The prompt
A new AV Trends Review for 2026 has just mapped where live events are heading, drawing on venue, production and technology specialists across the industry. Its five headline trends – a shift from technology-led to experience-led design, personalisation as the new benchmark, year-round content over one-off events, practical (not hyped) AI, and rising operational pressure on production teams – were written with corporate events and exhibitions in mind. Read them as a biotech or medtech marketer planning a conference stand, and they describe something very close to home.
01 – The technology isn’t the story. The story is the story.
The review’s central argument is that AV and production technology work best when they support a bigger narrative, not when they become the headline act. For a life sciences exhibitor, the equivalent mistake is familiar: a stand built around an impressive screen or a slick animation, with no clear thirty-second answer to what the company actually does and why it matters.
The technology-led stand looks good in photos. The experience-led stand is the one a visitor remembers a week later, because they left with a clear idea of the science and the opportunity, not just an impression of production values.
Sophie Read, Read Marketing
“I’ve watched founders spend their whole stand budget on the display and none of it on the thirty seconds of story a visitor actually needs. The technology should disappear behind the message, not the other way round.”
Personalisation is the new benchmark — and life sciences got there first
The review names personalisation as one of the defining shifts of 2026: audiences expect an event experience built around them, not a generic one they happen to be attending. Life sciences conferences have quietly been ahead of this curve for years, through pre-booked 1:1 meeting schedules built from weeks of prior outreach, rather than hoping the right investor wanders past the stand.
The lesson from the wider events industry isn’t that this needs to start. It’s that it needs to go further: personalised follow-up content after the event, not just a personalised meeting during it.
The reframe
A pre-booked meeting schedule is personalisation at the point of contact. The events getting real ROI in 2026 are personalising the six weeks before and after too – not just the two days on the stand.
03 – Year-round content, not a one-off stand
One of the review’s clearer findings is a growing emphasis on year-round content creation to maximise the return on a single event – treating the conference as a content source that keeps working for months, not a two-day expense that ends when the stand comes down.
For a biotech or medtech venture, that means the case studies, the photography and the conversations from a conference like ScotSoft, Space-Comm Expo or CPHI shouldn’t disappear into a follow-up email and nothing else. They’re raw material for months of content afterwards exactly the kind of named, specific, sourced material that builds genuine demand ahead of the next event, rather than starting from zero each time.
Sophie Read, Read Marketing
“The best content I’ve ever produced for a client came out of a single good conversation on a stand. The event isn’t the campaign. It’s where the campaign gets its evidence.”
04 – AI: genuinely useful, and genuinely over-hyped, at the same time
The review is careful here, flagging AI hype outpacing practical application as one of the two biggest challenges facing the events sector in 2026 — plenty of adoption, not always matched by a clear use case. Its more useful framing is that AI is settling into practical roles, particularly around accessibility and automation, rather than replacing the judgement events still need.
That’s a fair description of where AI sits in life sciences marketing too. It’s genuinely useful for drafting, iterating and testing content faster than before. It’s not a substitute for understanding the science, the regulatory line, or which specific investor actually needs to hear this story.
05 – What this means for your next conference
- Design the stand around a thirty-second story, and let the technology support it rather than headline it
- Extend personalisation beyond the meeting itself, into pre-event outreach and post-event follow-up content
- Plan for the event to generate months of content, not just two days of conversations
- Use AI to speed up drafting and iteration, not to replace judgement on messaging or compliance
- Build in the lead time a genuinely experience-led stand needs — it can’t be assembled well under compressed build pressure
Sophie Read, Read Marketing
“Twenty-five years in B2B marketing across life sciences and manufacturing has taught me the same thing this review is describing for the events industry generally: audiences can tell within seconds whether they’re looking at a story built for them, or a stand built to look impressive in a photo. Only one of those gets remembered.”
This piece draws on the AV Trends Review 2026 and reflects Sophie Read’s own commentary from her experience in B2B marketing across the life sciences and manufacturing sectors.
Is your next conference stand built for the photo, or the story?
Read Marketing works with biotech, medtech and medical device ventures across the North East and Scotland to plan conference presence that works long after the stand comes down.
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