Article actual date: Jan 28, 2021

Overview

This month we are glad to be featured in the first issue of the Digital Event News E-Magazine for 2021. In this article, Jublia talks about the drastic changes in the industry, some of our success stories, and what lies ahead for the events industry in this exciting new year. (To view the actual article, please click here. Pages 40–41.)

What does Jublia do?

Jublia is an event tech SaaS startup focused on smart business matching, content discovery and audience analytics with our AI engagement platform. Our mission is to empower organisers to intelligently match people and content at their events. Incepted in 2013, Jublia is an established global leader in the event technology space for the past 7 years.

Headquartered in Singapore, we operate through 9 strategic country locations where we have a local presence in, alongside an international clientele from over 55 countries, ranging from Kenya to Australia. Our years of experience have provided us with the credibility that is needed, at present, when we partner customers in evolving their event planning and sales in this digital new age, for their increasingly digitised audience.

How have the challenges of 2020 changed the events industry?

It has been a tough start to the year. With the ban on mass gathering, seen in most (if not all) countries globally at one time or the other, the Live events industry has been one of the hardest hit sectors.

As we kickstart 2021, we are seeing an interesting trend where the type of enquiries (Virtual or Hybrid solutions) from our clients are highly varied based on the state of Covid-19 in different localities.

The recovery of the event businesses will look very different depending on where one is. Jublia has primed our team to work in the local context of our clients, bringing along relevant global contexts to enable the best possibilities for organisers to continue running their core events business, be it a virtual or hybrid one.

What are some key values for incorporating a digital component at events?

A digital event experience is different from a physical live experience. Yet many event organisers make the mistake of trying to replicate the live experience entirely at their virtual events. That would be impossible. Instead, we need to understand and leverage on the unique value propositions that digital has to offer.

A key value would be audience engagement. Digital allows events to extend their engagement timeline. For most live events, engagement takes place during the actual days of the show. For most digital events, that engagement starts the moment an attendee completes the registration, and continues for over a period of 6 weeks to even 6 months.

Greater audience reach is another key value that a fully digital experience would offer. Going digital means going global too. Events with a digital component are not bound by any geographical limitations and would be exposed to a wider international audience.

Certainly, a key value not to be missed would be new ways for event organisers to generate revenue in the digital event space. This is proving to be challenging when data savvy attendees demand justification for their virtual participation. It puts increasing complexity and stress to the traditional mode of event planning, with the added operational and digital costs required to enhance the event experience. Event organisers are responding to this trend by formulating specialised virtual and hybrid event formats that seek to answer the questions of the end customers’ ROI.

Share with us some of the success stories for virtual and hybrid events that you have worked on?

We collaborated with a large-scale virtual event called the Summer Sourcing Week — an online sourcing platform for buyers and suppliers. The event was organised by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), one of the region’s top event organisers. This was one of the first virtual trade shows in the region and we experienced an overwhelming user adoption of over 80% with more than 150,000 interactions initiated. Over the course of a 4-week engagement campaign, we facilitate over 200,000 platform visits that garnered over 500,000 product and profile views. Continuing from this success, we also collaborated on the Autumn Sourcing Week which concluded recently — there were more than 15,000 business meetings achieved between buyers and sellers by the end of the event with over 1.2 million product and profile views.

Jublia has been partnering numerous virtual events across the world since March 2020. Some of the notable brands include European events such as the Festival of Breakbulk, Interpädagogica and Gastro Circle, as well as events in the United States such as the National Hardware Show and HLTH. Closer to home in Asia Pacific we’ve had the privilege to be powering Cosmoprof Digital, Asia Fruit Logistica, bauma CHINA Community and the
Singapore Fintech Festival.

We’ve started working on several pioneer hybrid events since the third quarter of 2020. One of which was the Intertextile Shanghai Apparel Fabrics Fair that is known to be one of the largest and most comprehensive trade fairs for fabrics since it was founded in 1995, organised by Messe Frankfurt. It hosted over 74,000 visitors, and nearly 4,000 exhibitors from at least 20 countries and regions.

We designed the hybrid event platform to grant different meeting access tiers to attendee groups based on ticketing packages (onsite meetings for domestic attendees, virtual and hybrid meetings for international attendees). Our team found it thrilling to be playing an instrumental role in bridging the gap between cross-border attendees who couldn’t meet physically due to the travel restrictions and personal caution. One of the most interesting takeaways was the 4-times number of virtual meetings made compared to onsite meetings. These types of statistics validate our understanding that the need for local businesses and international businesses to meet is still at an all time high.

Some other successful hybrid events that we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with include THAIFEX — Anuga Asia organised by Koelnmesse as well as TravelRevive, the first in-person onsite event hosted by the Singapore Tourism Board and is organised by the regional ITB Asia Team.

Final thoughts and how to get in touch!

The events in the future are bound to have an element of digital one way or another and we expect a large majority of events to support a combination of live and virtual attendees. Similarly, we expect there to be a greater appreciation for in-person events as people would soon realise that live events are still the best platform for generating the most quality leads compared to any virtual counterparts.

Event organisers would also have to contend with new data savvy attendee customers by formulating new event formats and measurements that seek to answer the questions of the end customers’ ROI. The organisers that come out on top would be those who have successfully learnt how to engineer the customers’ ROI with the use of technology.

We’re already helping some of the biggest trade shows and conferences pivot their events to Virtual and Hybrid. If you are keen to explore what we can do for you in terms of new event formats, do reach out to us.

Simply drop us a message at info@jublia.com or visit our website at https://jublia.com/.