It’s Veterans Day, so what better time to take a look at how quickly the United Service Organizations became an old-hand at staging virtual events. Once known for lavish live performances and personal outreach to their members, the USO needed to turn on a dime in response to the pandemic.

Beginning with Microsoft Teams as a collaborative platform to sync their international offices, the USO found use cases for Zoom (of course), Discord (VoIP), and even gamers’ platform Twitch — as well as leveraging LinkedIn to help veterans transitioning back into civilian work life.

It’s common now for USO to stream support and training content on four different channels simultaneously. But they haven’t given up on entertaining the troops: recent summer concerts, presented using Verizon Media, featured Clint Black, Florida Georgia Line and Ne-Yo.

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TikTok’s monthly active users (MAU) are estimated to hit 1.2 billion in 2021, according to mobile analytics firm App Annie. The short-form video app’s hot streak has continued, with its user base having tripled since 2018, TechCrunch reported. Further, its growing advertising business and sales of virtual gifts for tipping creators made TikTok the number two non-gaming app by consumer spending in the third quarter of this year.

Why we care. It’s been a chaotic 2020 for TikTok. It’s fate in the U.S. is still up in the air with the Trump administration’s ban, set to take effect on Nov. 12, blocked in federal court and the proposed deal for Oracle and Walmart to take ownership stakes in a new TikTok Global entity still under review. And yet, TikTok’s popularity with creators, users and advertisers shows no signs of slowing.

Autodesk faced a challenge with which many marketers are familiar. Teams that were expert in their various disciplines — channel marketing, regional marketing, industry marketing, etc. — had diverged into silos in the absence of a strong marketing performance management program. There was no unified view of how marketing spend affected program goals across all of these initiatives. 

“Without breaking down those silos, you can’t get to a point where you’re tracking spend in a unified way across campaigns,” said Autodesk’s Zoe Marquardt, the company’s consultant on marketing performance management (MPM). “You can’t even develop unified campaigns across the company.”  

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This news story, which broke late yesterday, came initially as a surprise — but reflecting on Workfront’s standing as an Adobe partner, and the integration it already had with the Adobe Experience Platform, perhaps it was just a logical progression. The deal, which reports suggest will close before the end of February next year, reflects the importance of orchestrating the work of CX and marketing teams in a remote-working environment.

Analysts are seeing it as a good move for Adobe, but have some reservations about the implications for Workfront customers: Workfront, after all, had previously been agnostic in its integrations, while Adobe has leaned heavily into selling a comprehensive set of CX tools to its customers.

“Workfront clients should push back against Adobe architectural precepts giving precedence to an all-Adobe stack strategy that is likely not in licensees’ best interests,” said Tony Byrne of Real Story Group. ““The big question is, will Workfront continue to be marketing cloud agnostic, or is it suddenly going to become Adobe-centric?” said Chris Penn of TrustInsights.ai. Adobe declined to comment.

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