Good morning Marketer, virtual events are here to stay. 

We asked Sharat Sharan, co-founder and President-CEO of virtual experience platform ON24, for his reflections on the current digital event environment. “In these unfortunate times, when the physical world has gone on pause, you have organizations which need to generate pipeline and demand, and that has driven momentum for our company,” he said.

ON24 – which saw rapid growth this year around virtual events and webinars – this week announced the launch of ON24 Conversion Tools. It’s a set of solutions designed to support insights into buying signals and enable sales teams to prioritize and personalize interactions with leads. These tools join the existing set of ON24 Engagement Tools which track audience engagement with virtual content through polls, surveys, Q&A, etc.

The accelerated evolution of the digital experience and event space could hardly be more evident. The question is whether the acceleration will be reversed if and when the pandemic ebbs. For now, brands and organizations can expect virtual event capabilities to become more sophisticated and robust – not just with a platform like ON24, but across the virtual event tech market as a whole. 

There’s more below, including a look at Facebook’s new cross-app communication feature. 

Taylor Peterson,
Deputy Editor

 
 
 

New for 2020! MarTech Today's Guide to Digital Asset Management Platforms

What should a digital asset management (DAM) platform do and what are the ways that vendors differ from one another? This just released guide from MarTech Today examines the market for enterprise DAM platforms and includes the latest industry statistics and developing market trends. Also included are profiles of leading vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating.

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Social Shorts
 

Instagram and Facebook Messenger merger

In March 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to merge messaging across Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and encrypt messages sent among the apps.In a first step, the company has now merged Facebook Messenger and Instagram, replacing the old Instagram Direct service with Messenger. 

“We’re connecting the Messenger and Instagram experience to bring some of the best Messenger features to Instagram,” Facebook lead Adam Mosseri and Stan Chudnovsky, the heads of Instagram, said in a statement. Users must consent to have the services merged.The WhatsApp integration is still a work in progress and remains separate.

Why we care. The move comes amid antitrust scrutiny, and many questioned whether a motivating factor of integrating the technologies to bolster the argument against breaking them up. As users spend more time in messaging and arguably less time in feeds, the integration helps maintain attention share and more attention means more ad view opportunities. 

 

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What we're reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

Exclusive: China preparing an antitrust investigation into Google – sources – Reuters

The new Google TV brings streaming apps, live TV and search into a single interface – TechCrunch 

Twitter’s voice tweets are rolling out to more iOS users, and transcriptions are on the way – The Verge

Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to one of Google’s big data sources – Fortune