Revolutionising the world with virtual event technology

Hoo (second) and Amanda Ng (third) from the top

UTAR Department of Alumni Relations and Placement (DARP) organised an Alumni Business Talk titled “How the Virtual Event Technology is Revolutionising the World” on 10 July 2021 via Microsoft Teams.

Invited to be the speakers were Dreamory Entertainment Group Sdn Bhd Founding member-cum-Business Development Director Hoo Yu Heng and Founding member-cum-Operation Director Amanda Ng Kar Wui. Hoo is the salesforce of the company. He is proficient in the ideation and conceptualisation of marketing campaigns using creativity and technology. Amanda Ng manages the company’s operation and constantly creates effective strategies to help the company run effectively and efficiently. She is also the mastermind of the company’s marketing direction with more than five years of digital marketing experience. Both Hoo and Amanda Ng are UTAR Alumni.

 “I hope today’s talk will benefit all of you as we share some useful information and hope that it could help you while you are making any decision in your life,” said Hoo.

He then began his talk by briefly explaining the background of the company. He said, “We positioned ourselves in the market as the Number 1 virtual event producer in Malaysia. We are always doing our best to achieve it. We actually specialise in virtual event production, video and animation production. We are a place where creative visuals mix with technology. Our focus now, at this time, is to do Research and Development (R&D) about virtual events technology. We are trying to improve our virtual event technology after our many experiences with the corporates. We also conduct R&D about creative ideas on how we can make virtual events even more immersive and even more special because people these days tend to get bored easily if we do not innovate. That is why we are constantly referring and studying development from overseas as well as coming out with ideas to present to the corporate world.”

Sharing their achievement, he said, “We have completed more than 100 virtual events so far and we have several clients that you might know such as Hong Leong Bank, Nokia, Skechers, Bvlgari and Gamuda Land, to name a few. We have been invited to the China-Malaysia Think Tank & Media Forum 2021 and interviewed by Oriental Daily News, sharing virtual events that we did so far and how the trends are going to be. Our vision is to revolutionise the marketing strategy using visuals and technology.”

Amanda Ng, on the other hand, shared their founding stories and how they survived through the pandemic as well as how it made them stronger. “Dreamory Entertainment Group Sdn Bhd was founded in 2018. Three years ago, we organised different kinds of event such as the Marathon, Annual dinners, launching events and so forth. We were doing quite well for the whole year until the Covid-19 came, it hit us pretty hard during that time because physical events were forced to cancel and we lost quite a lot of business. However, we treated this as an opportunity for us to review our nature of business. We thought that this was a good time for a transformation. So during that time, we started to do research, learnt new software skillset and planned new strategies to transform the physical event into an online platform. Since then, we have kept producing more and more virtual events until today. We are grateful because the company has kept growing. It started with three persons and now we have expanded to ten employees in our team,” said Amanda Ng.

Inspiring timeline showing their company’s growth in these three years

She then explained the concept of virtual events and said, “Basically we need professional equipment to make sure the visual and sounds are well delivered to all the audience. We will conduct the event in a venue, it could be a studio, a client’s office or a conference hall, which has a strong internet connection. After that, we will broadcast the event to the social media platform and their website. The audiences just have to stay at home and use their smart device to watch the show.”

“As a virtual event production company, we managed everything from A to Z, from planning the programme to making sure it is interesting and well planned based on the event’s nature, so that the audience would watch the virtual event until the end. Secondly, we address the creative part. We have our in-house design team to do the design work and make sure the outcome of the virtual event is delivered beyond the client’s expectations. Last but not least, when we get everything prepared, that will be the time to execute the live streaming show. Our in-house technical team will standby throughout the event to conduct all the technical parts, making sure the event goes smoothly and without the occurrence of any technical problem,” said Amanda Ng as she explained how they conduct the virtual events.

Amanda explaining how a virtual event is conducted

Sharing on the revolution by virtual event technology, Amanda Ng said, “The first thing is to digitalise the company’s operation. Previously, many corporates or associations used to conduct physical events and physical illusions especially those public listed companies. However, due to the pandemic, they were forced to rely on Zoom or other software to digitalise their business model. Most of the public listed companies, however, were unable to do so as they did not know how to conduct the election online, so when we see the demand coming up, our company developed an online voting system called Dreamonylink.com.” She then shared the background of Dreamorylink.

She continued, “Virtual events can be treated as effective digital marketing content because many people nowadays spend most of their time at home. So watching live events have become entertainment for everyone. Doing virtual event at your social media platform, for example, Facebook page, can increase the engagement between your followers. We can also highlight the exposure of brand awareness.”

Hoo continued and said, “When we do a virtual event, we do coordination and we collect data for clients. Sometimes they will ask us if we can do something during the pre-event. That is why we consider UX (User Experience). We have collected a lot of UX data from our past events and that is why we are coming up with something called pre-event marketing for this entire event. We make everything happen within the website. You can immediately buy your ticket or even RSVP and make payment on the website. We can also do a lot of advertising and digital marketing because we have the user data from there. We have incorporated all the streaming platforms into the website. We are trying to make this thing immersive and user friendly. We also do some retargeting after the event. We hope to deliver some messages as well as a reminder for our future events. This is how corporate starts to value and they find it useful for them.” He then continued to share the fourth and fifth revolutions by virtual event technology which were “boundaryless creativity” and perfectness.

Boundaryless creativity

Perfectness

Speaking on the last revolution by virtual event technology, he said, “After conducting more than 100 virtual events, we compared them with 100 physical events we did before the pandemic. Based on our findings, we would like to emphasise four main things, namely cost, manpower, preparation time and awareness. In terms of cost, we have successfully helped our clients to cut almost 40 per cent of the cost. We used to hire 100 crews as manpower just for one marathon but now we hire less than 30 crews for most of the cases. Before the pandemic, we take a lot of time to prepare for a physical event because we need to do printing and do the so-called fabrication of all the props and we need to send invitations to invite the guest speakers. However, virtual events helped to cut off 50 per cent of the preparation time. As a result, we see a good increase of 400 per cent in audience awareness due to the digital marketing, live streaming, sharing and partnership with several media to help us broadcast the entire event.”

He then continued, “Of course, some events cannot go virtual for example Marathon, Award dinner and Annual dinner. Only some events can continue to fully operate on virtual mode, for example, press conferences. So today, there are events like product launching and webinars that people like to do online.”

He said, “I would like to encourage all of you to do business on your own. If you feel like this is a comfortable way for you, just do it. You do not have to think too much. You can sell your product using the traditional way, it will actually feedback to you and teach you how to move on to digital and how to move on to even a bigger market. There are only two types of people in this world which are leaders and followers. You cannot say a follower is wrong; a follower has to be very agile and clever in order to be a good follower. A good follower can be a good support to good leaders so together they are actually helping the company grow. Always remember ‘Value comes first’ when we do business. Value comes first then only your price. We have to give value first no matter what we do, give something free and let the audience see what you are capable of, what you are good at then you only say your price. Only then will they buy your idea. So this is a correct way and I hope all millennials will start doing business this way.”

The Alumni Business Talk ended with an interactive Q&A session. The event was moderated by DARP staff Naaresh Arumugam.