienced at AVCOM, written for two audiences at once: event professionals running things in-house, and the marketing and comms leads who commission an agency like ours to help. If you recognise yourself in either, the advice is for you.
1. Sales start with honesty about the outcome
Every AVCOM discovery call opens with the same questions: What are your event outcomes? What does success look like for every stakeholder, not just you? Who is your audience, and what do you want their takeaway to be? Is there feedback from previous events? How will this event live on afterwards? And, finally: what is your budget?
That last one causes the most discomfort, and it shouldn’t. In Ireland, we’re reluctant to share a budget with a supplier, and it’s one of the biggest barriers to a good outcome. I recently ran a mystery-shopper exercise where five suppliers, including ourselves, quoted on the same brief with no budget attached. The prices came back between €12,500 and €36,000, which isn’t a range a buyer can make sense of, or use to judge who they can trust.
Clients who lead with technology rather than outcome tend to end up as transactional buyers, comparing suppliers on price alone. That’s fine for a purely functional event. It’s the wrong approach if your attendee numbers are falling or your own staff seem disengaged at internal events: at that point, look at the event itself before you look at the audience.
So, here’s my advice:
For event professionals: lead with the result you want and the audience you want to move, then let the technical conversation follow. The brief should describe a feeling and an outcome before it describes a screen size.
For teams commissioning agencies: share the messy context along with the brief, including the internal politics and the real budget. An event production agency built around a partnership model, leading and coordinating rather than simply quoting on a spec sheet, can only protect you from costly surprises if it sees the whole picture from the start.
From the road: The champagne look
Paul’s own first lesson in leading with outcome came years before AVCOM had a name for it. As Account Manager to the Burlington Hotel from 1999 to 2001, he ran what he calls a mini-AVCOM inside Dublin’s biggest meeting space, both selling events and delivering them. One piece of client feedback from that job still makes him smile: he’d made a champagne look out of a beer budget.
2. Design, production, and entertainment have to be in the same room
There’s an old idea in the traditional AV Sphere of events that the event begins when the first flightcase comes off the truck. It was never true, and it’s even less true now. Events are built by designers, producers, and entertainment curators working from the same brief, and the collaboration between them is where the value sits.
Too often in Irish events, these three disciplines never actually meet. That’s a missed opportunity: a good designer brings ideas that respect your brand guidelines, and a great one might challenge them constructively to help the event style & outcomes. Bring a producer and an entertainment curator into that same conversation early, alongside the venue and the catering team, and the ideas spark off each other instead of arriving as separate deliverables bolted together at the end.
A good example is Naturally Evolved, the event we designed and produced for Croke Park in 2024. Croke Park’s catering team, Aramark, was invested in the same outcome from the start, and so were we, so every part of the event reinforced one story rather than sitting alongside it. The event was such a success, especially in terms of being an immersive experience for guests, that our team put together a comprehensive guide based on this case study. You can download it here: A guide to crafting immersive events.
My advice for event professionals: people remember how an event made them feel. Start there, then decide what they should see. The visual choices should follow from that, not the other way round.
Advice for teams commissioning agencies: give your partner room to bring ideas rather than handing over a fixed running order. The creative value is in the collaboration, and a partner brought in only to execute a finished plan can’t offer you much beyond that plan.
From the road: Why AVCOM calls itself an agency
For most of our history, AVCOM was known for its technical delivery, brought in to handle the sound and lighting once everything else about an event was already decided. During COVID, that started to change: clients began bringing AVCOM the whole event brief, not just the technical one. Our team built on that shift, bringing design and production in-house alongside technical delivery, and became what AVCOM is today: a Premium Event Production Agency.
3. The technical work should be invisible
Inside a good event production agency, the technical team should be the least visible part of the operation. We describe our technicians internally as Ninjas, people of stealth who work with precision and speed. If an event runs without a hitch, nobody notices the technical team at all, and that’s exactly the point. The moment they do become visible is the moment something has gone wrong.
That invisibility is earned in the preproduction and rehearsal stage, long before the lights go down on an opening video. I learned this early in my career, operating sound for a 120-person conference in the Westbury Hotel on my own for the first time. I arrived far too early and spent eight hours with my fingers locked on the faders, never relaxing once. It worked out: the client told me it was the best sound they’d heard at an event in ten years of planning them, though I was too exhausted to enjoy the compliment at the time. The calm you see on the day is built in the hours nobody sees beforehand.
This is also where long-term client relationships take shape, built on trust established well before the event. Clients who partner with us for technical work rely on AV that performs consistently, and on video that carries the experience beyond the room after the event ends.
My advice to you, event professional, is to invest properly in the technical rehearsal and the contingency plan. Your audience never sees the safety net, only the fall when it’s missing.
For teams commissioning agencies, ask a prospective partner how they handle the moment something goes wrong on site. The answer tells you more about them than any showreel will.
From the road: The first broadcast
When live events stopped overnight in March 2020, AVCOM turned a corner of its own warehouse into a broadcast studio, testing every signal flow before risking a first live show. That show was an awards ceremony, and by Paul’s account, the crew had never been more nervous. It worked. AVCOM went on to open studios in Croke Park and the Clayton Hotel at Burlington Road, then at University College Dublin, running remote productions for clients who, a year earlier, had never needed them.
Where the events industry is heading and what to do about it
In 2023, AVCOM produced a Future of Events Report looking at carbon footprint, audience engagement, advanced technology, and the fundamentals that should always work at an event. Three years on, sustainability and audience engagement still sit at the centre of what makes an event succeed, and AI has become the trend every planner is now tracking.
Attendance is worth a direct conversation. In-person events have been under pressure since the shift to hybrid working, for reasons that go deeper than an online-versus-in-person choice. When people were in the office five days a week, an event was a welcome break from routine. With most teams in two or three days a week, and one of those days often reserved for internal meetings, there’s only one realistic day left to choose an event over staying home. Poor attendance and poor engagement lead to the same place: audiences that don’t return, sponsors and brand reputation left to absorb the cost.
Sustainability now sits inside procurement criteria, expected as standard rather than treated as a marketing line. Ireland’s Climate Action Plan commits to a 51% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and that commitment shows up directly in tender scoring: the public tenders AVCOM has been invited to weight Environmental and Social criteria over 15% of the total score. We built our own carbon tracker in response, tracking our footprint across the full delivery cycle, because off-the-shelf tools for our industry still don’t really exist.
AI has settled into the workflow rather than remaining a novelty. The most useful applications for corporate planners today are operational: scheduling algorithms, sourcing and diagramming tools, adaptive agendas, and post-event content built from what actually happened in the room. What AI can’t replicate is the thing it makes more valuable by contrast, trust built through live, human connection. As the tools commoditise and the noise around events keeps rising, that connection becomes the scarce asset, and it doesn’t happen by accident.
The thread underneath it all
Different chapters, same idea running through them:
– Honesty about outcomes before technology
– Design and entertainment that serve the story rather than the budget
– Technical work that stays invisible because the rehearsal did its job
– An industry future that rewards partners who can say what to stop as readily as what to add
As everything else moves faster and gets more automated, human connection is the one thing that won’t scale itself. Someone has to build it intentionally, and that’s what Experience More has always meant to us: moments people actually remember, carefully planned.
If any of this struck a chord, whether you’re planning your next event in-house or working out if you’ve got the right event production agency alongside you, we’d like to hear about it.
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About AVCOM
AVCOM is a premium event production agency in Ireland with over 45 years of expertise, specialised in corporate event production. We deliver conferences, leadership events, awards ceremonies, and brand activations across Dublin and beyond. Our five core areas, Design, Production, Video, AV, and Entertainment form the foundation of our integrated approach.