An Integrated Approach Accelerates Digital Transformation

With the speed at which brands have to adapt and deliver digital experiences today, having a high level of expertise and end-to-end execution at your disposal is key for survival—especially in Latin America, where brands used to stand behind other regions in the path toward digital success, but are swiftly covering more ground in less time.

Previously, many brands used to consider digital transformation important, but not urgent. Now, it’s table stakes—and happening at incredible speed. And while consultancies have spent years consulting rather than acting, brands are finding that when push comes to shove, transformation doesn’t have to be such a long, arduous process after all. 

Combining the multicultural knowledge of two of Mexico’s most awarded digital companies, Circus and MediaMonks joined forces to deliver a first-class experience—assisting brands in Latin America to transform in meaningful ways at speed through the refinement of three prioritized capabilities that will help form the bedrock for success in years to come: platform and product design, content and film production, and end-to-end social media.

The Cornerstones of Great Digital Experience

After months of seeing consumers adopt new behaviors in the era of virtualization, being on social media isn’t enough—you have to be intimately aware of the way audiences connect on a variety of channels, and it’s imperative that brands innovate in a way that resonates with digital audiences today. This means they must not only recognize opportunities to show up for audiences in new ways, but also require new skill sets and expertise that bring those ideas to life.

We’re cutting through this challenge by having a unitary structure that joins together expertise in data insights, community activation, engaging digital experiences and impactful content built by talent around the world. Circus-MediaMonks operates at the intersection of creativity and technology.

“We’re pushing digital transformation forward, and the only way to accelerate it is by working with multi-disciplinary and agile teams,” says Sergio Escamilla, Managing Director in Mexico City. “Moving forward, digital transformation is going to be the main brand strategy, and both performance and conversion are needed to stay ahead. In Mexico, it’s hard to find agencies that have integrated more than one of these capabilities.”

Gathering creative, strategic and production expertise collaboratively in-house, our teams are equipped to not only tackle big ideas, but ultimately execute them—for example, by building a web platform that integrates Google technologies and social media tools with Mexico’s biggest airline’s ecommerce backend.

In our work for Aeroméxico, we combined platform and product design with multichannel communication to create a comprehensive travel booking experience, driven by a cultural narrative. The bespoke website offered people (rather than cities) as destinations to select. When booking a flight, the chosen person would print on the ticket, enabling a more personalized experience to users—who also had the option to promote themselves as a destination through a video generated by their social media data. In the Forrester webinar “AI And Automation Will Shape The Agency Of The Future” Forrester Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall used the platform as an example of how automation at scale benefits creative differentiation.

“If you think about airline apps, they all do the same thing. But the notion of intelligent creativity helps us push beyond that digital sameness and provide business and technology leaders the ability to execute not only in volume, but with a deep understanding of people and empathy of people,” Pattisall says.

“…Aeroméxico shows us a really striking contrast… So you can see how the combination of a creative idea with technology scale created a very differentiating execution, a breakthrough execution that helped them achieve that higher value benefit.” The human-driven campaign stitched social media content with a seamless innovative experience, adding value to the audience’s relationship with the brand and impacting 20% of online sales.

That’s how virtualization connects distinct experiences across a wider digital ecosystem, and it’s important to consider it should look like an ongoing, integrated process rather than a piece-by-piece jigsaw puzzle of random acts of digital. 

An Integrated Approach Ensures the Greatest Impact

In the era of virtualization, brands must not only make relevant content for existing channels but also develop entirely new experiences. And while most projects are developed in just a few weeks, they are oftentimes the gateway to long-term strategies and collaborations. In that sense, having an integrated approach can help expand an initial creative idea into subsequent, connected content and experiences. To make this happen, we usually opt for a “zero-to-one” strategy, in which short-term goals yield quick results for brands, then progressively build and aggregate into longer-term goals.

Still, having a unified approach and overcoming silos within the brand is fundamental to achieve agility. Divided budgets and departments working independently will soon cease to be profitable—or even sustainable. “Transparency, accountability, senior management, time and resource optimization—these are all advantages of having a unitary structure and an integrated approach to digital transformation,” Escamilla explains. “But for that to happen, brands must have the same mindset. In the future, we will see a combination of technology and integrated marketing. Today, most brands are managing that separately.”

Having a partner that can work end-to-end and sit at the co-creation table ensures the greatest possible impact within budget limitations, and it’s the best way to service multiple channels by producing content simultaneously. For our ongoing collaboration with Cerveza Victoria through the last three years, we weaved high-end film production with platform and product design to create cultural relevance tied to the Day of the Dead. While the shootings of each annual film took place, we created toolkits with Instagram slider ads, Tweet videos, AR face filters, living images for the social ecosystem and even an interactive website where users could build their own altar to make a Day of the Dead offering—the kind of simultaneous creation process that is not feasible without a digital-first outlook. 

The need for personalized, fit-for-format content and the power of innovative digital experiences will shape brands’ strategies in years to come. And as they aim to connect digital touchpoints into a holistic brand ecosystem, relying on partners who can bring a variety of skills and expertise to the table will provide the agility they need to survive. While we continue to fulfill brand promise through interactive platforms, high-end film and social media, smart holistic digitalization will determine engagement and relevancy.