On the floor at InfoComm in June 2026, Tobi Tungl held a glass award over his head and grinned. The badge around his neck still said what it usually says - CTI - but the screen behind him had supplied a new line: AV Person of the Year. The scene contained a neat career joke. The executive accepting the industry honor had begun more than twenty years earlier as a field technician, pulling cable and commissioning systems. Careers, he observed afterward, are weird that way.
The photograph is celebratory without becoming solemn. Tungl is in a green polo and white sneakers, standing beside a suited colleague, one arm raised. It looks less like a coronation than the moment after a team finds out the long project worked. His own caption made the same point. You keep showing up, learning, making mistakes and getting better. Opportunities follow. Then, almost without permission, the industry stops feeling like somewhere you work and begins to feel like somewhere you belong.
His final sentence was the useful one: “The award has my name on it, but nobody gets anywhere alone.” For an executive who spends his days deciding how a company should speak, the instinct was revealing. He accepted the noun and redistributed the credit.
A marketer who remembers the cable tray
Tungl entered professional life in information technology during the dot-com boom and crash. In 2005, he crossed into audiovisual work. The early tasks were physical and exact: cable has to reach, systems have to commission, rooms have to function. A field technician receives unusually honest feedback. The screen either lights up or it does not. The room does not applaud a strategic rationale.
He moved through technical and sales roles, eventually helping integration businesses retain clients, grow revenue and open locations. By the time Epiphan Video hired him in 2022 as vice president of sales for North America, his résumé had gathered both alphabets and scar tissue: the CTS and CTS-D credentials from AVIXA, the RCDD credential from BICSI, and years spent close enough to customers to know when a promise is doing too much work.
This is why his view of marketing sounds more like operations than ornament. He says he has never considered it a support function. Marketing belongs inside the machinery of growth, trust and relevance. At CTI, his remit crosses positioning, sales alignment and market strategy for Pro AV, broadcast and mission-critical environments. These are not impulse-purchase markets. Buying cycles are long, skepticism is reasonable, and credibility is built in teaspoons.
“I don’t believe in marketing for marketing’s sake. I believe in marketing that makes it matter.”Tobi Tungl
His playbook is compact: sharpen strategy every quarter, root campaigns in storytelling, and execute long enough for the work to compound. More important is the inspection after launch. Did the message match how the company actually operates? Did sales have a reason to continue the conversation? Did attention become momentum? The modern stack can produce more emails, more impressions, more invitations and more content with astonishing efficiency. It cannot make any of them interesting.
“Reaching someone is easy,” he has written. “Being worth their time is the hard part.” It is a bracing line for a marketing chief because it removes distribution as an excuse. The inbox was reached. The feed registered an impression. Now comes the impolite question: did anyone care?
The long road is not a metaphor by accident
Tungl is an ultra-endurance gravel cyclist and mountain biker, which means he voluntarily makes Saturday much longer. One recurring event runs 204 miles from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. His account of preparing for it begins with the practical worries: weather, Garmin, food. Then the day takes over. There are fast group miles, quiet solo miles, new companions and a Pine River section that keeps a rider alert.
Endurance is often borrowed by executives as a decorative word. Tungl has put in the dull miles that give it meaning. He has ridden the Iceman Cometh Challenge for more than a decade and writes training notes for its community. His advice is cheerfully unglamorous: ride when it is hard, ride when it is inconvenient, and keep moving. A mantra is not a substitute for preparation, but it can be useful when the trail bites back.
The bicycle also widens his circle. He has coached with Grand Rapids Dirt Dawgs and, since 2023, with the Michigan Scholastic Cycling Association. He serves as a coach, board member and communications chair for the West Michigan Coyotes, a K-12 composite mountain-bike team. The team's ambition is wonderfully plain: kids should have fun in the woods.
Long before this formal coaching, bikes were already tangled with family and local enterprise. In 2013, Tungl and his wife Melissa owned Seva Yoga in East Grand Rapids. As she expanded the school and its classes, they planned a Seva-sponsored mountain-bike team. In Tungl's life, business development has a habit of finding a trailhead.
Make the front door easier to find
The coaching instinct runs straight into his industry work. Tungl served on AVIXA's Young AV Professionals Council from 2016 to 2022. He spent six years on the NSCA Education Foundation board and served as its president in 2023-2024. The foundation's assignment is not abstract: create scholarships, internships and routes into an industry many students have never heard of.
His current argument begins with a contradiction. AV companies talk about a talent shortage, then advertise jobs that demand five, ten or fifteen years of AV experience. If every hire must already be inside the business, the talent pool does not grow. It merely changes badges.
“Curiosity matters. Drive matters. Being willing to learn matters.”Tobi Tungl
He points to people in IT, construction, live events, broadcast, engineering, sales and project management whose skills translate readily. He also points to young people who may not know that professional AV is a career at all. At CTI, he highlights CTI University, technician boot camps, internships and an apprenticeship program as deliberate entrances. Experience still matters. So does giving someone a first legitimate chance to acquire it.
This is not charity masquerading as hiring strategy. New entrants bring different frames of reference to an industry whose technologies increasingly overlap with networks, software, broadcasting and workplace design. Curiosity can be recruited. Product knowledge can be taught. The scarce ingredient is often the combination of composure, appetite and the willingness to keep learning after the novelty wears off.
A global brief, measured in conversations
CTI has expanded across the United States and into the United Kingdom, moving from 35 American locations in early 2024 to 40 US locations and two UK offices by mid-2025. Tungl's marketing task grew with it. A brand stretched across regions cannot survive on a slogan alone. Local teams need a shared position without losing the knowledge that comes from being close to customers.
On a recent UK visit, Tungl joined a sales offsite in London, traveled to Retford for lunch with more colleagues and came away praising the context that only frontline conversations provide. There was also a competitive darts game. He hit a bullseye, called it luck and declined to retire. Even the anecdote fits the larger pattern: show up, take the shot, avoid writing mythology around one good result.
The company work spans rooms where communication must be effortless and rooms where it is mission-critical: corporate collaboration, broadcast control, government, education, sports and live events. Tungl's advantage is not that he can personally engineer every system. It is that he has stood on enough sides of the business to notice when the story drifts away from the work.
That gap preoccupies him - the distance between what a company says, how it operates and how it grows. It is where polished positioning becomes either useful or ridiculous. Close the gap and the brand earns trust. Leave it open and even the prettiest campaign becomes a small, expensive fiction.
So the award photograph is best read as a checkpoint, not a summit. The technician, salesperson, marketer, cyclist and coach are not competing identities. They form one operating system. Prepare carefully. Respect the people closest to the terrain. Keep the message attached to reality. Give new riders room to enter. Then do it again next quarter, next season, next mile.