After 5 EventsThe first half hour is already decided
Guests arrive, take a drink, stand near people they know. You do not control this part and should not try. What you do control: whether the product is visible when they walk in, or whether it stays covered until the moment you choose. That decision changes what the first thirty minutes feel like.
If the product is on show from the start, the reveal moment later is weaker. If it is covered or off-stage, the room has a focal point it cannot yet see, and that holds attention. Covering also solves the problem of guests handling the product, photographing it badly, or asking questions before the presentation is ready to answer them.
The venue will tell you when you must be ready to admit guests. Arrive time is typically one hour before that if the rig is pre-built, three hours if it is not.
When to seat and when to stand
A seated audience listens longer and photographs less during the presentation. A standing audience moves, talks and checks phones. If the presentation is under ten minutes, standing works. If it includes a demo, a video or more than one speaker, seat them.
Seating also sets the rhythm. Guests will not sit until prompted, so the moment you ask them to sit is the moment the informal part ends. That prompt comes from a voice they recognise — the host, not the AV tech — and it comes once. Repeating it makes the company look unsure.
Food before or after, not during. If catering goes out while someone is speaking, the room hears cutlery.
The presentation is fixed, everything else flexes around it
The product reveal is the only part of the evening that cannot move. It happens at the time the livestream is scheduled, the time the press were told, the time the email to customers said. Everything else in the running order is there to get that moment right.
That means doors open at a time that gets the room full ten minutes before the presentation starts, not at a round number. It means the host's introduction is as long as it needs to be to settle the room, and no longer. It means if the demo requires the lights to be at a specific level, those levels are marked during rehearsal and called by the tech running the desk, not adjusted live while the CEO is trying to speak.
Rehearsal happens the same day, after the rig is up and before guests arrive. Not the day before. The screen, the mic levels, the product lighting, the cue to start the video — all of it is checked with the person who will be standing there, in the clothes they will be wearing, because a dark jacket under a spotlight reads differently than a mid-blue shirt does.
Who calls the cues
The host cannot also be the person cueing the AV. If the person on stage is the one signalling to start the video, they are doing two things at once and both are visible. The room sees it.
Cues are called by a stage manager or the tech on the desk, from a marked running order that both the host and the AV operator have seen. The host knows what is coming and when. The AV operator knows what to do when they see the cue or hear the line. No improvisation, no gestures from the stage, no hoping the video starts when it should.
If there is a livestream, the camera operator also has the running order, and knows which moments are framed wide and which are framed on the product. The streaming rig is built and tested during the same rehearsal as everything else, because a stream that drops in the middle of the reveal is the story the press writes.
When the performance starts and why it is the hinge
The presentation ends. Guests stand, talk, take photos of the product now that they are allowed to. This part lasts twenty minutes if there is nothing pulling them back into the room, or two hours if there is.
What pulls them back is sound. A DJ, a live set, something with enough presence that standing at the other end of the room talking about work starts to feel like the wrong choice. That does not mean volume; it means intention. The music is not background. It is the second act.
The timing: thirty to forty minutes after the presentation ends. Long enough that guests have taken the photo and had the conversation, short enough that no one has left. If the performance starts too early, it competes with the product. If it starts too late, the room has already peaked and you are asking people to stay for something they have missed the beginning of.
That timing is not approximate. It is called, the same way the lights and the video were called, because the energy curve of the evening depends on it.
What the running order actually looks like
Not a minute-by-minute grid. A sequence of blocks, each with a start condition and a rough duration. Doors open at the time that gets you full ten minutes early. The host seats the room when it is full. The presentation starts at the fixed time. The demo runs as long as it runs. Catering goes out when the presentation ends. The performance starts thirty-five minutes after that, or when the crowd at the product has thinned, whichever comes second.
The venue controls when you can be in the building and when you must be out. The content controls when the presentation happens. Everything else is decided by the people running the evening, and on the night those decisions are made by the person calling cues, not by the organiser standing in the crowd hoping it goes to plan.
After 5 Events is the crew writing this guide: the people who build the rig, call the show and know what a product launch needs because they were there the last time one went wrong.
The decision now is whether the presentation, the demo and the performance are being coordinated by people who run them as a single evening, or by three suppliers who met each other that morning. Settle that before the date is fixed, because the running order is written by whoever turns up first.