By Gabor Jelinek, Executive Director, PRGN | June 6 2024
As members of the Public Relations Global Network have returned home from the most recent member meeting and conference in Hong Kong at the end of May, chances are increasing for more business collaborations among the 50+ agencies spread across six continents.
In the latest episode of the PRGN Presents Podcast outgoing PRGN President Andy See from Malaysia and Hong Kong member and conference host Joanne Chan shared insights with Podcast host Adrian McIntyre and me on the dynamics of in-person meetings at a global agency network and how they facilitate out-of-the-box thinking, agency development and business collaborations.
“I think the conference this time was very successful in [demonstrating] the growth potential of China and Hong Kong and how Hong Kong will play a very important role connecting our partners overseas and develop collaborations in China. So I’m actually very happy to see the conference has given us a lot of new ideas on collaborations,” said Joanne.
With PRGN meetings being hosted at varying locations on a rotation basis, the most recent conference in Hong Kong put the focus on the Asia-Pacific region in its panel discussions, keynote speeches and group conversations. Feedback from participating PRGN members have confirmed a lot of the discussions were eye-opening for them, including how the media and social media landscapes are different in countries in this region from other regions, how the Greater Bay Area of China – including Hong Kong – could be a model for economic development and trade promotion elsewhere on the globe, how handling crisis issues is different in this part of the world from other regions and how pioneering Web3 developments in Southeast Asia could be leading the way for Western markets.
“I think I can tell these two days of panel discussions are very fruitful for all of the members,” adds Joanne.
Furthermore, there’s a lot of innovation and brand building exercise now being done by Asian brands with hopes that it would allow them to compete at a new level with global brands. This is what is going on in the Asia-Pacific region and this creates a lot of economic opportunities for agencies in the region to grow further, adds Andy See.
“So therefore, we also wanted to explore how PRGN can function in hubs to, number one, attract investors and our clients from the rest of the world to be interested in the Asia-Pacific region, and on the other hand, Asia-Pacific brands looking at how they can grow their brand presence to the rest of the world, in Europe, in the U.S.,” Andy said. “And these are the [types of] conversations we’ve had. And we believe that all of us here can play a role.”
The Hong Kong conference obviously put the host country and region in the focus of professional attention with subjects like media and social media markets, digital communications tools and platforms unknown in other markets, generating ideas about what new trends may be reaching other regions in the near future and what learnings agencies on this side of the planet have already collected.
But the closed, “members-only” part of the conference served participants with another perspective – which is always very special and unique to PRGN conferences – more specifically, how owners manage their agencies in very different markets and at very different stages of development and how they manage client relationships and develop them into further business opportunities.
“That kind of conversations never stop in each and every one of our PRGN meetings, and there’s always something new that you discover. Even though we have met many times and I’ve been a PRGN member for more than seven years now, I still learn from each and every of these meetings when I have one-on-one or even small group discussions with other members and we talk about how we manage our teams, how we manage our client relationships, how we manage our firms. And that’s also a core component of learnings that I always get from the meetings that I attend,” said Andy See.
To learn more about the value of PRGN and its bi-annual member meetings held at various locations on the globe, listen in on this week’s episode of PRGN Presents.
If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the PRGN Presents podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Thursday. To have them delivered automatically and free of charge, just choose your preferred podcast player from this list, open the app, and click the button to “Follow” or “Subscribe” to the show: https://prgnpodcast.com/listen
