RONALD QUAY – FOUNDER
Ronald Quay has been in the communications business since 1974.
He left The Straits
Times in 1974 and joined forces with Ramlan Dato’ Harun
to set up RQ Advertising and Ramlan & Quay. He also then founded
the first PR company in Malaysia with ex-journalists (who were
his ex-colleagues) of The Straits Times. One of the main PR activities
of his then-PR company was ‘lobbying’ (Trade Unions
were a powerful group in the 70’s).
Shortly after, RQ
Advertising became RA Advertising – ‘RA’ for
‘Recruitment Advertising’, the area of advertising
in which Ronald chose to specialise in to this day. RA is the
country’s leading recruitment and financial advertising
agency today.
As the business of
public relations was not yet in demand in Malaysia at that time,
his PR company then got absorbed into RA Advertising. All PR activities
were then executed from within RA Advertising.
However, in the late
80’s (anticipating that PR would now play a major role in
communications), he founded RA Public Relations Sdn Bhd to complement
the financial advertising services of RA Advertising.
The RA Group grew
by leaps and bounds over the years and now owns a substantial
network of companies in both core competent activities as well
as non-related activities here and overseas. In the same year
that he founded RAPR, he also set up RA Advertising’s first
branch outside of Malaysia - RA Advertising Thailand, based in
Bangkok, which was to become a highly successful agency.
In 1997 and at the
height of the Asian crisis, Ronald took over Bantam Advertising,
a major competitor. It has since been renamed Bumi Bantam and
is the second advertising arm of the Group. It was during this
period too that he also set up RQ Net Sdn Bhd, a software-application
systems provider.
The smooth integration
of the various communications services within the RA Group is
one of the major reasons behind RAPR’s meteoric rise to
the top in just a few short years.
In 1996, he handed
over the reigns of RAPR to his then General Manager, Nancy Yeoh
who took over as Managing Director. He is the Executive Chairman
of the Group to this day.
NANCY YEOH
– MANAGING DIRECTOR
Nancy began her career during the height of the recession of the
mid-1980’s, when she joined a Hong Kong-based advertising
agency which resulted in her spending a large part of her early
years in the communications business in the British colony.
Upon her return to
Malaysia, a career in broadcasting followed.
She went on to become
the Client Service Manager of Times Direct Marketing which was
then the first Direct Marketing agency in the country. After a
short period, she was promoted to Client Service Director of the
Public Relations Division.
She went into ‘luxury-retailing’
and became ‘the Client’ in the late 80’s. She
joined and later headed up for the next few years the Public Affairs
Division of Metrojaya Bhd, the only one-stop luxury-retailing
house in the country then.
Following Metrojaya’s
successful public listing on the Main Board of the Kuala Lumpur
Stock Exchange and its eventual MBO by another listed Group, Nancy
moved on and in early 1993 joined as General Manager, the PR arm
of RA Advertising, an agency established since 1974 as a leader
in financial and recruitment advertising.
She capitalised on
the strength of RA Advertising and, together with a team of ex-merchant
bankers, went on to form the IPO arm of RAPR and thereafter aggressively
marketed the need for PR to clients seeking investments or a listing
on the KLSE. To this day, financial PR continues to play a key
role in the success of RAPR.
Armed also with her
past experiences in retailing, Nancy introduced ‘lifestyle
branding’ within RAPR’s Consumer division –
targeted mainly at luxury-goods companies. It was quite opportune
as the retail boom soon happened. Ex-suppliers and ex-colleagues
became her clients.
Under her leadership,
RAPR soon became a social powerhouse. Its lifestyle division comprising
an impressive client portfolio as well as influential database
of celebrities, royalty, business tycoons and political leaders
made RAPR’s services in this category much sought-after
by luxury goods companies.
She was elected to
the Board in 1995 and became Managing Director in 1996.
As part of her expansion
exercise, she introduced in the year 2000 the Mileage Group of
Singapore as new partners but remains the majority shareholder
of RAPR to this day.
Nancy is as active
on the international PR scene as she is in Malaysia. She was the
National Council Member representing Malaysia for a few years
at the International Public Relations Association (IPRA). She
was also one of the few privileged Asians to have sat on its international
judging panel for quite a few years to judge IPRA’s prestigious
annual PR awards, the Golden World Awards.
Having started her
career at the height of the 80’s recession, she was determined
to lead RAPR out of the 1997 Asian Financial crisis and quit her
Council seat to concentrate on this. RAPR has since become a major
PR consultancy.
Nancy holds a Masters
Degree in Business Administration majoring in Marketing from the
University of Wales, U.K.
