About
What is The Production Index?
The Production Index is a vendor ranking publication for production services in the San Francisco Bay Area. It scores video, audio-visual, event and wedding production companies on five published criteria, and the rubric goes up before the rankings rather than after.
What The Production Index covers
The Production Index currently publishes 5 rankings in San Francisco: conference AV, trade show AV, LED wall rental, teleprompter rental and video production. Those rankings score 38 vendors between them, each with a profile recording the public data the score was built from.
Coverage expands across the Bay Area — Oakland, San Jose, the Peninsula, Marin, Berkeley, Napa and Sonoma, Santa Cruz — and then to other production markets. A city is added only once its own vendors have been researched, because a ranking that reuses another city’s candidates is not a ranking. See coverage for what is live and what is next.
How The Production Index decides a ranking
Every vendor is scored 0 to 100 across five dimensions, weighted for the category being ranked:
- Rating quality. The mean star rating, discounted by the share of ratings below four stars. A clean record counts for more than a high average with a bad tail hidden inside it.
- Review depth. How much evidence sits behind the rating, measured against the other vendors in the same category rather than against the whole market.
- Service depth. How much itemised capability the vendor actually publishes, rather than how much it claims in prose.
- Price transparency. Whether a buyer can see a number before making contact. Almost nobody in this market publishes one, which is exactly why it separates vendors.
- Operational proof. Checkable evidence that there is a real operation behind the listing: an owner-claimed profile, a street address, work performed at the client site, a photographed inventory, and breadth of registered category.
Weights vary by category, because a buyer renting an LED wall for one evening and a buyer commissioning a three-day conference are not weighing the same things. Each ranking page publishes its own weights above the ranking, and those weights are set before the scoring runs. The full method, including the arithmetic behind every score, is at the rubric.
Rankings are computed from that rubric rather than assigned. That means the order sometimes disagrees with Google’s own local pack. Where it does, the page shows both orders and explains the difference instead of quietly matching.
Where the data comes from
Ratings, rating breakdowns, published service counts, categories, prices and profile attributes come from Google Business Profiles. Local-pack positions come from Google search localised to the city being ranked. Claims taken from a vendor’s own website are recorded as that vendor’s claim and labelled as such rather than stated as fact.
Every figure carries the date it was current — not the date it was collected. Google serves profile data from a cached snapshot that can lag the live listing by weeks, so where a live figure and a cached one disagree, the live one is used and dated accordingly, and where only a cached figure exists its own snapshot date is published so a reader can see how old it is. Nothing is estimated to fill a gap.
What The Production Index does not do
Placement is not for sale. No vendor can buy a position and there is no tier that changes an order. If that ever changes, any paid element will be labelled on the page it appears on and kept out of the scoring.
Vendors that cannot be scored are listed without a score rather than dropped. A company with no Google profile, or one whose service list has not been audited, appears in the also-serving section of the relevant ranking with the gap named. Being absent from Google is a gap in what a company publishes, not evidence about its work.
Companies that appear in the same search results but sell a different service are kept out of a ranking with the reason published on the page — a hi-fi retailer is not an event AV company, and an installed-systems integrator is not an event production vendor, however well either would score.
The Production Index and the industrial production index
These are different things that share a name. The industrial production index, or IPI, is an economic indicator of manufacturing, mining and utility output, published in the United States by the Federal Reserve Board. The Production Index is a vendor ranking publication for production services in the San Francisco Bay Area and has no connection to it.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong or out of date, The Production Index wants to fix it. Any vendor can ask for a re-check of any figure attributed to them, and a re-check that changes a score changes the ranking, in whichever direction the data goes. Vendor data is re-pulled monthly and the full rubric is re-scored quarterly.