Eighteen questions that tell you whether you're hiring a production partner, or renting from a desk.

Eighteen questions to ask any AV bidder twelve weeks before your event, the same ones our producers ask each other on Monday standups before a flagship goes into pre-production. If they can't answer them, they're a rental desk, not a production partner. Bring this to your next scoping call, or paste it into your RFP scoring grid.

What's inside

• Security & compliance Six questions that separate the bidder who is current on Avetta and ISNetworld before badging week from the one who scrambles the day procurement asks for the COI.
• Broadcast topology Four questions that separate hybrid production partners from someone running a CDN tab on a laptop, bonded cellular, SRT failover, end-to-end latency, encoder redundancy. What to ask, what answer is acceptable, what answer disqualifies.
• Content & IP Three questions every marketing team forgets to ask until load-in, masters, music licensing, archive rights, the ones your CMO will ask three weeks after the event.
• Execution risk Who runs the show on the day? Who calls the keynote when it drops a battery? Who owns the post-event scorecard your CFO sees? Five questions, named owners.
• Scorecard template The comparison grid we use to triage incoming RFPs ourselves, drop in three bidders, score against the eighteen questions, and the memo writes itself for the procurement readout.