Three desert tips that can help you with outdoor events [COP16 in Riyadh]

Tuesday 21 January 2025

I’m Lucía Arribas, founder of Solutions Prompteur. At the COP16 United Nations event, my team managed the two main rooms at the Kingdom Arena in Riyadh for three weeks. In this article, I’ll share three tips that could help you avoid mistakes if you’re working on complex outdoor events.

You’ll discover how to better protect your equipment outdoors, a weird question you should ask a client who wants to use a transparent teleprompter (Obama System with glass), and a nice surprise from Riyadh, in case you ever visit.

First pill: Dust

As I mentioned, at COP16, we had the two main rooms equipped with remote-controlled Obama teleprompters – ready to go – and we remained reactive all day to respond quickly to requests.

Each morning, we arrived about an hour before the meetings started:

We removed the protective covers we had placed on the Obama teleprompters on stage. The same for the control room.
We dusted them off with a vacuum air compressor.

I know this might make you smile, but the “air duster” turned out to be a key tool to get rid of all the dust and keep the equipment in perfect condition during outdoor events. We were in the desert.

If you plan to use devices outdoors (especially if they are mobile, like our height-adjustable teleprompters), it’s essential to bring an air compressor vacuum. You can’t afford to give technology a reason to fail.

After cleaning all the gear, we plugged everything in and conducted our technical tests.

Second pill: Managing last-minute speeches and a weird question.

In 99.9% of the events we attend, we require the speakers’ texts in advance so we can format them. This way, clients can read their speeches more comfortably, making the delivery natural.

The unique aspect of COP16 was that we could be handed a text and asked to prepare it five minutes before the speech. That is, someone would quickly approach us and ask for a tele prompter text in Arabic, Turkish, English, French, Chinese, Hebrew… We had to be ready.

When we were asked, we needed to load the text immediately, format it quickly, have tips to act fast, and have pre-set memories in our system.

The weird question we had to ask: What is the speaker’s height?

Why did we ask this?

The Obama teleprompter is transparent because it reflects the text so that it’s only visible from one specific point: the speaker’s podium. It’s not the same if a speaker is 5’3″ or 6’3″ tall. The teleprompter needs to be adjusted to their height.

If we know the height, we adjust the glass with the remote.

And if we didn’t get the information, thankfully, at COP16, the speakers were often well-known personalities—heads of state, ministers, writers, philosophers…—We could look up their profiles on Wikipedia. Often, their height was listed there.

Third pill: The unexpected ally that carried us through the end of the day.

When the meetings ended in our room, we would conduct tests again once the room was empty. We tested the equipment again, the rise and fall of the glass, to ensure everything was working well after a whole day. Then, we covered all our equipment in both the control room and on stage until the next day.

In Riyadh, there were some beautiful surprises, especially the coffee. I love good coffee, and I must say that it was in Riyadh that I had the best coffee of my life. It was truly a treat, coffee that could make you addicted, refined, smooth, and delicious.

Another thing I need to mention is the gastronomy. The Indian food here was divine. There was some very, very good food in Riyadh.

So, two important and pleasant points when staying there for three weeks: you can eat well and drink amazing coffee. By the way, there was coffee everywhere. Along a stretch of 200 meters at COP16.

In the afternoon, there were Arab musicians singing and playing drums.

A hopeful human environment.

I spent my day in the plenary room, listening to high-level meetings. It was interesting because you could immediately see the participants who genuinely wanted to take concrete action to combat desertification. Combatting desertification was the theme of this United Nations convention.

It was quite powerful to be in a place where the whole world was coming together. There was truly a meeting point, where you could feel the collective will to implement solutions to improve the state of our planet.

C’était assez puissant d’être dans un lieu où le monde entier se concertait. Il y a eu vraiment une rencontre, un point de rassemblement, où l’on sentait la volonté de tous de mettre en place des solutions pour améliorer l’état de notre planète.

I know there are also interests in the world, not everything is perfect, and maybe it’s a facade… But what I saw – and I’ll leave it at that – is that the world had gathered and decisions were being made, largely in the interest of our planet.

Everyone knows and says that there is still much work to be done, but it’s very important that COP16 ended with concrete actions.

That’s it.

I hope this article has brought you closer to one of the most important events of 2024.

Lucía ARRIBAS

PS: I hope this publication has been useful to you. I only publish 25% of this information on the web. If you’re in the events business, I’m sharing privately the tips I’ve observed from the most sought-after production directors in France (and around the world) after working with many of them for over 20 years. This information is free of charge and will help you avoid many coordination errors during an event, thereby increasing your prestige.