Analysis of millions of ON24 experiences reveals global benchmarks for B2B digital engagement and ways for sales and marketing teams to increase results

Today ON24, a leading intelligent engagement platform for B2B sales and marketing, announced its annual, “2024 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report,” to unveil the key trends in B2B customer and prospect digital behavior, and how go-to-market organizations can innovate across channels to increase their pipeline and revenue growth. 

Based on analysis of millions of B2B professionals engaging across hundreds of thousands of webinars, virtual events and content experiences in 2023, a critical finding is the significant impact of personalization on marketing channel performance – when a digital experience is personalized, B2B prospects and customers nearly double their engagement with calls-to-actions and are four times more likely to progress their buying journey, enabling sales and marketing teams to deliver greater ROI and business results.

"For the past decade, go-to-market teams have known the power of personalization to unlock business results, but the challenge of scaling personalization has stood in the way,” said Callan Young, CMO, ON24. “Now, with the rise of AI, we believe there is a tremendous opportunity for sales and marketers to achieve both personalization and scale, helping businesses significantly increase revenue performance while improving their efficiency. Our findings demonstrate the potential for AI-powered personalization and content to make digital engagement more intelligent and transform the B2B buying experience.”

With digital engagement continuing to grow year-over-year (YoY), the report identified the shifts in B2B customer and prospect digital behavior in the past two years, including the following highlights:

• Engagement with digital experiences is intensifying - The average number of unique interactions per attendee increased by 20% since 2021.
• B2B customers and prospects are demonstrating higher buying intent - Requests for product demonstrations per attendee from webinar experiences grew by nearly 60%.
• Personalization is making a significant impact on the B2B buying journey - Engagement with calls-to-actions increased by nearly 70% YoY, requests for product demonstrations grew by 4X and conversion rates doubled for personalized experiences YoY.
• Audiences want to engage with experiences anytime, anywhere - The average number of unique interactions per attendee within on-demand experiences grew by 13% YoY.
• Audience demand for content is greater than ever, increasing the need for generative AI: The number of content hub visitors increased by 2X YoY and content views in personalized experiences were up almost 40% YoY.

Sendlane, the unified retention marketing solution for eCommerce brands, elevates merchant capabilities and the customer experience with an exciting update to its signature email and SMS marketing suite. Today, the SaaS company announced the launch of Forms, a user-friendly tool enabling eCommerce merchants to grow their email and SMS lists easily at no additional cost.

"At Sendlane, our mission is to unify the tech stack for eCommerce merchants. After multiple successes with our additions of SMS and Reviews, we knew it was time for a significant upgrade to our outdated Pop-ups product to meet the marketplace's ever-changing needs. We are proud to bring another incredible product to our customers, Sendlane Forms, with new advanced features and an easy-to-use UI, for free," says Jimmy Kim, Founder and CIO of Sendlane.

Now, our users can achieve optimal results with the Sendlane Forms tool, featuring robust options ranging from customizable layouts to advanced targeting and comprehensive performance data. Notable Forms features include:

• User-Friendly UI: Publish high-converting forms with customizable layouts, built-in legal jargon, and drag-and-drop functionality for fast implementation.
• Content Customization: Create compelling, branded forms using new styling options and updated fonts. Plus, save content blocks with Global Styling for quick building.
• Versatile Collection & Layout Options: Choose from multiple mobile and desktop layouts to collect consent via Email only, SMS only, or Email and SMS.
• Multiple Ways to Collect Information: Capture lead details and key data points with inline, pop-up, and banner forms.
• Questionnaires for Deeper Insights: Understand your audience's preferences to create personalized, targeted automations and campaigns that truly resonate.
• Advanced Targeting: Leverage new targeting rules to show up when and where it matters most with controlled frequency, URL and location inclusion/exclusion, and display triggers.
• Comprehensive Performance Data: Gain impactful insight into track impressions, click-through rates, emails and SMS conversions, and form lifetime value.

EX.CO solidifies its position as the leading video platform for publishers with new GCPP certification 

EX.CO, the world's leading publisher video technology platform empowering publishers to own their video content and monetization strategies, today announced its recognition as a Google Certified Publishing Partner (GCPP). This certification reinforces EX.CO's expertise in delivering cutting-edge video solutions for publishers to further engage audiences and increase monetization opportunities.

As a platform specifically designed for publishers, EX.CO always prioritizes publishers' needs by providing solutions such as a machine-learning-based yield engine, AI-driven contextual recommendations, and access to a premium video content marketplace which makes it easy for publishers to achieve 100% video coverage on their websites. This Google certification solidifies EX.CO's credibility as a technology provider and reinforces EX.CO's ability to support publishers with everything they need to execute a successful video content and monetization strategy at scale.

Certified Publishing Partners are vetted by Google and must pass all Google's policies that drive premium user experiences, implement best practices that drive higher yield, and prove that they have established a strong track record of helping publishers succeed through customer feedback and surveys. As publishers continue to seek out effective tools for challenges they face such as economic trends, audiences flocking to social media platforms, and the future without third-party cookies, Google and EX.CO are providing solutions for them to make more informed decisions when it comes to video.

"Our ongoing alliance with Google has been instrumental in cementing our status as a trusted partner for publishers. Achieving recognition through the GCPP program is a source of pride and marks a significant achievement for our entire team," said EX.CO co-founder and CEO, Tom Pachys. "We look forward to working with Google further to continue driving innovation and delivering more future solutions to publishers."

EX.CO's AI-driven and machine-learning-based solutions for video management, video monetization, content automation, and video recommendation are trusted by some of the largest publishers globally including The Arena Group, CBSi, Hearst Newspapers, and Nasdaq. Becoming a Google Certified Publishing Partner strengthens EX.CO's position as a trusted industry leader for publishers and opens more opportunities to deliver premium video technology to a vast network of publishers.

New GenAI-Powered Platform Integrates Social Impact Into Salesforce Customer 360

ScaleWith, the #1 Social Impact AI company, recently announced the public beta availability of its GenAI-powered platform Social Impact Copilot™. This advanced AI tool, built on OpenAI technology and available on the AppExchange, works alongside Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot to transform how businesses align with their customers’ values. 

Social Impact Copilot™ seamlessly integrates with Einstein Copilot to help businesses align marketing & sales strategies to deepen customer relationships, drive profits and create operational efficiencies. Social Impact Copilot™ extracts insights from Salesforce's Data Cloud and enriches customer data with CSR, Sustainability and social impact insights, allowing for a deeper understanding of customer needs and societal trends.

Social Impact Copilot™ brings new vitality to Salesforce’s 1-1-1 philanthropy model, which dedicates 1% each of company equity, product, and employee time to local communities. ScaleWith introduces the 1-1-1 2.0 model. This enhanced framework incorporates a second layer of ‘1’ by integrating data-driven social impact strategies into core business operations enabling sales organizations to achieve better win rates, shorter sales cycles and improved client retention, while directing critical funding to address our most pressing global challenges.

“The partnership between ScaleWith and Salesforce is a game-changer, set to redefine what success means for customers,” said Jim Tantaro, Chief Customer Officer at ScaleWith. “By turning every interaction into an opportunity for impact, we are making success synonymous with positive change, ensuring that our customers thrive by driving higher revenues and profits and improving the quality of people's lives in communities around the world."

Following 11+ years in senior leadership roles at Twitter, Riedy Will Lead Business Operations, Sales, and Marketing for the Performance TV Advertising Platform

tvScientific, the leading performance advertising platform for connected TV (CTV), today announced that the company hired Chris Riedy as Chief Revenue Officer. In his new role, Riedy will be responsible for driving integration and alignment between all revenue-related functions, including marketing, sales, customer support, pricing and revenue management.

Chris brings 25 years of sales, business development & marketing experience to tvScientific. Following the acquisition of Twitter / X by Elon Musk, Chris led the Global Sales and Marketing practice out of San Francisco. Before that, he was based in Dublin, Ireland, and served as Vice President, EMEA, leading Twitter's business practice for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Formerly, Chris managed teams focused on helping top clients and partners within the US successfully leverage Twitter’s platform to meet their marketing and business objectives.

“Technology has dramatically changed the TV landscape, and I couldn’t be more excited to join tvScientific as the company drives innovation and performance for advertisers of every description,” Riedy said. “tvScientific is redefining what’s possible with CTV advertising, having the opportunity to combine an incredibly creative medium - TV Advertising - with precise targeting and one-to-one outcomes is exactly what advertisers of all shapes and sizes are looking for. I count myself very fortunate to be a part of it.”

Riedy joins tvScientific amidst the ongoing transition of the $72 billion TV advertising market to programmatic execution, as technologies emerge that enable the buying and measurement of TV advertising in a manner similar to the $200 billion search and social media market. CTV advertising is expected to grow by 22.4% globally in 2024 to $25.9 billion, according to GroupM’s mid-year forecast.

“Chris is uniquely qualified to drive tvScientific's go-to-market strategy and execution into our next stage of growth,” said Jason Fairchild, CEO. “His relationships across the industry, as well as his 25-year track record of growing teams from early stages to billions per year in revenue, is exactly the right fit for tvScientific.”

Prior to his time at Twitter, Riedy led business development, strategy and product marketing at a variety of venture-backed startups.

Compulse, a leading marketing technology and managed services company built for local media and agencies, and TapClicks, a leading provider of Smart Marketing solutions, including unified marketing operations, analytics, and reporting platforms for digital marketing, today announced a strategic partnership to help their clients accelerate and manage advertising campaigns.

The partnership integrates software and services from both companies to streamline and optimize omnichannel advertising campaigns. The integration adds functionality, eliminates the need for manual data re-entry, reduces the likelihood of human error, and dramatically speeds up the sales process, campaign creation, and go-live timelines. Simultaneously, campaign metrics from Compulse will feed into TapClicks’ analytics and reporting platform while reducing media costs and fees for all customers.

“Local media companies and agencies need a better way to manage their rapidly growing digital business,” said Martin Kristiseter, Managing Director at Compulse. “Our joint customers no longer need costly point systems for media planning, proposal generation and omnichannel fulfillment. Our unified solution greatly enhances our customers’ ability to generate more revenue, improve profit margins, and increase operational efficiencies to future-proof their businesses.”

The partnership between Compulse and TapClicks comes at a time when media investments are shifting toward programmatic activation, and marketers demand greater transparency. Compulse and TapClicks address that demand by providing technology to enhance and streamline marketers’ workflow, delivering greater insight into where and how media dollars are being spent. The efficiencies gained from this collaboration translate into savings for marketers. These savings can be reinvested in more working media or allocated towards enhancing operational margin, ultimately driving greater value for businesses across the industry.

“Partnerships are part of our DNA,” said Chel Heler, Executive General Manager at TapClicks. “The breadth of complementary technology and services between TapClicks and Compulse gives us an unprecedented opportunity to create a powerful end-to-end solution and generate huge efficiencies for our collective customers.”

Cloudera is now the only provider to offer an open data lakehouse with Apache Iceberg for public and private clouds 

Platform will be on display at booth #1534 during the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in March 

Cloudera, the data company for trusted enterprise AI, today announced the next phase of its open data lakehouse on private cloud that revolutionizes on-premises data experiences for trusted analytics and AI at scale. With its latest round of enhancements, Cloudera has become the only provider to offer an open data lakehouse with Apache Iceberg for public and now private clouds, helping customers to unlock the enterprise AI potential of all their data.

Research from Cloudera estimates that 53% of organizations in the U.S. currently use Generative AI technology and more than a third (36%) are in the early stages of exploring AI for potential implementation in 2024. But implementations have stalled as many enterprises struggle to access or achieve business value from their data with AI. Challenges include distributed data infrastructures, governance risks, or security concerns.

By delivering Apache Iceberg for private clouds, Cloudera is empowering every organization to overcome these issues and quickly scale enterprise AI deployments to generate greater value. Apache Iceberg is an open-source, high-performance table format for vast analytic tables. When applied to private clouds, the solution enables companies to apply AI to the vast amounts of mission-critical data that exists both in the cloud and on premises, ultimately allowing them to create new use cases. Cloudera is also now the only company to provide the ability to run a completely air-gapped large language model (LLM) deployment, providing customers with enhanced security and data privacy, as well as improved performance and reduced operational costs. 

Cloudera is also rolling out a series of additional updates to its platform that will deliver unprecedented business value to its customer base, including:

• Zero downtime upgrades (ZDU) and security enhancements such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 for increased business continuity and minimized interruptions.
• New Apache Ozone capabilities, such as quotas, snapshots, and disaster recovery enhancements that enable vastly greater scalability at lower cost to service the voracious data consumption needs of modern workloads.
• Expanded support for integrations including Python 3.10, RHEL 9.1, RHEL 8.8 FIPS, SLES 15 SP4, Oracle 8.8, and JDK 17 for increased compatibility and flexibility.

"Cloudera's mission is to empower customers to transform data anywhere into actionable insights by enabling it with AI," said Dipto Chakravarty, Chief Product Officer at Cloudera. "By giving them a trusted data foundation for analytics, this next phase of cloud-native solutions unlocks endless possibilities for building innovative AI applications." 

"In this AI-powered era, we'll continue to see formidable AI applications emerge that significantly increase the business value of enterprise data," said Sanjeev Mohan, Principal, SanjMo. "For organizations to capitalize on this technological gold rush, data cannot be locked away in company data centers. Enterprises need a data management strategy that enables them to transform complex data anywhere into actionable insights through a comprehensive, open, and hybrid platform."

"The Iceberg community is very big and is growing fast. It's being adopted around the world. Cloudera's open data lakehouse with Iceberg means we have an open table format with a lot of advanced functionality, which makes it easier to use and maintain our data. The open table format is important to us, because it means data can be accessed easily by many users with a variety of tools," said Matteo Carucci, Head of Data & Analytics, Eutelsat. "The open table format is a fundamental requirement because the company data is the property of the company itself, not a specific vendor. So an open table format guarantees that whatever may happen with technology in the future, you have full ownership of your data. "

Cloudera will be demonstrating its latest series of updates at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, taking place March 11-13, 2024 in Orlando, Florida. Attendees will see firsthand the enhancements to Cloudera's platform and speak to Cloudera experts onsite about the company's next phase of cloud- native solutions. Additionally, Cloudera's Technical Evangelism Director, Jake Bengston, will be leading a session at the event on March 12 titled, "Game-Changing Gen AI: Advancing from Pilot to Production at Enterprise Scale." The session will cover stories of seasoned AI leaders from top global enterprises about lessons learned, best practices, and avoidable pitfalls so attendees can cut through the hype and deliver production-ready AI for a competitive edge.

Announces General Availability of Box AI for Enterprise Plus Customers

Box, Inc., the leading Content Cloud, today announced a new integration with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to bring its advanced large language models to Box AI. The integration of Azure OpenAI Service enables Box customers to benefit from the most advanced AI models in the world, while bringing Box and Microsoft’s enterprise-grade standards for security, privacy, and compliance to this groundbreaking technology. Box also announced that Box AI is generally available to customers on Enterprise Plus plans, starting today. 

“While generative AI is still new to the enterprise, we’re already seeing significant excitement from customers who want to apply this technology to their content that is already in Box,” said Ben Kus, Chief Technology Officer at Box. “Our collaboration with Microsoft spans well over a decade, and has spurred innovation throughout previous technology shifts, including cloud and mobile computing. Now, in this new era of AI, we are expanding our collaboration again to bring AI to enterprises without compromising data security, privacy, compliance, and governance.”

Building with Azure OpenAI Service

Guided by its AI Principles, Box has built Box AI on the company’s platform-neutral framework, allowing it to connect with today’s most powerful large language models. By integrating with Azure OpenAI Service, Box is applying the most advanced intelligence models to its Content Cloud to further advance enterprise-grade AI. Microsoft and Box already help customers meet strict compliance requirements like FINRA, GxP, and FedRAMP. With today's announcement, they will also empower organizations across highly-regulated industries to leverage AI for new use cases. For example:

• Financial services companies can extract insights from reports in Box, that include market trends, economic indicators, and historical financial data, to provide a summary of key findings that highlights projections and potential risks.
• Life Sciences organizations can obtain information from clinical trial data and expedite analysis of vast datasets for a more comprehensive and efficient understanding of trial outcomes.
• Public sector agencies can derive valuable insights from vast amounts of feedback from constituents and policy research to guide evidence-based decisions and policy development, aligning to President Biden’s guidance for use of AI.
• Insurance companies can find key information in claims reports to enhance efficiency, reduce turnaround times, and provide a smoother experience for both parties.
• Legal firms can quickly identify key terms, clauses, and relevant information within complex legal texts, to significantly reduce the time and effort required for legal research, allowing attorneys to focus on more strategic aspects of their cases.

“With generative AI innovating at a rapid pace, we are committed to providing technology that organizations of any size can rely on,” said John Montgomery, corporate vice president, AI platform, Microsoft. “We are excited to see Box leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to further enhance the Box Content Cloud. This collaboration underscores our shared commitment to providing advanced, secure, and trusted solutions for enterprises, empowering them to unlock the full potential of their content.”

Box AI is Generally Available Today

Box AI leverages the power of generative AI to bring foundational AI models to the Box Content Cloud – where more than 115,000 enterprises already secure, store, and collaborate on their critical business content. Since entering beta, thousands of enterprises are leveraging Box AI to easily extract the information they need from their documents, generate their own new content automatically, or derive timely insights from their content to transform how they work and accelerate workflows in their businesses. Today:

• Wealth advisors are using Box AI to quickly analyze detailed documents from Investor Relations to inform decisions around wealth management and market updates.
• Clinical researchers are using Box AI to summarize vast amounts of clinical trials to more rapidly extract key findings.
• Product marketing managers are using Box AI to generate fresh and editable content quickly in the form of blogs, LinkedIn posts, and other social media.
• HR leads are using Box AI to search massive amounts of sensitive documents including Intranet content, company policies, and employee handbooks in order to find the answers employees need most.
• Nonprofit outreach specialists are using Box AI to efficiently draft communications as well as track donor engagement and analyze donor data.

“Not too long ago, our organization was discussing the business imperative to embracing digital transformation by sunsetting legacy workflows and investing in a content cloud platform that enables secure and seamless collaboration from anywhere,” said Matt Hoey, Assistant Vice President of Technology at Marx|Okubo Associates. “As the leader in this space, we chose Box to ensure we could achieve our transformation, and without knowing it at the time, this would be a critical decision that allowed us to maintain business continuity during an unforeseen global pandemic. We see Box AI as a similarly massive value-add to our technology stack, where we may not know all the ways generative AI will change our lives in the future, but we’re on the rocketship of AI advancements just by being a Box customer.”

Box Integrations With Microsoft 365

Over the past decade plus, Box has built a number of integrations for Microsoft 365 and Teams to enhance productivity and collaboration for joint customers including:

• Teams: Box customers can streamline collaboration by accessing and sharing Box content directly in Teams channels or chats.
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint: Users can easily access, create, edit, and collaborate in real-time on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on the Box web app, mobile or desktop, with all edits auto-saved to Box.
• Outlook: Users can eliminate the risks and hassle of email attachments by converting outbound attachments to Box shared links and maintain version control by saving incoming attachments to Box from any device.
• Copilot: Box will also soon integrate with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 starting in Teams via the Box connector for Microsoft Graph.