The Medicines Australia Code and your event AV: where the line sits

Pharmaceutical sponsorship makes most Australian medical conferences financially viable. The sponsoring companies gain access to clinicians and visibility at peer-endorsed events. The medical societies gain the funding to run their educational programs. The arrangement works, and it is openly disclosed.

What the Medicines Australia Code of Conduct (now in its 20th edition, effective 30 March 2025) does is define exactly where the sponsor’s involvement ends and the independent educational program begins. That dividing line is not abstract. It has a physical location in your venue, a specific place on your run sheet, and a direct effect on how your vision and video pipeline is configured.

AV teams who have not worked pharma-sponsored events before often find this out after bump-in. AV teams who run them regularly build the Code’s requirements into their production design from the brief stage. The difference is noticeable in the room.

Why a pharma-sponsored meeting is different

At most corporate conferences, the sponsor relationship is straightforward: sponsors pay, their branding appears, sometimes they get a speaking slot. The organiser controls the program, but there is no regulatory framework governing how those elements relate to each other.

At a pharma-sponsored medical conference, the Code changes the terms considerably. The organising society (not the sponsor) controls the scientific program independently. The educational content, the speaker selection, and the session structure belong to the society. A pharmaceutical company that sponsors the meeting is not purchasing access to shape what clinicians hear from the podium.

What the sponsor funds is the infrastructure of education: the venue, the AV, the catering, sometimes the delegate travel. In return, they may participate in a clearly bounded way during designated sponsor times, typically within an industry exhibition or a satellite symposium that sits alongside (not inside) the main scientific program.

The Code is explicit that hospitality and any entertainment provided must be moderate and reasonable by Australian standards. The whole spirit of the arrangement is that delegates attend for the education, not the amenities. This matters for medical and pharma conference production because it means the sponsor experience and the scientific experience need to look different, sound different, and be kept apart by your run sheet.

If they bleed into each other (even accidentally) you have a potential Code issue, not just a production glitch.

What the AV team controls

The AV team does not enforce the Code. That is the organiser’s job. But the AV team controls the tools through which the Code’s requirements become visible in the room.

The vision pipeline. During scientific sessions, what appears on your LED wall, confidence monitors, and broadcast feed should reflect the organising society’s brand identity, not the sponsor’s. Presenter slides go up clean. IMAG rolls. The only persistent graphics on screen are society-branded lower thirds, session titles, and speaker identifiers. Sponsor logos are off.

When the program moves into a designated sponsor period (a satellite symposium, a product theatre, a sponsored lunch-and-learn), the pipeline switches. Sponsor branding comes on. Sponsor video content runs. The visual language of the room changes deliberately and visibly.

That switch is not automatic. It requires a configured vision system and a show caller who knows when to execute it.

The audio environment. The separation also applies to audio. Sponsor content plays in sponsor spaces: the exhibition hall, the satellite symposium room, or bracketed time slots where the boundary is clear. A sponsor brand reel does not play into the main scientific auditorium during a break between sessions. The audio spec for the main room and the sponsor activation areas may be entirely separate systems, or at minimum separately controlled.

Recording. What gets recorded, and what does not, is a Code-adjacent decision. Scientific sessions go to the CPD archive. Sponsor content typically does not, and should not, appear in the same recorded deliverable as the educational program. The production team has to know which ISO recordings belong where before the event, not during post-production.

The run sheet enforces it

This is where theory becomes practice. A well-constructed run sheet for a pharma-sponsored event does more than list cues in sequence. It marks the mode each segment operates in, so every operator in the room knows what they are serving at any point in the day.

A scientific session in the main room runs in what you might call “society mode”: society branding active, presenter content priority, recording on, sponsor material off-limits. A satellite symposium in a breakout room, running concurrently, operates in “sponsor mode”: sponsor branding active, sponsor video approved to roll, recorded only as a separate archive if at all.

The risk is the transition. A scientific session overruns by seven minutes. The show caller holds on science mode. The sponsor content that was queued for the break does not play until the scientific session has closed and the transition cue has fired. A run sheet that does not account for the transition protocol is a run sheet that will eventually produce a Code problem.

Good run-sheet design for pharma-sponsored events builds the mode designations in from the start, marks every transition point with an explicit cue (not an implicit one), and gives the show caller the authority to hold on mode until the transition is clean. On events where a sponsor’s satellite symposium runs in one room while the main scientific plenary continues in another, the show caller often coordinates across rooms to make sure branding states are always consistent with the program state.

For the broader picture of how the run sheet and session design work across a multi-room medical meeting, the AV for medical and pharma conferences overview covers the full format in detail.

Recording and the Code

The recording scope at a pharma-sponsored meeting is more nuanced than “record everything and sort it out later.”

Scientific sessions are recorded for CPD purposes. Medical colleges and societies require documented evidence of the educational content their members attended, and the recordings form part of that record. Those recordings are archivable, distributable to delegates who missed a session, and potentially creditable against CPD requirements.

Sponsor-hosted content occupies different ground. A company product presentation that runs in a satellite symposium is promotional material under the Code, even if it involves clinicians speaking. Including it in the same CPD recording package as the independent scientific program is at minimum confusing and may raise Code concerns depending on how it is presented.

In practice, the cleanest approach is to record them as separate deliverables from the start. The scientific room’s ISO recording goes to the CPD archive workflow. Sponsor activation recordings (where they are captured at all) go to a separate deliverable, clearly labelled, and reviewed by the organiser before distribution.

The post-production brief should specify this distinction before the event. Asking a post-production team to retroactively sort sponsor content from scientific content in a mixed recording is slow, expensive, and introduces the risk of error in a context where accuracy matters.

Remote broadcast adds another layer. If the main scientific plenary is being broadcast to remote delegates who paid registration to attend, the broadcast feed is the scientific program only. Sponsor content that runs in the room during breaks does not go to the broadcast stream. A hybrid event where the broadcast director is cutting between the plenary and sponsor activation footage without a clear brief is heading toward a problem.

Questions to ask your AV vendor

Choosing an AV partner for a pharma-sponsored meeting is not the same as choosing one for a corporate conference of equivalent size. The format requires specific knowledge that does not transfer automatically from general conference production experience.

How do you configure the vision system to switch between scientific and sponsor modes? The answer should be specific. Not “we can do that” but “here is how the run sheet marks the transition, here is how the operator knows which state the room is in, and here is what happens when a session overruns.” If the vendor looks puzzled by the question, they have not run this format before.

Who calls the transition cues, and what authority do they have to hold on mode? Some production teams give this authority to the show caller. Others leave it to the client representative on the day, which introduces delay and human error at exactly the moment precision matters. Understand the protocol before the event.

How do you handle concurrent rooms in different modes? A main plenary in scientific mode and a sponsor satellite in breakout room 2 at the same time require either separate production teams or a senior operator who is coordinating both. Single-operator setups running across multiple concurrent rooms in different modes are a risk.

What is your post-event delivery workflow for CPD recordings versus sponsor content? The vendor should understand this distinction without needing it explained. If they treat all recordings as a single deliverable, the post-production cleanup falls to the organiser.

Have you worked with the organiser’s compliance team before the event? Some medical societies have a compliance lead or legal review for the run sheet. An AV vendor who understands why that review happens, and who incorporates feedback from it into the production design, is a vendor who has done this before.

The Code is not onerous to work within once the production is designed around it. The complication arises when a team treats a pharma-sponsored meeting like any other corporate event and discovers the differences on the day.

For events where the stakes of getting this right are high, and where the audience is a room of clinicians who notice when things are not being run cleanly, the brief stage is where you buy yourself a smooth show. Get the mode design right, get the run sheet right, get the recording scope clear, and the day runs the way the Code requires.

If you are planning a pharma-sponsored medical conference or satellite symposium in Sydney and need a production team that knows how the Code shapes the AV scope, get in touch with the Studio AV team. We brief around the compliance requirements from the start.