Not just creating events: Why we took Spalba into Southeast Asia

This post is sponsored by Spalba.

In August, Spalba picked up six wins at the Marketing Events Awards 2026, including Best Use of Tech and Best B2B Brand Experience for Google Marketing Live 2025, Best Immersive Experience and Best Tech-Powered Event for Think Apps Vietnam 2025, and Best Event (50-100 Attendees) for Google for Singapore 2026.

I’ve been asked more than once since then what has changed. The honest answer is that nothing changed overnight. What those wins actually reflect is a decision we made a while back, quietly, to stop building for one country and start building for a region.

The industry we’re building into

It helps to see the size of the board we’re playing on. The global event management market is now valued at roughly US$1.55 trillion in 2026, projected to reach US$2.42 trillion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence’s latest analysis. And Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region in that picture, expanding faster than North America or Europe on the back of economic growth in China and India and continued infrastructure investment across Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

At the same time, the accountability bar is rising: industry surveys show a large share of event organisers globally still can’t cleanly prove ROI to their own leadership, even as most expect AI to reshape how events get planned and measured within the next year. Scale is growing faster than trust in the old ways of working. That gap is exactly where we’ve chosen to build.

Why Southeast Asia, and why now?

India taught us how to engineer events at scale. Southeast Asia is where we chose to find out if that held up somewhere much bigger and far less familiar.

We opened an Asia Pacific base in Singapore, and from there, we now execute across more than 12 countries. We didn’t walk in assuming the region needed us. We walked in hungry, aware that nobody owed us a seat at this table, and every project since has been about earning it rather than assuming it. Twelve countries in, we’re still building that reputation one brief at a time.

Built, not bolted on

Being tech-first was never meant to be a differentiator we put on a slide. It’s what made us future-ready. Event formats change every year or two, and a company that bolts technology onto an existing production process has to rebuild every time the ground shifts under it.

We built AI-led planning and audience intelligence into the foundation from day one, which is the only reason we can absorb new formats, markets and client expectations without starting from scratch.

Experience over theatrics

The other half of it is what we chase and what we don’t. The easiest way to impress a room for one night is spectacle: bigger screens, louder sounds, more confetti. It’s also usually the fastest way to be forgotten by the following week.

What’s kept a client such as Google returning across three consecutive briefs – Google Marketing Live, Google for Singapore, and Google I/O Connect – isn’t how loud a moment is, it’s whether the person in the room walked away actually understanding what the brand wanted them to understand.

We measure that in recall, sentiment and real conversations started, not applause. Theatrics photograph well. Experience is what gets remembered, and what gets a client to hand you the next brief without a pitch.

That combination, engineered from the ground up rather than retrofitted, and judged by outcomes rather than a spectacle, is what an awards jury rewarded six times over in one week, across two markets, and three separate productions.

Where this goes next

We’re not treating Southeast Asia as a market to be entered once and left alone. The plan is to deepen it: more markets inside the region, more of our own AI-led tools built directly into how we plan and execute, and a bigger local team so the work stops depending on flying people in and starts depending on people who live there.

We also want to bring more of the region’s own brands into this way of working, not just the global names who found us first. The early conversations are already global; the next chapter needs to be regional in a way our client roster isn’t yet.

I’ll be candid about the harder part. Scaling an events business across a region this diverse means the thing that made you good in one market – deep local relationships, fast decision-making, intimate knowledge of a specific audience – is exactly the thing that’s hardest to replicate somewhere else.

We don’t have a clever answer to that beyond doing it the slow way: building teams on the ground, market by market, rather than assuming a playbook written in Gurgaon translates everywhere without friction.

Six awards is a nice marker for where we’ve been. The more useful number, to us, is 12 countries, and counting.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, you can explore our recent work.

Naveen Gupta is co-founder of Spalba. He has spent 27 years building and scaling experiential and event-tech businesses across India and Asia Pacific.