The AV RFP, rewritten.

Most corporate event leads inherit the AV RFP template from the last person in the role. The template lists the rooms, the dates, asks for a price by line item, and includes a column for "preferred equipment SKU." It comes back with five bids that don't compare cleanly because the bidders are quoting different gear against different assumptions, and you spend three days on a spreadsheet trying to normalize numbers that were never going to line up.

There's a better way. The AV bid that makes sense is the one your studio writes against a brief — the show, the room, the audience, the constraints — and lets the studio specify the gear. You stop comparing apples to oranges and start comparing how each studio thinks about your show. Below is what that brief actually contains.

Event format and audience.

Lead with the show, not the gear. What is the event — keynote, all-hands, product launch, sales kickoff, gala, investor day. How many people in the room, who they are (employees, customers, press, analysts), and what they're meant to walk away believing. Whether the speakers are reading from a teleprompter or working from notes. Whether content is hero-grade (a product reveal video) or utility-grade (a quarterly numbers deck).

Headcount drives the audio system size, the LED viewing distance, the sightline plan, and the camera package if you're capturing the show. A 200-person executive briefing and a 2,000-person general session are not the same problem at a smaller scale — they are different shows. The studio scoping the bid needs to know which one you're shipping. One sentence per question is enough; we'll come back with the rest.

Venue context.

Name the venue if it's booked. If it isn't, name the kind of room — hotel ballroom, soundstage, theatre, convention center, company HQ. Include the ceiling height if you know it, the rigging point load if the venue has shared it, the FOH location, and any venue restrictions (no flown audio, in-house catering required, IATSE-house, no open flame, etc.).

Venue is where the abstract show meets the physics of the room. The same 500-person keynote at the Theatre at Ace Hotel and at a Culver City soundstage are scoped differently — the Ace has flown points the soundstage doesn't, the soundstage has black walls the Ace doesn't, and the load-in dock determines the truck call. A studio that knows the venue can scope tighter and faster. A studio that doesn't yet know the venue can still scope it, but the bid will carry contingency for the unknowns. Name the venue if you can.

Gear must-haves — scope, not SKUs.

This is where most corporate AV RFPs go wrong. They list specific SKUs — "request 8x L-Acoustics K2, 4x KS28, DiGiCo SD12" — copied from the last show or pulled from a vendor's website. The result is a bid that prices line-item against line-item and tells you nothing about whether the studio understands the show.

Instead: describe the scope per room. "Line-array PA sized for a 500-person ballroom with even SPL across the seating bowl, headset and lavalier wireless for four speakers with redundant RF, FOH console with a show-caller comms position." Let the studio specify the boxes — L-Acoustics K1 / K2 or d&b KSL, Yamaha Rivage PM7 or DiGiCo Quantum 338, Shure Axient Digital with Sennheiser 2050 backup. The studio that knows the room will pick the right line array for the throw distance and the right console for the show caller. The studio that doesn't will substitute and you'll find out at FOH.

Same logic for LED — describe the visual (rear-projection content wall, IMAG side screens, lower-third surface), not the panel. The studio specifies pitch, size, processor — Brompton Tessera SX40 for broadcast-grade calibration, ROE Black Pearl BP2 or 2.6mm at the typical keynote viewing distance — once they've sized the room.

Content requirements.

Tell the bidder what content is showing up, who's making it, what format it lands in, and when. A 15-minute sizzle reel from your creative agency. A 60-slide deck from each speaker. A two-minute product reveal sequence with synced lighting cues. Lower thirds for each panel. The studio needs to know the content pipeline because it determines the playback rig — Disguise d3 for timecode-locked sequences with lighting handoff, a clean QLab rig for simple cue playback, a broadcast switcher for live camera mix.

This is also where you flag what you don't yet have. If the keynote video is still in cut, say so. If lower thirds are coming from the speakers' bureau two days before the show, say that. The studio can scope content QC time into the schedule and avoid the day-of fire drill where a sizzle reel arrives in the wrong codec.

Crew expectations.

Specify what the show needs engineered live, not who's on the badge list. The bidder needs to know whether you're hiring a crew to run the show end-to-end or filling specific positions inside a larger team. Whether speaker rehearsals are on the crew call. Whether the show caller is yours or theirs. Whether you need a content op, a video director, a switcher, a comms engineer.

The studio writes the crew sheet to the show, not the other way around. A single-day keynote with rear-projection LED and a line-array PA runs cleanly with one FOH op, one LD on grandMA3, one video op, one comms engineer on Riedel Bolero or Clear-Com FreeSpeak II, and a show caller. A two-day general session with eight cameras and a switcher truck needs three times that. Let the bidder size the crew to the rig; you set the scope and the budget envelope.

Timeline and rehearsal.

Lay out the calendar. Show date, doors, end of show, load-out window. Load-in start. Rehearsal day. Programming day. Pre-pro and previz dates. Content lock dates. Any venue restrictions on access hours (most union houses have specific load-in / load-out windows; some hotels have noise restrictions before a certain hour).

Rehearsal is the most misjudged line on most RFPs. A clean tech rehearsal saves the show; a cancelled tech rehearsal costs a panic at doors. Include the rehearsal day in the brief explicitly — speaker rehearsal, content QC pass on the actual wall, full run-through with the same crew that runs the show. The studios bidding will scope the rehearsal honestly if you ask for it honestly.

Budget context — send a scope, not a price sheet.

This is where many corporate event leads either over-share or under-share. Over-share looks like a line-itemed pricing template the bidders fill in. Under-share looks like "ballpark welcome." Both miss the point.

The right move is to share the budget envelope — the range you're working inside — and ask for a scoped quote against the brief. A scoped quote is one number with a one-page scope of work behind it: what's included, what isn't, the schedule, the deliverables, the assumptions. Not a line-itemed gear sheet where you can pencil-mark a discount on the lavaliers. Studios that work this way come back with bids that compare directly because the scope is the unit, not the SKU.

If the budget envelope is genuinely undefined, say so — "we're sizing this show as part of an annual planning conversation" is honest and useful. The studio will scope a baseline rig plus a "what changes at +20%" and "what changes at -20%" tier so you can take the right number into the meeting. What you do not put on the RFP is a pricing table for bidders to fill in. That's procurement-grade work. Corporate AV at the keynote tier is scoped, not transacted.

Redundancy and failover.

Specify the failover posture. A show that can't tolerate a dropped microphone needs hot-swappable wireless on every speaker channel. A keynote where the playback can't stutter needs redundant Disguise nodes with hot-take handoff. A broadcast feed that has to stay up needs dual transmission paths and a UPS-protected encoding chain.

This is also where the bidder demonstrates whether they actually run shows or just rent gear. A studio that runs shows scopes a backup processor on the LED wall, a hot-swap mic on the talent, a spare console at FOH, and a redundant comms loop. The line items add cost; the alternative is a show that goes dark at the worst moment. Ask the bidder how they handle a failed primary processor on the main wall and how fast the swap is. The answer tells you everything.

Contingency planning.

The last section of a well-scoped AV brief is the contingency layer — weather (for outdoor or load-in-exposed venues), power (does the venue have generator backup, or does the bidder bring one), content (what if the keynote video doesn't land by the lock date), staff (what happens if the FOH op is sick on show day). The studio you want to hire has thought about all four and has a written plan. The studio you don't want to hire writes "TBD."

You don't need to anticipate every failure mode in the brief — that's the studio's job. You do need to ask. A single sentence — "describe your contingency posture for power, content delivery, and key crew positions" — separates the studios that ship from the ones that hope.

What to not put in your RFP.

Pricing tables to be filled in. They convert a scoped quote into a procurement document and they reward the bidder who shaves margin on the parts you can compare, not the bidder who delivers the show. Skip them.

Specific SKU lists copied from the last bid. They lock the bidder into the wrong gear for the new room. Describe the scope; let the studio specify.

Generic photo requirements ("please attach 5 sample event photos"). Look at the studio's site. Their work supplies the proof. If the site doesn't, the photos in the bid won't either.

Vendor exclusivity demands. Most corporate AV studios subcontract specific specialties — a touring rigger, a specific content house, a particular generator vendor. Requiring 100% in-house staffing rules out the studios that ship and rewards the ones that own the cheapest gear.

Insurance and credential audits before the bid stage. A studio worth talking to has the insurance, the safety credentials, and the experience to back the work. Ask for documentation when you're picking, not when you're sourcing. Front-loading paperwork burns time on bidders you'll never hire.

Multi-bidder Q&A windows with hard deadlines. The studio that asks the best questions is the one that's actually thinking about your show. Encourage questions; answer them inside the same day; share the answers with the other bidders. The Q&A is the bid.

If you write the RFP this way, the bids that land will tell you three things in the first paragraph: the studio understands the show, the studio has thought about the room, and the studio has a posture for what could go wrong. That's what to compare. Not the SKU column.

If your show is a keynote specifically, the keynote AV production page walks through what the rig looks like at scale. If it's a multi-track conference, see conference AV production. If you want the bigger frame on how a studio thinks across all of these, the corporate AV in Los Angeles hub is the right entry.