Has the Events Industry Outgrown the Word “Production”?
By James Lastowski, Business Development Lead, VDA
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
– Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Inigo was talking about “inconceivable,” but no word in the events industry can trip people up more than production.
I hear it constantly at networking events. Someone tells me their company does “event production,” and goes on to elaborate a bit while I smile and try to read context clues before having to ask for clarification outright.
That’s exactly what’s going on every time a client asks for production support and no one confirms what that actually means for that specific client and that specific event. Depending on who’s answering, production could mean five completely different jobs.
Where the word actually breaks down
In my role, I’m usually the first person hearing what a client says they need, before that request gets handed off to whoever actually delivers it: our designer, our lead PM, whoever owns that piece of the job. The breakdowns I’ve seen rarely come from execution. They come from language, specifically, from what gets lost or assumed in that handoff.
This is the trap in scoping calls across the industry: someone says “production support,” and everyone politely nods along. As the saying goes, the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it’s actually happened, and a room of nodding heads is exactly what that illusion looks like. Scope and budget lock in before anyone circles back to check, and by the time the gap surfaces, nobody’s really at fault. Both sides were just using the same word to mean two different things.
The 5 types of event production, explained
Technical production is the world of audio, video, lighting, staging, and the crew running the show in real time. Ask a technical director what production means and this is the answer you’ll get.
Fabrication production belongs to the builders, welders, and carpenters constructing the physical environment itself; the booths, sets, and branded spaces that exist before a single show cue is called.
Video production means something different to a video team hearing the word: filming, editing, motion graphics, the work of turning raw footage into a story.
Creative production covers presentation design and content development, the visual and narrative pieces that guide someone through an experience from the moment they walk in.
Event production, the broadest use of the word, means the full orchestration of a project from first concept through teardown: logistics, vendors, timing, every moving piece at once.
Five groups of people, five different jobs, one word covering all of it.
The language is already changing, just not evenly
Some of this is already shifting. Technical crews increasingly describe themselves as show operators, managing the live experience in real time rather than just running equipment. Creative teams are calling themselves experience designers. Video teams talk about storytelling more than they talk about footage. Fabrication teams describe themselves as environment builders. And executive producers are starting to use titles like experience architect to describe what they actually do: designing the system all of these disciplines have to fit into.
None of this is fully settled. The new titles exist, but most of the industry still defaults to the one word that’s supposed to cover all of it. That gap between the job someone is actually doing and the word they’re using to describe it is where scope creep, budget surprises, and missed handoffs tend to start.
Other industries have already been through this
Modern events pull together architecture, storytelling, technology, logistics, fabrication, and marketing into a single experience. That’s a lot to ask one word to carry.
Other industries have hit this same wall and split their terminology. Film did it: when “cameraman” became cinematographer, director of photography, and gaffer, that wasn’t just a title change. It was an admission that the job had gotten too specific for one word to describe. Technology did the same thing when “engineer” split into a dozen specialties. Events are in the middle of that same shift right now, we just haven’t finished getting consensus on what the definitions should be.
What does production mean to you?
For now, the real fix here isn’t a new glossary nobody will read. It’s one extra question, the one I’ve started actually asking now at networking tables and in scoping calls: what does production mean to you?
That single question, asked before scope and budget get locked in, catches more mismatched expectations than any amount of polished terminology ever will. Until the industry agrees on better words, asking is the only thing that actually works.
If you’re not sure what production means for your next project, that’s the exact conversation I have with people every day. Let’s talk.