We began our innovation journey developing the Virtual Experience Hub in May 2019 with the intent to scale our Cisco Live Global Physical Events. COVID-19 hit the United States in March 2020 shutting down all gatherings including in-person meetings, conferences and large-scale events industry wide. Suddenly, we became the most popular kids on the block and decided it was time to turn up the heat. We launched our MVP (minimal viable product) in April 2020.
This innovative product was built to:
- Provide our customers, partners and prospects a one-stop-shop for all their video on demand content (Netflix Style)
- Enhance the event experience by delivering value through features like Chat, Q&A, Sponsored Ad’s, AI recommendation engine, networking, Polling & Trivia, Multi-streaming and language events.
- Craft a digital experience that becomes known as a best-in-class experience for digital events.
- Deliver a scalable platform to meet high volume of simultaneous viewers and all sizes of events from 100s to hundreds of thousands.
- Create an intuitive content repository to drastically improve browsing and engaging with post-live on-demand content.
- Drive business impact by providing opportunities for lead generation to our sellers, partners, and sponsors.
The Virtual Experience Hub was developed to be a fully immersive, best-in-class B2B experience platform for digital events.
The VEH platform is built levering modern best practices and cloud native technologies allowing for global scalability, redundancy and security. It leverages a React and Redux single page application to provide immersive and interactive engagement to the end user enabling a rich virtual experience when watching content both live and on demand. Through the use of serverless and microservice APIs VEH provides an adaptable, flexible, and modular data driven architecture. This architecture provides for rapid development as well as the flexibility to quickly integrate with various technology partners.
KEY FEATURES:
- Provide a multi-lingual platform to support global and regional events and allow users to consume content in any language they prefer.
- Hyper personalization with recommendation engine
- Deep analytics and tracking capabilities
- User built scheduling & “My Stuff” capabilities to save videos they liked or want to watch later, and follow channels on specific video topics
- Integrated registration through APIs into our always on journeys and cisco.com experience
- Federated content models for self-publishing and partner integration
- Ad placements and sponsorship opportunities
- Allow event hosts to customize their event landing page and keep the content dynamic where their page can update in real-time when a stream is live
- Demand Gen direct to sales lead generation
- Dynamic, engaging real-time video streaming and interactivity.
- Emoji and like capabilities throughout experience.
- Allow users to engage with a livestream through moderated Q&A, polls, trivia, resources, and send individual private messages to partner sponsors through Webex
- Create partner sponsorship tiering model for payment-based participation with their private booth space
- Paid channel subscriptions (much like Netflix, HBO, HULU, etc..) VIP access to premium content
- Ads and sponsorships generated $400k+ in revenue
- Hosted over 75 livestreams/events in 2020
- 14.2M in social reach across virtual events
- ~500,000 attendees
- 2,000,000 + live minutes watched
- 9 custom channels generating $180k in revenue
- 1000+ leads sent to virtual sales & partners
- 490,000+ unique visitors
- 94% Positive sentiment from attendees
- Commercialization of our platform for 4 key Enterprise Accounts at Cisco
