Constellation ShortList™ Virtual Events: Webcasts and Meetings

About This Constellation ShortList™

Webinars have entered the AI age. From content creation, avatar-based event moderation, to post event summarization and content reporposing, the live event is just one piece of the webinar puzzle thanks to AI. Webinars have evolved, shifting in length, interactivity and channel. Central to sales, support and marketing initiatives, virtual events are now critical to internal education, service-driven knowledge exchange and customer collaboration, not to mention HR on-boarding. For any team looking to engage directly with an audience, webinars are core to basic engagement. Now, enhanced with agents at every stage of a webinar’s lifecycle, from creation to conversation, webinars have become an evergreen content experience. It has empowered marketers to rethink webinar and content strategies, questioning if webinars should be more like talk shows or mico-dramas. 

Users are looking for secure, flexible, scalable and customizable interfaces and consoles that deliver connection and interaction between speakers and audience while maintaining focus on speakers and their content. Increasingly the capacity for live interaction via messaging, innovative networking with “break out” environments, and robust multi-channel knowledge libraries for resources are high on the buyer wishlist. Buyers are also looking for connectors and integrations that better connect webinar demand generation and engagement activities with larger, more holistic data, personalization and journey orchestration strategies. Demand generation capabilities will need to evolve as generativeAI capabilities push expectations for data cleansing, appending and enhancement to drive more complete and actionable lead generation in B2B environments. 

Webinar platforms had started to more fully merge with larger communications and meeting platforms, but with the explosion of LLMs and generative AI capabilities across vendors, there is a new focus on engagement and the continuation of relationships through webinars as opposed to a focus on the commuications platform or meeting itself. Constellation expects to see even more focus on the generative capabilities AI can bring to both content generation used during webinars and also into hyperpersonalized webinar experiences that take a one-to-many broadcast and generates follow on experiences that are highly individualized and contextual to the buyer and buyer’s business turning a webinar from a moment into something far more personalized and episodic. This ShortList includes solutions ideal for smaller to mid-sized organizations along side those platforms better suited for larger enterprise organizations.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Capacity to host live audio (audio and slide/content), play video and prerecorded sessions
• Registration with flexible form fields for lead capture, including organizing an event series
• Customized branding and console configuration
• Quick, stable, reliable connectivity with toll-free, international calling and access
• Multihost, scalable speaker and producer interface
• Pre- and post-event communications, alerts, calendar invitations and reminders
• Multibrowser responsive user experience, installed app for Mac and Windows, native mobile apps
• AI tools for audience and for organizers including capacity to translate, summarize and generate unique, personalized content experiences based on audience engagement and questions. Increasingly, platforms are including AI Sales Agents to connect CTA to conversion 
• Generative AI tools for post event content iteration and reuse including generation of key quotes and clips in video reels ready for social posting, ready-to-post blog content and capacity to prompt specific video edits including clips by subject, by speaker or by audience persona. 
• Live audience engagement tools, polls, voting, chat, comments, screen mark-up, Q&A 
• Integration into key engagement systems including social, mobile messaging and marketing automation 
• Integration into customer and employee data repositories including CDP, CRM, ABM and HCM tools 
• Recording and rapid on-demand availability, commerce-ready gateways and monetization 
• Integration with digital asset management solutions for rapid video management 
• Security, role-based access and authorization, customer viewer controls 
• Analytics and robust reporting, viewers (live vs. ondemand), attention, downloads 
• Support, training and community for customers • Accessibility features, including real-time voice transcription and translation