Interview: Sean Wargo & Lee Dodson, Apogee Insight

• Features

• 15/06/2026

There’s no shortage of data in the pro AV industry, only a shortage of certainty. As the market expands, so does the complexity behind the numbers. AI is making answers easier to generate, but not necessarily easier to trust. Without clarity on where data comes from, forming a reliable view of the market remains a challenge.

Sean Wargo and Lee Dodson worked at AVIXA and were both involved with the IOTA market report. They parted ways with the trade association to found Apogee Insight, a dedicated market research firm. Their departure was not an act of rebellion. AVIXA made a strategic decision to redirect its focus. But the ‘data gap’ Wargo and Dodson identified was real, and Apogee Insight was their response.

Apogee Insight has made a significant step with the recent acquisition of PMA Research, a research firm with deep roots in projector and display data and an established network of on-the-ground analysts across North America and Asia. With the expansion in capabilities, it becomes interesting to see how the data market is shaping up moving forward.

The problem with the numbers

Market data available to integrators today paints a rosy picture. The AV industry is projected to grow to many billions of dollars by 2030. But data of this type lacks the depth that AV businesses need to make effective decisions.

Dodson, who spent 35 years on the manufacturer side of the industry before co-founding Apogee Insight, knows the feeling intimately. He says: “I was in the rather lonely seat of trying to keep tabs on what is happening in the industry in a global sense. The quality of data sources has been poor generally and inconsistent forever, and there’s been a general erosion of confidence in the data sources that are there.”

The IOTA report, AVIXA’s annual Industry Outlook and Trends Analysis, served a wide-angle view of a broadly defined industry, useful for strategic benchmarking and board-level presentations. What it was less suited to was the granular, operational questions that an integrator needs answered. How is digital signage spend trending per square foot of commercial fit-out? Which product categories are being specified most frequently in corporate AV projects? Where, exactly, in the supply chain is inventory sitting?

Wargo says: “As an individual business owner, you are so abstracted from a big macro number. What actually impacts your business is knowing whether flat-panel demand is rising in your target market, or whether a shift is happening in how audio distribution is applied in commercial installations. That kind of granular data is what moves the needle.”

Beefing up

Both Wargo and Dodson are emphatic on one point; there is no single perfect data source for the pro AV industry. The supply chain is too fragmented, the routes to market too varied, and the end-use contexts too diverse for any one dataset to capture the full picture. The answer, they argue, is triangulation.

Wargo says: “You have to use multi-modal, multi-methodology approaches to understanding a market like this. You’ve got shipment data, distributor data, integrator data, survey data, platform data. The key is blending them together intelligently.”

Dodson adds: “One of the biggest problems with traditional data sources is that buyers are looking at a report that was researched a year ago. What attracted us to PMA Research is they really do have their finger on the pulse of the display market, which most of us would acknowledge is at the core and heart of pro AV.”

Building pipelines from manufacturers, distributors, and integrators — updated quarterly and in some cases monthly — offers a far more current and layered view. This is a direction that Apogee Insight intends to go in.

Layered on top of large scale data reports is the capability Apogee Insight itself brings in the form of bespoke research. Survey access through partners allows the firm to probe specific audience segments. Project management platforms like Jetbuilt — a software platform used by integrators to scope, quote, and manage installations — open up something that has historically been very difficult to obtain in the shape of actual use-case data from inside the integration channel.

Wargo says: “Platforms like Jetbuilt give us the opportunity to see what integrator-installers are scoping into projects. That leads to true use-case type data. And that is the hardest thing of all, understanding how technology is actually being used in the field.”

The APAC opportunity

From an APAC perspective, the question of how any of this translates to the region is not an academic one. Asia Pacific is consistently cited as the fastest growing geography for pro AV deployment. The theoretical opportunity is enormous. The practical challenge of accessing reliable, current, and authentic data across markets as diverse as Japan, China, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia is massive.

Language barriers, fragmented distribution structures, and the sheer insularity of some national markets make remote data collection an unreliable exercise. It is here, both Wargo and Dodson suggest, that the PMA acquisition might give Apogee Insight a leg up.

Dodson says: “At the core of how PMA manages that challenge is that they, and now we, have people on the ground. We have an industry expert living in Tokyo, who knows all the players there. We also have an analyst in Taiwan covering China, Korea, and the greater APAC region — specialists who speak the languages, live there, and are watching what is happening every day.”

Wargo is candid about the historical bias of platform data towards North America. He says: “Asia will be unavoidably a top priority for us. PMA’s longest standing and most loyal client relationships are with Japanese projector companies, a constituency that has valued PMA’s precision and reliability for years. And we intend to make this acquisition help us expand further into APAC.”

Data in turbulent times

The industry has absorbed, in relatively quick succession, a pandemic, a global supply chain crisis, a chip shortage, and now significant trade policy uncertainty. Can better data and market intelligence help navigate these shocks?

The honest answer, from both men, is ‘partially’. Annual datasets are essentially useless when conditions are shifting weekly, as was the case during peak tariff volatility. But higher-frequency, forward-looking data offers something meaningful; not prediction, but pipeline visibility. Dodson acknowledges: “There is no crystal ball. But you can turn on the windshield wipers to a certain degree, and that is where forward-looking data is vital. Most data sources are rear-view. What they fail to assess in a dynamic situation is the pipeline effect.”

Wargo adds: “If you have data, you can start to see the effect working backwards from demand, through distribution, all the way to the manufacturer. Getting a demand indicator in as close to real time as possible, or at least monthly, tells you how the whole system is likely to respond.”

In Apogee Insight’s opinion the AV industry deserves better tools than it has historically had. Wargo concludes: “As a researcher, data is king. If you don’t have your own specific access to proprietary data sources, that go beyond an individual company, you’re essentially an AI engine that is just scraping and that will absolutely mislead you if you’re not careful.”