Christine Rogers Of AVI-SPL’s XTG Team On The Art Of The Possible With Experiential Display Projects
July 24, 2024 by Dave Haynes
Sixteen:Nine worked with German content partner invidis on its annual digital signage yearbook, which by a mile (or 1.6 km) is the most comprehensive annual look into the industry. That free yearbook has been available for the last few weeks, and we’re now making individual pieces available online – so readers get a sense of the kind of content they get access to just by taking 30 seconds to register and grab the PDF file.
This one, written by Sixteen:Nine, looks at how integrator giant AVI-SPL’s XTG Team focuses on not only on the projects, but also on people’s expectations.
AVI-SPL had a decades-long history and reputation for designing, delivering and supporting audiovisual and unified communications projects all over the world, but the systems integration giant still had to take on a start-up mentality to win confidence and business in the rapidly emerging area of immersive and experiential spaces.
The Tampa-based company has more than 4,200 staff globally, and offices in 60-plus cities, but it took setting up a specialty business unit to properly address, win and then service projects that are often about big visual ideas – as opposed to AVI-SPL’s primary work of kitting out workplaces with ProAV and IT solutions that help customers communicate more effectively.
The Experience Technology Group (XTG) was established in 2015 as a business unit within Whitlock, another big US systems integrator that was acquired by AVI-SPL in early 2020. It started with three staff, and XTG now has 45 people across a variety of disciplines and skills.
The company’s projects have varied from visually-driven workspaces for McDonald’s, Verizon and T-Mobile, to Amazon’s Spheres visitor center in Seattle and the Museum of the Future in Dubai, also described as the most beautiful building on earth. The photo at the top is from the Arte Museum in Las Vegas.
XTG’s business leader Christine Rogers, a VP with AVI-SPL, says working in creative and architect-driven experiential projects was not entirely foreign to the company. But it tended to be client-triggered work that AVI-SPL reacted to, as opposed to going out and winning it based on a plan, team and pedigree.
“We were not thought of,” recalls Rogers, “and we found for meeting with groups like (architecture giant) Gensler, or others, I can’t tell you how many times we heard, ‘Oh, we didn’t know you did that.’”
“So it really was important to create a separation, and talk about a specialty group. We can do what we do because of the size and power that we’ve got as a company. Building XTG as an overlay, and having support for all of that, really showed we’ve got the size, the talent, the skill, and the specialty group that is going to help bring it all together,” Rogers adds.
Pure play experiential design and creative technology companies may have a handful of sales and business development people chasing these specialized projects, but AVI-SPL has some 500 people in sales roles who can, at minimum, introduce XTG’s capabilities.
“XTG, that title, explains the basic idea: experiential technology group,” says Rogers. “It was the idea that experiences, in whatever format that might be, are the future of where we feel that the industry is going, and we wanted to be experts in doing that.”
“We did a lot of research and developed an understanding of what would be the best way to be successful in doing that. It’s not to compete with consultants or architects. It’s not to start creating content. But it is to have an expertise in our niche, which is experiential design, almost the art of the possible.”
“So often,” explains Rogers, “you’ll get end-users who have an idea about what they want … something cool, that visual unicorn, whatever it might be, but they don’t necessarily know how to get it, what it might cost, or how it will integrate all of those things. So we put together a team that is pre sales, of design engineers, the cream of the crop, who will go in with customers and help them define what could be possible for their space, and then the things to think about.”
What started out as a trio – sales, a program manager, and an experiential designer – is now a much broader roster of 45 covering everything from strategy to after-care on projects.
“What we realized in these experiential projects is that there are so many players that are different. You’ve got architects, experiential design firms, content creators, fabricators, and many others, and somebody needs to help manage those relationships, to create a symbiotic plan,” says Rogers, of having project and program managers.
“We also have a team of people supplementing work – roles like design engineers, project engineers, commissioning specialists – because sometimes a regional AVI-SPL office either doesn’t have the bandwidth, or the skill set, to deliver on these types of projects. So we can come in and help them from that aspect.”
XTG also added service and customer success roles to help not only launch projects, but keep them running. “So we are really soup to nuts – a beginning-to-end, full-service support team for all of our regions, globally.”
While having the company headcount, resources and experience to take on big projects, Rogers says success owes a lot to getting the right questions asked and answered in the initial meetings.
“My team gets tired of me saying this, but I call it marriage and wedding,” says Rogers. “Don’t go and spend 8 million dollars on your wedding, if you don’t have the stuff to make your marriage work.”
“So, we can go out for a meeting with a customer, and someone in the meeting will say, ‘Hey, I’ve got 5 million dollars, and I want to put it all in a big visual project,’” adds Rogers. “And we say, ‘Okay … but why? Why do you want to do that? Do you have a story? Do you understand the chapters of that story? Who’s coming to your space? What do you want them to think and feel and do?’”
“Even though we’re not the ones who create that story, sometimes our role is to get the customer to stop for a minute, and say, ‘I haven’t thought about these things.’”
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