Meta held its annual APAC Press Day for 2021 on Friday, December 3.
It’s been a big year for the company. In October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the Connect 2021 event that the company had confirmed a name change to Meta. The brand will bring together apps and technologies under one new company name.
This year’s event was the third time that a Press Day had been held, and the second time that restrictions meant that the event was held virtually. Welcoming everybody to the event was business communications manager for Meta, APAC, Shefali Srinivas. She showed a short clip of the Metaverse – announced alongside the company’s name change – before introducing the first speaker, Meta’s vice president of Asia Pacific, Dan Neary.
Neary began by explaining a bit more about the Metaverse – which he called “ a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who you aren’t together with physically,” saying that “it brings you closer together when you’re separated.”
“The Metaverse is really the next evolution, it’s much more immersive. When you put it in the context of what that means for businesses, we believe that the Metaverse will be the single biggest opportunity for modern business since the creation of the internet. We genuinely believe that. This is the next evolution of digital platforms, and on a lot of levels, it’s going to be the successor for the mobile internet – and there’s lots of potential here in Asia Pacific,” Neary siad.
Neary continued by outlining some of Meta’s achievements over the past 12 months, including decreasing prevalence of hate speech on their platforms and launching creations like Ray Ban stories.
The next speaker was Meta’s Vice president of business, Karen Teo.
Teo spoke about the future for small businesses and how Meta would be involved in that future.
“In our latest report on the state of small business in September this year, we published the results of our survey with more than 35,000 small business leaders across 30 countries and territories. What we saw was that across the majority of these surveyed countries, closure rates are falling, which is a great sign that small business recovery is underway. However, there is still a long way to go,” said Teo.
She also spoke about how over 51 million people in APC tuned into boosted Facebook content in 2020, and how 6% of shoppers surveyed in Southeast Asia purchased products online during Meta sales days events.
The last speaker was Meta’s APAC head of creative shop, Angela Bassichetti, who spoke about some of the breakthrough work from Meta’s partners across the globe in emerging creative trends.
She used the example of L’Oreal Malaysia, who used the platform to help people foster a close connection with loved ones that they couldn’t see because of lockdown during Ramadan.
Wrapping up, she said “we create opportunities for brands to connect with people and culture and multiply exponentially new technology. Technologies are the new canvases for us to tell human stories. We’re excited about the future where technology is more empowering to people than ever before.”