Connect with a Brand Ambassador Aligned to Your Strategic, Long-Term Goals

Today’s marketing ecosystem relies on always-on content shared across many channels and tailored to individual user preferences. With new ways of delivering and consuming content comes a need for new ways of working and building partner relationships.

A Forrester report released in early 2019 explores the unique challenges that digital transformation poses to brands and CMOs in particular, who must ensure a better customer experience through the process. But that experience is impacted by a number of factors across the digital landscape, prompting organizations to rethink how they do business at every level. This can manifest in pivoting to new platforms, supporting new content channels or optimizing the production process for deliverables at scale.

Engaging in these challenges, brands are sure to highlight specific needs in their ongoing digital transformation. Once they’ve elevated this need—an optimized transcreation process, for example—brands require a new partnership model that can provide the needed expertise over the long term. According to the Forrester report mentioned above, “CMOs should challenge traditional agencies and insist on new pricing models — asking for a shared risk/revenue approach to test the willingness of their strategic partners to commit to results.”

Rising to meet this need is the integrated partner model, in which we custom-build teams centered on solving key challenges and specific needs for brands—a relationship so closely aligned that we don’t call them “clients,” but rather partners. In the center of this relationship (a unique blend of agency, consultancy and semi in-house/semi-global studio) is the brand ambassador, who cements the relationship between us and our partners.

Strategizing with Shared Risk and Goals

A key benefit of the integrated production partnership is that your custom-built team can reside in-house on a permanent or partial basis. The proximity that the brand ambassador has between an organization and the larger MediaMonks network allows for more quick, agile response to the brand’s needs, whether it be a need to scale up operations, offload some bandwidth or strategize new opportunities.

Learn more ways to achieve more from less.

This is particularly useful for established or legacy brands seeking to adapt to something new—a need that’s become all but required in our fast-changing digital landscape. The digital experience is a primary pillar for any brand, and today’s environment requires they explore and adopt entirely new ways of thinking and working. This is especially important for brands that are beginning to embark on a journey of digital transformation, as an integrated production partner can provide both creative and technical expertise to help organizations execute their goals while protecting their brand.

For example, one sector that’s been dramatically altered by digital disruption is that of ecommerce, wholesale and retail. One of our partners is heavily experienced in offline retail, but found an opportunity to step into the digital wholesale space. Because this was a new environment for our partner to play in, it was important that they had easy access to a UX strategy expert to whom they could consult for help in designing and implementing the digital purchasing experience.

This resulted in the team’s Lead UX Designer serving as a key brand ambassador in the partnership, whose primary responsibilities are to lead workshops, sit down with product owners and draw up a roadmap with key stakeholders in the company. “These talks become much more regular and prominent throughout the development and execution process, as opposed to getting a brief and then building a solution,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks LA. What results is a close, long-term partnership focused on future-proofing and sustained success.

In researching how to implement the best UX for this partner’s platform, we recommended conducting user interviews—something the partner was originally reticent about.

But our brand ambassador was able to understand, relay and engage with those concerns to eventually make the case for the interviews’ usefulness. “The insights gleaned from those interviews shifted the course of the project for the better,” says Martens. “Thanks to the embedded model, the brand could quickly pivot to respond to new insights without taking the project off-track.

Safeguarding Brands with Design Acumen

We’re well aware of how essential it is for brands to safeguard themselves, whether it be ensuring a consistent experience across markets and touchpoints, or placing work in hands they can trust to understand and execute the brand’s voice. This concern is right at the heart of the integrated production partnership, which is dedicated to upholding and protecting design standards while lightening its workload.

This is achieved by having the production talent and experience on the ground to inform the strategy provided to partners. Traditional consultancies may be focused primarily on business strategy and its technical implementations, but our brand ambassadors provide partners with an open door to the vast creative talent available in our network. With our own high visual standards, we strive to be proactive in seeking new opportunities to showcase partners’ brands with best-in-class design.

While preparing for its annual keynote presentation, for example, one partner sought out bold, flashy animations to ensure its points stuck. While this work was outside the scope of our typical, day-to-day deliverables with the partner, our flexible setup connected them with an animation team capable of bringing their design needs to life. Because the partner had a very specific look and feel in mind for the project, fluid communication between both parties—a process streamlined by the ambassador at the center, who has a clear understanding of their brand’s design philosophy—ensured it could be done quickly and to standard.

A Long-Term Partnership Designed for Success

One of the reasons why an integrated partnership brand ambassador can facilitate these projects so easily is because they work so closely with the brand, often partially in-house. This proximity provides complete transparency on both sides of the aisle, and helps the brand ambassador gauge what bandwidth is available for finishing projects or optimizing the workflow.

The integrated production partnership model means that both parties have skin in the game and have a shared desire for success across the board. For the partner whose ecommerce platform is discussed above, we found an opportunity to optimize its B2B platforms as well. This process began with optimizing the existing UI and creating a new design system informed by continuous user testing. From there, we’re looking forward to implementing new features into the platform to improve customer experience worldwide.

This goal for a more holistic brand experience drives home what makes this nature of partnership so unique: it might be designed to specifically tackle one goal, but over time capabilities can evolve with a brand’s needs, with the brand ambassador available at arm’s length to kick off talks and help source talent. From there, organizations are better equipped to adapt to any need that crops up in the fast-changing digital landscape they seek to carve a path through.