As more B2B marketing teams adopt B2C strategies to engage and convert business customers, electronics giant Panasonic has found success in focusing on engaging customers where they are. And during the COVID-19, that includes virtual events.

“We’ve had to adjust, think as entrepreneurs and, as a company, look at how some of the other big brands have chosen to shift,” said Panasonic’s VP of Marketing Brian Rowley. “The ability to be agile is the way we approach the business and our marketing.”

When the 2020 NAB Show was impacted by the pandemic, Panasonic teamed up with virtual production company DisruptAR to create a virtual event. They used the Panasonic AW-HE42 video camera and green screen technology, and hosted the event on Microsoft Teams.

Panasonic went on to host 33 virtual events in 2020, and with some uncertainty about the return of live events in the short term, they are embracing a hybrid approach.

“We took our [existing events] team and actually shifted to being a virtual production team,” said Rowley. “Some of the team that’s more vertically within the business shifted skills to support that events team.”

Panasonic didn’t have to reduce their marketing team or hire new members. To support the new hybrid events, they determined what the virtual assets were that would replace the print materials, Rowley said.

His team is watching attendance rates closely and finding that virtual events are producing more qualified leads, in many cases.

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Join this hour-long event curated for marketers today at 12 p.m. ET. Learn how to simplify the personalization process and use resources more efficiently and effectively from special guest Rusty Warner of Forrester and also experts from Sleep Number and Dow Jones.

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Twitter has launched Shop Modules, a dedicated section at the top of profiles where brands can showcase their products, as a pilot, the company announced Wednesday. The Shop Module pilot is currently rolling out with a handful of brands in the U.S., and only people in the U.S. who use Twitter in English on iOS devices are currently able to see the module.

Why we care. If this feature receives a wider rollout, Shop Modules may help bridge the gap between audiences discussing a brand and discovering that brand’s products on Twitter. Additionally, the user bases of social media platforms vary by factors like age, gender and education level. This new feature may be especially useful for B2C or D2C brands whose target audiences are particularly active on Twitter.

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Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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Consumer identity management and resolution platform Infutor has announced that its data assets are now available on AWS (Amazon Web Services). This will enable marketers using AWS to easily access Infutor’s extensive database of deterministic (and privacy compliant) third-party identity and attribute data to supplement and enhance their first-party data sets.

Consumer data at scale. Infutor’s Total Consumer Insights database aggregates privacy-compliant behavioral and household attributes, as well as as auto, property and mobile ad ID data, on some 266 million US consumers and 120 million households, putting it on a comparable to the U.S. consumer data-sets maintained by Epsilon and Experian. It incorporates predictive attributes such as age, household income and gender.

This follows earlier news that Infutor is collaborating with data privacy workflow provider Nth Party to enable prospects and customers to use in-browser encryption to evaluate Infutor’s ability to enhance their first-party data — without actually sharing the data with Infutor. 

Why we care. The threatened but postponed deprecation of third-party cookies is throwing a spotlight on providers like Infutor who aggregate vast quantities of deterministic third-party data and are able to resolve it to consumer identities at scale.

The ability to run first-party data against Infutor’s database and identity graph without actually exposing the data to Infutor is a neat add-on.

Join thousands of senior marketers online — September 14-15 — at MarTech! This two-day training experience will equip you with actionable tactics and proven strategies for meeting the challenges and opportunities data presents.

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“It wasn’t until I removed myself from the day to day work of Marketing Automation and Salesforce admin work that I got to hone my skills as a Revenue Technology Expert. I was able to fully look at our entire technology stack and see the changes we can do to be competitive and lead in the digital transformation. Plan strategically and execute violently.” Jomar Ebalida, Head of Revenue Technology, Stealth