Four Key Executive Briefing Center Audiovisual Strategies

‍Executive Briefing Center Audiovisual Strategies

Executive and customer briefing centers (EBCs and CBCs) can create enduring impressions on visitors. How can the media systems we design help make them wonderful places?Consider these four key executive briefing center audiovisual strategies:

1. First and foremost, let’s tell a coherent, compelling story: All the audiovisual tricks in the world can’t make up for a poorly constructed message.
2. Selective use of media technology: When we surround visitors with displays and sound system, we can provide an engaging message, or we can overwhelm them.
3. Compelling audio and video: Let’s ensure that we use images that are large, colorful, and rich; sound should be full, crisp, lifelike.
4. Interactivity: We can use interactivity to encourage visitors to create their own path through the content and to explore the story that interests them most. Media content that provides a linear presentation of the brand is easier to develop, but risks boring viewers.

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Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements.

1. Create a Compelling Story

Content may be presented by a host, viewed by visitors interactively in a “self-driven mode,” or some combination. The EBC space may simulate products’ use environments through physical design, or dynamic virtual design. Truly impactful CBCs and EBCs often incorporate both approaches. While waiting for a demo session to begin, interactive “exhibits” in a waiting area can stir visitors’ imagination and curiosity, priming them for the structured presentation to follow.

2. Be Selective In Your Use of Media Technology

With each new generation of audiovisual technology, displays get bigger, brighter, and more impressive. Let’s exploit these advances creatively — we can use these display products to make our clients’ stories more compelling and memorable. Sometimes wall-size images tell a story best; we might use them to create a backdrop that immerses visitors like a stage-set. Other times, a story may be told best by focusing viewers’ attention on a single, conventional-sized display. Sometimes a point can be made well with a display oriented horizontally like a TV, but it’s worth considering other shapes and orientations of displays to shake up viewers’ expectations with something that doesn’t immediately look like TV.Audio is getting better, too. Why merely put sound into a space when we can design sound systems that provide unique sonic environments focused on a discrete area? We can create acoustically isolated demo spaces right next to one another, something we couldn’t do in the past.

3. Create Compelling Audio and Video

Let’s present images and sound with confidence. Small screens, washed-out video, and wimpy sound are like a weak handshake — they make the recipient doubt we believe our own story. There’s nothing preventing us from presenting images that jump out of the screen — video whose quality underscores our confidence in our brand.Sound quality is just as important. Audio doesn’t have to be loud to be good. We can design richness into sound systems that blend well with architecture; in doing so, we can create an immersive, memorable experience.

4. Innovate with Interactivity

In the audiovisual sense, the word “interactivity” used to mean small, slow touch screens. Let’s use today’s interactivity tech to engage visitors by using big, bright screens, and let’s put them in innovative places, not just on walls and kiosks, but on floors, too.

Bonus: Keep Content Fresh

Especially in customer-facing briefing centers, content is everything. Content has to be fresh. Repeat visitors should never see the same thing twice. In an EBC/CBC, keeping content up to date is as important as stocking the coffee machine with fresh beans.Think about incorporating live feeds, like from Twitter and other social sites. Some digital signage software platforms can automatically scrape the web for mentions of the company and send those to the screen. For obvious reasons, these sources should be curated to ensure visitors see only the best side of company-related press.

Summary

Companies spend significant sums on their executive and customer briefing centers and expect them to be compelling places. Let’s make the best content and media system choices and give visitors experiences they’ll remember and want to repeat.