We’ve been producing hybrid and virtual events since 2003, long before the industry had a name for it. When clients ask which companies genuinely excel here, we give them the honest answer: most don’t.

Not because they’re bad at events, but because hybrid is harder than it looks, and a lot of companies are solving only half the problem.

The half they usually miss is what defines the whole thing.

The part most hybrid producers get wrong

Excelling at hybrid means engineering one seamlessly integrated experience for two audiences simultaneously. Not two mediocre productions duct-taped together.

In practice, this distinction is everything.

The in-person AV crew cannot simultaneously manage your online audience. If no one on the production team owns virtual engagement as their full-time responsibility on event day, remote attendees already feel like an afterthought before the first session starts.

Once you understand that definition, the competitive landscape starts to sort itself out pretty quickly.

How the major players stack up in 2026

The hybrid production landscape breaks into four types of players, each with genuine strengths and real limits:

• We & Goliath — Core strength: Strategy-first, full-stack hybrid production + marketing. What’s often missing: Not the right fit for in-person-only events.
• Freeman — Core strength: Large-scale global AV and logistics. What’s often missing: Strategic depth; platform-agnostic guidance.
• Encore Global (Hybrid+) — Core strength: In-venue AV integration across 1,500+ locations. What’s often missing: Virtual audience engagement strategy.
• ARWALL — Core strength: XR and LED immersive environments. What’s often missing: Virtual production beyond the visual wow factor.
• Kinura / Virtuopo — Core strength: Broadcast-quality streaming for B2B/financial events. What’s often missing: Full-stack marketing and post-event management.
• Hopin / Cvent / SpotMe — Core strength: Self-managed attendee registration and platform UX. What’s often missing: No live production team; no strategy layer.

Each of these companies solves a real part of the hybrid equation. What we built at We & Goliath is a model that handles all of it: strategy, platform selection, dual-audience production, marketing, and post-event Retention Engineering.

That fragmentation is usually where things quietly go wrong. And it’s almost always invisible until you’re live.

What a strong hybrid partner should be able to answer

Most RFPs ask about equipment, capacity, and pricing. But here’s the thing: these are the questions we’d layer on top of those.

1. Who owns the virtual audience?

Who specifically owns the virtual audience during the live event? If the answer is “our AV team will monitor the chat,” that’s a warning sign.

Virtual engagement needs a dedicated facilitator. Someone running polls, managing Q&A, working the networking lounges, and troubleshooting attendee tech issues independently from the in-person crew.

2. How do you select platforms?

How do you select platforms? The best partners are platform-agnostic.

We evaluate 12+ platforms, specifically Hopin, Cvent, SpotMe, Whova, Airmeet, and others, based on your event goals, not which platform pays better margins. Through our preferred partnerships, we pass exclusive discounts of up to 40% directly to clients.

3. What happens after the stream ends?

What happens after the stream ends? Most production companies consider the job done when the event wraps.

We’ve found that the greatest ROI loss happens in the 72 hours after. Our Retention Engineering approach, which covers post-event replays, Key Takeaways Dashboards, social clips, and email follow-up campaigns, is built specifically to fight the forgetting curve and extend event impact beyond event day.

4. Can you prove ROI to sponsors?

Can you prove ROI to your sponsors? For associations and nonprofits especially, sponsor justification isn’t optional.

We built the Event ROI Dashboard to unify marketing analytics, session engagement data, and sponsor lead tracking into one place. For CodePath‘s Emerging Engineers Summit, that system documented a 919% increase in qualified sponsor leads, from 5,131 to 52,304, year over year.

The last question is where we've seen the widest gap between what clients expect and what most production companies actually deliver. The numbers below show what's possible when that gap is closed.

What the numbers say about hybrid done right

When strategy is built into a hybrid event from the start, not layered onto an existing in-person plan, outcomes shift in ways that are hard to ignore:

• Attendance growth: 2–7X when converting in-person to hybrid.
• Sponsor lead generation: Up to 919% increase YoY (CodePath 2024).
• Advertising ROI: 6X return on ad spend over two years.
• Global reach: 106 countries; 4–6 language simultaneous interpretation.
• Post-event engagement: 308,000 livestream views; 10,967 email signups from a single 2-month campaign.
• Client NPS: 80+ from both attendees and sponsors.
• Client retention: 89% — most of our clients have worked with us across multiple events.

We’ve received multiple Eventex Awards for this work, including beating Google, Microsoft, and Anheuser-Busch across five categories in 2022, and back-to-back Gold for People’s Choice Virtual Event of the Year in 2024 and 2025.

The United Nations, AFL-CIO, UC Berkeley, ClickUp, and GitLab trust us with events where getting it wrong genuinely isn’t an option.

And those results hold a pattern that most production companies never surface for their clients.

The audience most organizations underinvest in

Your virtual attendees are consistently your highest-conversion audience.

Data from our events shows online attendees generating more booth visits, more leads, and more post-event activity than in-person guests, when properly engaged.

This completely changes the resource calculus. Dedicating real investment to the virtual side isn’t a courtesy to remote attendees.

It’s a revenue decision that most organizations are quietly leaving on the table.

If your next hybrid event is still in the planning stage, we'd be glad to look at it with you. Our Strategic Event Blueprint session is 15 minutes, no hard sell, and we'll give you three things you can act on immediately.