A shift in meaning, driven by technology.

In the era of virtualization, people are using digital technology to refine their identities and enhance ways of connecting with those around them—physically, socially and mentally. And with virtualization’s ability to transcend constraints of time, space and physical limits, are we all cyborgs today? The Social Innovation Lab considers this question and more as the search for meaning redefines what it means to be human. When the social consciousness begins to appraise value, culture and behavior in new contexts, brands will have to fluidly adapt. In this report, readers will discover how they can leverage technologies such as Web3, the metaverse and today’s most popular social channels to provide impactful experiences for audiences in search of meaning.

And that’s it! There certainly hasn’t been a lack of innovation over the past year, and as we look ahead to 2022, we can’t wait to see what happens next. But stay tuned, as the Labs.Monks will continue providing regular insights and experimentation into new trends as they emerge. See you then!

From the Fortnite challenge on late-night TV to politicians meeting constituents in-game, it’s no secret that gaming has risen to become an incredibly profitable entertainment industry—a trend that has accelerated in the past year as consumers have flocked to online environments for connection.

Just look at esports’ growth: the esports ecosystem is expected to surpass $1 billion in revenue this year, most of which will come from sponsorship and advertising. So, while gaming audiences have historically been difficult to connect with, emerging interest in esports has caught the attention of brands.

This development comes at a time when consumption of traditional sports has waned. So, will esports replace traditional sports completely? Of course not—but the ways that gaming audiences connect and consume could offer a glimpse at broadcast viewing experiences of tomorrow.

Esports Broadcasts Pull Fans into the Game

While esports organize in competitive leagues, they uniquely blend together what happens both in the game and in the arena. Technology like extended reality lets a broadcast drop character models directly in front of the characters who choose them. Meanwhile, commentators may stand beside an augmented reality diorama of the game to show replays in immersive detail. These innovations stand in contrast to watching a physical sport. “Cameras in a sports stadium are still very flat and traditional,” says Geert Eichhorn, Innovation Director at MediaMonks. “What fans want is an environment you can walk around and engage with.”

Traditional sports have long sought ways to make the viewing experience more engaging to audiences at home, though those experiences have largely remained linear. Today’s sports audiences connect through a variety of digital channels to seek new ways of getting closer to the action, and esports audiences are accustomed to interactive viewing experiences delivered through livestreaming channels like Twitch or YouTube. Sports can look toward esports’ innovation to enable more engaging experiences that break down the barriers between the audience and the game—with brands serving as the MVP’s that power these experiences.

Building the Virtual Stadiums of the Future

For esports and traditional sports alike, virtual stadiums set the stage for immersive and interactive viewing experiences. “You have to think: what can we offer in a virtual space—how are we using the third dimension?” says Eichhorn. “You can do more than just recreate a stadium by letting spectators look beyond the fixed angle of a camera.”

What’s more, much like a physical venue, a virtual one opens up unique sponsorship opportunities for brands, whether it’s more measurable and personalized ad targeting or branded stadiums. 

When it comes to consuming videogames within a virtual stadium, APIs are crucial. An API funnels data from the game in and into the viewing platform in real time—for example, the health of each player, their current equipment, whether they’re in a vehicle and more. In-game assets like maps, player models and animations can also translate seamlessly into the viewing environment.

MediaMonks Labs, our R&D team, has experimented with this technology by building their own virtual venue in Mozilla Hubs. Inside, a small group of viewers can meet together to watch a game of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds both traditionally (a recording on a stream) and through a 3D map that shows each player’s location in real time—a lot like the park map featured in the HBO series Westworld.

Eichhorn explains why the prototype is limited in the in-game data it uses: “Many game developers are guarded with API access to data in an effort to minimize cheating,” he says. “But a brand or creative partner working directly with a developer to virtualize a competition would have access to much more.”

Sports can Take a Page from the Esports Playbook

We’re still a way off from watching a full traditional game at that level of detail. “Volumetric in real time is difficult for live sports, because it takes days to stitch together everything into a 3D file.”  Though some are bridging the gap, like NBA’s games broadcast in Oculus venues, which lets viewers from afar watch together in a virtual environment—albeit from a linear, fixed-camera perspective. 

However limited immersive broadcasting within a virtual venue may remain today, there is a strong potential to fuel entirely new content experiences. “Intel creates replay clips through its True View volumetric capture,” says Nora Henrikkson, Managing Director at MediaMonks. “These clips pause at a key moment to let the viewer look around in 360 degrees. In the future, it would be cool to broaden that experience and put more control in spectators’ hands.” The same technology powers our work with Intel, which uses volumetric augmented reality to let sports enthusiasts watch, rewind and examine athletes’ moves from any angle.

Esports are branching out and following the lead of traditional sports—like franchising teams, organizing in season matches—but traditional sports can likewise learn from their digital counterparts. At the very least, virtual stadiums set the stage for more impactful, engaging and interactive digital experiences that bring people together, a goal shared by both industries. As brands aim to connect with audiences as well, virtualized environments and platforms that level-up the viewing experience offer an opportunity to change the game forever.

A high score in innovation.

Retail customers stand outside in a queue to ensure a safer shopping experience. Dressing rooms are closed. Fashion Week has gone virtual. And today’s fashion design students can’t meet in a studio to cut and sew materials. But the fashion industry isn’t in peril—it’s just taking on a new look.

This month, our research and development team MediaMonks Labs is collaborating with FLUX, our fashion and luxury team, to offer a special Labs report focused on the future of fashion. Bursting at the seams in digital innovation—from production to customer experiences—the report spares no effort to serve looks and inspired insight on the virtualization of fashion in its many forms. 

Virtualization is In-Season

For a long time, fashion-forward didn’t necessarily translate to being tech-forward. But in recent years, there’s been a growing desire to shake things up and break free from the cycle of seasonal releases and endless fashion weeks around the world. Suddenly, events that had long been exclusive became available to everyone through social feeds, completely changing the way brands engage with their audiences—like video game-inspired activations.

“It’s not just about the tech changing, but also how consumer behaviors are evolving,” says Ben Lunt, Head of Experience Design, Fashion & Luxury. “Brands knew they’d have to adapt, but the time never felt right until the past year.” Thanks to the pandemic, customer-facing digital experiences are increasingly in vogue—just recently, MediaMonks partnered with Verizon Media and IMG to bring Rebecca Minkoff’s new Spring 2021 collection to fashion lovers everywhere through 3D renders.

The technology lets people inspect looks up-close from any angle, either on a desktop device or directly superimposed in their surroundings using augmented reality. Previously, Rebecca Minkoff noted that customers are 30% more likely to buy when given the chance to engage with 3D product models online.

3D Production Connects People and Experiences

While the virtualization of the consumer experience has received a lot of attention from the fashion industry, it’s also aiding efforts in design and production. In response to sustainability concerns, today’s fashion students are learning to design in CLO3D, which allows designers to design, develop and sample garments in real time—software that’s also proven useful in the pandemic. The tool does more than let users design and collaborate from a safe distance—it streamlines the entire process.

In the traditional process, draping and patternmaking for each change in design can be time-consuming and wasteful. Virtualized production lets designers visualize these variations at speed, opening them up to more experimentation throughout the process. But it’s not about speeding up an already fast industry. “It’s about pinpointing parts of the process that can be streamlined in order to slow down others,” says Brandi LaCertosa, a Creative at MediaMonks. “We can create more space and time for thoughtful design and production.”

And these same assets can pull double duty by powering the kinds of touchpoints discussed above—or even inspire entirely new experiences. On the Labs team, MediaMonks Innovation Director Geert Eichhorn says: “If you switch to this digital pipeline you can make new products, like exporting designs onto video game avatars or letting users try on outfits with a digital twin.” While the digital twin idea is still some time away, it inspires some of the exciting D2C ecommerce solutions that forward-thinking brands might try out.

New Feedback Loops Transform the Industry

 Accelerated production and design can transform the value chain—a linear process that moves from designing and planning to sourcing and supply, and finally the consumer experience—into more of a Venn diagram where different steps overlap. Consider if 3D garments worn by players in a video game were the same used in a virtualized look book for retail buyers—but were originally made during the design and production process of the physical garments.

These assets can also be used for market testing. RTFKT presents 3D designs to its audience, inviting them to vote on those that make it to physical production. Fashion brand Finesse uses AI and social listening to source data-driven designs. Using CLO3D, the brand can act on trends quickly through accelerated production. For brands that serve as tastemakers, this same data can act as a trend forecast report in the design process, helping curate which pieces of the collection to take from runway to production. “Many designers crave an understanding of the people who will wear their clothes,” says LaCertosa. “Take Virgil Abloh for example, who is extremely active on Clubhouse for exactly this reason.”

Emulating the Analogue Aesthetic

Despite the advantages of virtualization, could it all be a fad—is it the emperor’s new clothes, bound to fall out of fashion once the pandemic subsides? Lunt notes that there’s always been a tension between fashion labels—luxury ones in particular—and new technologies, particularly because those brands have honed a more analogue aesthetic that can feel at odds with virtualization at first blush.

“They operate at a deep, impressionistic level,” he says. “If you look at a campaign image from Bottega Veneta, there’s a lot going on there—it touches you at a deep level, but a lot of those soft signals are analogue. Digital currently has its own aesthetic codes which can often be antithetical to luxury.” But it’s not a zero-sum game. By way of example, Lunt mentions Pixar’s painstaking efforts to emulate an analogue aesthetic in its CG films—like the split diopter lens, a unique tool that puts two objects in focus with no continuous depth of field to provoke a specific emotion in the viewer. 

Virtualized fashion also runs the risk of falling into “uncanny valley” territory, in which the slightest imperfection in an otherwise faithful reproduction can induce revulsion. “From the way the trim falls when moved to folds in the fabric, the smallest thing that looks off can trigger that response,” says Eichhorn.

But these challenges shouldn’t turn brands away from virtualization. Instead, it should prompt them to think more thoughtfully about where technology has the most potential to fuel creative innovation or build stronger relationships with consumers. “Luxury codes are already evolving to accommodate, appropriate, and ultimately push digital aesthetics forward,” says Lunt. “And you can still take that stylized photoshoot to capture the human element, then use 3D so consumers can see how it actually looks on them,” adds LaCertosa. “It’s about using this technology to support your brand and its aesthetic, not replace it.” 

There’s more where that came from.

Happy new year! To say the world changed in 2020 is obvious. And it’s clear that 2021 is off to a similarly wild and turbulent start.

But while the science isn’t conclusive about how long it takes to develop a new habit, we have lived through the pandemic and this transformative period long enough to shed old habits and develop new patterns and routines—good, bad or ugly. So, like any strategist, I chatted with teammates to reflect on what’s truly changed from last calendar year and what might stick to shape the new one for individuals, brands and organizations.

TL;DR: In a year that seemed to stand still for many, the most notable shifts weren’t new, but rather existing trends that accelerated at warp speed.

Goodbye, digital and physical. Hello, integrated living.

Brands have long drawn a distinction between digital and physical worlds. And individuals have often curated a version of our online selves that may not completely reflect the offline reality. While these lines have been blurring for some time, they completely collapsed once the world went into lockdown and we collapsed onto our couches. In 2020, we changed how we lived: we brought bosses and teachers into our homes via video chat, we shopped for groceries online that were delivered to our doors, we worked out in our homes with others across the country. No experience worked without the true integration of digital and physical.

Even if 2021 doesn’t look exactly like 2020, the one constant is that change and emotional intelligence (or EQ-led leadership) are proven to build resilience. This doesn’t mean we abandon data or our “hard skills.” Instead, leading brands and organizations will understand how to listen and learn, find moments of emotion and empathy (at scale) in the data and continue to lean into what might feel uncomfortable. “We have to remember that the people and cultural factors are probably the most critical ones for success,” says Bruno Rebouças, Managing Director LATAM at MightyHive.

Whether you felt like everything came to a halt in 2020 or wouldn’t stop spinning, you made it to 2021. Breathe, but don’t rest too easy—for the strategists, designers and those who wake up every day to create the best experiences for others, this year is poised to be another one of change. Whether serving their teams or their customers, brands and organizations must know how to be resilient, nimble and empathetic. Fresh off a holiday break, I’m excited to explore and create better ways of living, learning, working and connecting with people at home and afar. Let’s get started!

This article contains contributions by Sarah Higbee, John O’Rourke and Joseph Sutton.

Now, expectations are that winning experiences are truly integrated, adaptive and convenient. Even when it will be safe to socialize less than six feet apart, our hunch is the home will remain a critical hub that connects every aspect of our lives: Warner Bros. is eschewing theaters to premiere new movies at home through HBO Max, dating apps are connecting people from afar and virtual events offer greater accessibility than traditional, in-person counterparts. To continue to deliver on these new expectations of service, brands and platforms must adapt and rethink how, when and where consumers make decisions across increasingly nonlinear journeys—what Google calls “the messy middle.”

Michael Leen, SVP Growth and Partnerships at MediaMonks, recently discussed this new reality of everywhere commerce. “What differentiates brands and sellers today is their ability to show up where their customer is, whether it’s the dot-com, on TikTok or at an event. Brands must make sure they are using all the channels that are appropriate in ways that resonate with their customer.”

As marketers and designers, we must double down on human-centered design—and perhaps even think about home-centered design—by understanding how the present moment continues to shape content and connection.

Goodbye, surviving. Hello, thriving.

We’re living through a pandemic. We have to talk about our health—which includes physical, mental and emotional health. All too often, in US culture, “I’m busy” also signals “I’m important.” But in 2020, busy reached a breaking point without boundaries or rest, resulting in unprecedented burnout: for parents, for healthcare workers, for teachers and any and all essential workers (we see you, and we’re grateful). We couldn’t ignore our rising mental health challenges any longer.

Leading organizations understood this reality wasn’t just an individual challenge but also an organizational one stifling creativity, collaboration and problem solving, to name a few. With that, 2020 was the year we (finally) began to normalize mental health and take control of all aspects of our well-being—a priority that Firewood Co-founder and President Lanya Zambrano has championed by sharing her own journey.

Stressors won’t vanish when the pandemic ends. The good news is the rise and adoption of digital tools can help us better manage our health as individuals, like seeing a doctor via video chat with ease. But we’re also hopeful the conversation in 2021 moves beyond an afternoon of self-care to cultural norms of flexibility and balance.

Goodbye, traditional classrooms. Hello, lifelong learning.

Learning looked different this past year. So much so that metrics we’ve traditionally used to measure success (classroom size, test scores, etc.) essentially lost their relevance. What emerged in 2020 was something closer to the learner-centered approach that’s been championed for some time. Opportunities for anyone, at any age, to learn from anywhere with an internet connection took off: time spent learning on professional development platform LinkedIn Learning has tripled during the pandemic, while MasterClass saw a double in sales and raised $100 million to fund new content.

But the ways that education changed in 2020 weren’t all positive. Pandemic lockdowns exposed a digital divide that threatened to set underserved students and communities back further and showed how ill-equipped our institutions are in engaging students virtually when needed.

As we look to this new year, there’s an incredible opportunity to imagine how we learn (anywhere) and who is a student (everyone) when we close the digital divide once and for all and consider new ways of learning. Might successful learning look like the Peloton model: personalized, entertaining and engaging group lectures supported by smaller discussion groups and communities?

“I believe that the most effective edtech experiences are built based on in-depth knowledge of what drives and engages kids and young adults,” says Vinne Schifferstein, Managing Director at MediaMonks Australia. “Only by truly stepping into their shoes can we motivate them to learn in a way that suits them best, ultimately resulting in better learner outcomes.”

I am not an educator and acknowledge that different solutions suit different ages and stages. But whatever this next year looks like, the opportunities for partnership, content and learning seem limitless.

Goodbye, geographical borders. Hello, shared values.

For the lucky industries and professionals who can work from the safe confines of home, how we work changed in 2020. And whatever model emerges (3-2-2 or others) this year, a distributed workforce will remain. Unrestrained by borders, the distributed workforce opens the door for more diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, which will not only create better work but also means teams can source the best talent from all over the world.

But without shared physical spaces, norms or experiences that hold everyone together, leading organizations must instead rally around a set of common goals, values and purpose to create a community. Our values of humility, authenticity, inclusivity and responsibility have not only kept us connected and grounded throughout an unprecedented year, but have served as guideposts for designing content, programs and events across S4Capital—with a unified digital home on our bespoke internal platform, the Shift.

While this is not a new idea, it has become a cultural baseline to set future organizations and leading brands apart.

Goodbye, small talk. Hello, emotional intelligence.

Small talk changed in 2020. In a non-scientific, anecdotal survey of teams and client partners, platitudes about the weather and generally forgettable, time-filling conversations disappeared. They were replaced with conversations of grief, social justice, and wildfires (many of our teams live on the US west coast) because ignoring these topics felt tone-deaf. We had tough conversations. And consumers and communities expected brands to show up meaningfully to support their communities, customers and employees alike.

Museums have long existed to make culture more accessible to their audiences, giving patrons access to artifacts and works of art that teach them about both past and present, as well as celebrate differences in culture across time and space.

But what appeals to audiences of one generation doesn’t necessarily translate to another, prompting museums to rethink and evolve their approach to outreach. Digital further helps museums inject new relevance into their collections, allowing patrons to engage with exhibits outside of visitor hours or across borders.

An outstanding example of this is the newly launched “The Queen and the Crown” digital exhibit by Netflix and the Brooklyn Museum, made in collaboration with MediaMonks. The exhibit highlights costumes featured in both Netflix-original series The Queen’s Gambit (a new limited series that premiered on October 23) and season four of The Crown, which returns on November 15.

Vogue calls the exhibit “the kind of immersive concept that could only happen with the help of the internet,” noting the ability to get a closer look at the costumes’ dazzling  details than would be possible in-person, as well as the brightly-lit virtual venue that would have damaged the costumes if they stood there in reality–a rare scene that must be experienced to be believed. W Magazine also covered the work, including additional insight and commentary from Brooklyn Museum curator Matthew Yokobosky, who paired some of the outfits on display with art pieces from the museum’s collection.

The concept resonates strongly with viewers, as costume design is integral to both series. In The Queen’s Gambit, protagonist Beth Harmon’s outfits reflect her rise in the ranks of competitive chess. The Crown meanwhile focuses on different eras of Queen Elizabeth II’s life in each season, featuring a new cast and wardrobe in each to reflect the historical context. The digital exhibit leverages the power of the period dramas and the fidelity of Netflix’s sartorial vision to make history a little more relatable.

Enter the Virtual Museum

The Queen and the Crown exhibit is not just a simple carousel of images; to provide a truly immersive digital experience, MediaMonks helped build and model the museum’s interior and exterior, paying tribute to its beautiful architecture and drumming up the sense of anticipation felt when entering into a museum lobby. “The intricate detail we were able to achieve in rendering the museum’s exterior façade is especially impressive,” says Celeste Acosta, Global Head of Client for Netflix at MediaMonks.

Step into the virtual museum yourself.

Once users click through, they enter a fully 3D, immersive rendering of the Brooklyn Museum’s iconic Beaux-Arts Court. This is where viewers can inspect the exhibit at every angle–just as they’d do in-person. The experience of entering the virtual hall is striking; in addition to the attention to detail the team took to recreate the space visually, music and the sound of footsteps reverberating off its walls add to the atmosphere as if you were really there. As viewers inspect each outfit in detail, written commentary from the shows’ costume designers, show clips, sketches, fabric swatches and detail photos add greater context to each.

Everything is artfully arranged on the digital exhibit floor–Acosta noted that arranging the virtual exhibit required carefully building a floorplan, much like how Brooklyn Museum would plan out a physical exhibit. Due to the challenging amount of outfits in one single space, one of the greatest challenges was combining the 360 photographs within the 3D space, then blending this together with the UI to create a seamless experience. The result is a digital destination that fans of either show and fashion enthusiasts alike can enjoy, demonstrating how brands can inject new relevance through original content that drive new ways for consumers to interact with culture.

Production Innovation Brought Costumes to Life

The experience of viewing the exhibit wasn’t the only innovation: the team employed cutting-edge production behind the scenes to bring the work to life for audiences far and wide. We used two shoots: one in LA for costumes from The Queen’s Gambit, and one in the UK for those from The Crown. Using a turntable, we captured each outfit from every angle, stitching the images together to mimic 3D.

Due to safety measures imposed by the pandemic, the brand team oversaw production remotely in both locations to ensure a COVID-safe production that captured a staggering volume of images. “The exhibit is a combination of 1,512 photographs: 72 images of each dress,” says Robert Burdsall, Film Producer at MediaMonks. “To capture this remotely was a true collaboration between teams in Los Angeles and London. By working closely with health and safety professionals, we were able to uphold our high safety standards ensuring our teams on set were protected from Covid-19.”

Activating New Audiences Through Partnership

Exhibitions like The Queen and the Crown can help make museum collections more relevant to digital-native audiences. As cultural centers evolve to become more relevant with their audiences, they’ll also need to rethink how they contextualize their collections: in the Wall Street Journal, Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn Lowry notes that museums have become “content providers,” signaling a growing change in mindset in how they serve artifacts and the histories that surround them.

As museums begin to see themselves as content platforms in their own right, serving not only local communities but patrons from afar as well, they’ll need to focus on creating digital destinations that engage with the cultural zeitgeist–whether that means repackaging exhibits for popular social platforms, collaborating with brands and influencers or even virtualizing the experience of visiting the museum.

Brands like Netflix who are adept in creating original content can prove essential to translating audience insights into impactful experiences that resonate with both broad and niche audiences. “At the end of the day, we’re all trying to tell stories to connect with audiences—whether through a museum exhibition, a drama series or both,” says MediaMonks CMO Kate Richling. “It’s cool to watch history unfold in new and entertaining formats, ultimately becoming more accessible to people around the world.” In this respect, the exhibit serves as an example of how brands can fuel creativity in making culture more relevant and accessible for audiences through digital.

A commissioned study out today, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of MediaMonks, has found that the next phase of digital transformation is virtualization, a process that includes “creating distinct, digital environments in which customers can interact with brands.”

In the early stage of the pandemic, virtualization mostly took the form of livestreaming events. We’ve had our hand in making some: when we took BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival out of Prospect Park and onto the world stage, we were able to extend its audience globally while creating a more intimate viewing experience. With Pride marches canceled due to the pandemic, Netflix was able to unite the LGBTQ+ community through stories and culture, asking people to share stories of their own.

But these activations did more than simply try to recreate the in-person experiences that inspired them: they wielded technology and data to infuse experiences with new value that could only be achieved through digital.

This gets at the heart of what virtualization truly means. Marketers must re-energize their teams and deliver upon new opportunities to engage with consumers across channels and throughout the brand ecosystem. This requires brands to rethink how audiences connect with one another in virtualized worlds–environments in which people and brands increasingly exist today.

What Brand Virtualization Is — And Isn’t

A major distinction made in the research notes: “The pandemic has popularized the term ‘virtualization,’ but many efforts are just a small step.” Other areas of virtualization include virtual and remote production, connecting data across the customer decision journey and simply making the brand available to consumers across channels and platforms. These capabilities enhance every part of the brand ecosystem, including but not limited to events.

This makes the difference between experiences that feel inferior to their in-person counterparts versus innovations that enhance the customer experience, resulting in indelible experiences that weren’t possible before. When the pandemic hit, finding a way to recoup on existing event plans was top of mind for brands who wanted to show they can continue engaging with consumers digitally without missing a beat. This was an adaptation out of need; data from the study shows that “56% of decision makers reported shifting in-person events into digital ones.”

But brands shouldn’t stop there. Much like how digital transformation of old has put brands in a CX rut, failure to move beyond this initial investment in virtualization can make it tough to stand out and deliver differentiated experiences—for example, a livestream might look and feel no different than many other digital events or, in a worst-case scenario, a workplace videoconference.

Brands Are Facing an Urgent Need to Broadly Transform

Before the pandemic exposed gaps in digital customer experiences, brands had taken a slow and incremental approach to digital transformation that didn’t always deliver on its promise. “The past decade has been defined by perpetual digital transformation: brands put it in the ‘important but not urgent’ category, consultancies made money on consulting rather than creating, and brands focused on laying technology pipes over enhancing the user experience,” says MediaMonks CMO Kate Richling. “Then COVID happened, serving as a stress test for how transformed brands actually are––revealing just how effective, and necessary, brands’ investment in all this time, money and resources have been.”

In 2020, the very notion of digital transformation has transformed. Likewise, marketers are shifting their priorities to accelerate digital, better align brand promise with customer experience and more. Research from the study indicates a drastic change in marketers’ priorities between the start of 2020 and today, with new focus on digital experience offerings and omnichannel digital experiences to engage with consumers anytime, anywhere.

Next Steps on the Path to Virtualization

Moving beyond initial steps to virtualization requires brands to strategically rethink how audiences connect with one another in virtualized worlds—the space in which brands and consumers increasingly find themselves today. Brands must look toward building discrete ecosystems and environments that drive culture and connect with consumers on an emotional level.

Powered by data and infused with relevance, virtualization enables brands to deliver content on par with that which consumers actively seek out and enjoy. It’s through the totality of these experiences that consumers fall in love with brands, says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “The hyperadoption of new user behavior has rapidly changed how we use tools to create and connect,” says ter Haar. “These changes offer an opportunity to become part of the conversation in interesting and meaningful new ways.” But they also require new skillsets, prompting marketers to switch focus and reskill their teams.

For example, Forrester’s study found that “Currently, only 23% of marketing leaders strongly agree that they are able to use analytics to understand how marketing’s performing, and only half reported their firms are using customer lifetime value as a key KPI to track their success.” This gap in data maturity makes it harder to follow the consumer across ecosystems—online and off—to lend value when needed.

As brands seek to build creatively differentiated customer experiences across investments in virtual events, extended reality and virtual content production, they must not only hire for new skillsets, but also negotiate new KPIs that focus on long-term brand health. The commissioned study, which you may access to read below, lays out several areas where marketers aim to invest and digitally mature as they finally deliver on the promises of digital transformation.

Take a bold step to brand virtualization.

Havaianas is a brand for everyone, owing its early success to the working class. But over the decades, Brazil’s biggest fashion export really has delivered on its promise that there’s a pair of flip flops for everyone, upscaling the affordable yet durable traditional pair into a wide range of footwear with broad appeal.

While the brand has achieved icon status in Brazil, Havaianas is a brand with a significant global reach. Circus Marketing, who joined our monastery earlier this year, has greatly supported and enhanced Havaianas’ efforts to accelerate success around the world, helping audiences everywhere come to know the brand like the Brazilians do: a truly democratic brand that stands for the people.

Circus and Havaianas march in perfect sync thanks to their close connection in Havaianas’ internal creative team, Hana. Hana is built for digital, and was established after Havaianas realized the opportunity to increase their digital investment to make creative more effective. While Hana is an internal team, its efforts are accelerated and supercharged by Circus–at home and around the world. Here’s how.

Legitimizing the Brand Story through Collaboration and Activation

A lot of what makes Havaianas such an iconic brand is through its marketing—not just in the messages it puts out, but even in how it produces work internally to live up to the brand image.

Speaking at a Brand Innovators event presented by MediaMonks and Circus centered on multicultural marketing, Havaianas CMO Fernanda Romano said, “By design we’ve made it a rule internally that we need to bring representation to the table. Our partners know…don’t even bother to bring a bid to the table if you haven’t bid with all sorts of people.”

The brand is further transforming itself to support marginalized communities: most recently, Havaianas launched its “All Love is Welcome” platform to celebrate LGBTQ+ pride. This is more than just a campaign: it’s a year-round commitment that demonstrates the brand’s role in supporting the LGBTQ+ community in an impactful way.

In addition to launching a Pride-themed line that will sell year-round, Havaianas is allocating part of product net income to All Out, an organization that operates locally and globally to advocate for the community. Havaianas will also cease categorizing by gender and will increase the size range for designs to make them more inclusive. “We made a point that representation wasn’t a checkmark to tick off,” Romano told the Brand Innovators audience.

To help launch its “All Love is Welcome” platform, Havaianas worked with Circus to host a virtual celebration of love. Three couples—and their guests—virtually came together to marry, renew vows and celebrate the spirit of Pride at home. In addition to real marriage officiating, couples were treated to serenades from Flutua and Johnny Hooker, who belted out an anthem to inspire and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. In addition to the hero video that captures moments from the virtualized event, Havaianas is rolling out documentary-style shorts that dive deeper into the lives and stories of the featured couples for a global audience.

Depicting real stories was key to the campaign’s success and spoke to the challenges that LGBTQ+ people face in lockdown. “One of the creatives who worked on the campaign said that one of her friends had just come out to his mother because they were living so closely together now,” says Luciana Haguiara, Executive Creative Director at Circus. “Some people are arguing but many are becoming much closer with their loved ones, are starting to accept things and being more careful with one another’s feelings.” She notes that Sao Paulo has one of the biggest Pride parades in the world, a claim that the Guinness Book of World Records has confirmed from 2006 to at least 2016, making it incredibly important to still offer that celebratory space virtually.

Making the Pivot to Virtual

The Pride campaign is just one example of how Havaianas has rapidly virtualized to offer the brand’s trademark fun, summery spirit. Its Mother’s Day campaign, which depicts mothers in recognizable situations at home (keeping their kids entertained, being separated from family and more), was built out of insights gained from the brand asking how mothers feel during COVID-19.

Perhaps more excitingly, the Hana team also quickly pivoted its content strategy to host virtual events that provided its audience fun and comfort while at home. Havaianas very much represents the outdoor lifestyle, so the challenge became: how do we activate the brand while the majority of its customers are indoors and at home?

Circus’ idea was to help Brazilians continue to enjoy life through a series of livestreamed, at-home concerts featuring Marília Mendonça, Thiaguinho and Big Brother Brazil star Manu Gavassi. In Mendonça’s performance alone received over 11 thousand likes, three thousand posts from viewers showing off their Havaianas, and three million simultaneous viewers—a YouTube record that hasn’t been beat.

And as Havaianas continues to expand around the globe, the brand is focusing on virtualizing commerce as well. Its “Let’s Summer!” campaign and new Tmall store in China exhibits how the Havaianas really is for everyone, no matter where they are in the world. The store serves as a best-in-class example of how a brand can modernize and optimize its digital storefront by following the full customer journey.

Havaianas was integral to normalizing flip flop use out of the home in its early days in Brazil, and has met a similar challenge in its expansion to APAC and China, where wearing flip flops in public isn’t common. Moving past this is the first test before engaging more deeply with the local culture. “The challenge was to establish a flip-flop culture in China, first and foremost by making people fall in love with the Havaianas brand and what it stood for: the colorful, fun and lively Brazilian summer spirit which is core to their brand DNA,” said Brandon Tucs, Creative Director at MediaMonks.

Achieving this was a truly global effort, connecting talent from Shanghai, Los Angeles and Brazil. “Since this was the first MediaMonks job with the Havaianas, we helped them understand the positioning, the challenges going global and translating their spirit to such a different market like China,” said Caio Del Manto, Managing Director at Circus. “In the end, this is the part of the brand’s main goal: to become a global lifestyle brand that carries this easy-going spirit so famous among Brazilians.”

We established master pages for the Home and product pages, making it easy for the brand to plug in content based on brand guidelines our team had established, ensuring the digital store looks inviting in any scenario.

A writeup in Marketing Interactive noted how useful digital investment was for the brand to emerge successfully through the COVID-19 outbreak. “During COVID-19 when stores were closed in most of the APAC countries, Havaianas invested disproportionally behind digital media to maximize its brand visibility. It also set up stronger social commerce platforms and built a relevant influencer strategy with local brand ambassadors, such as Luna Maya in Indonesia or Nelydia Nik Sen in Malaysia.”

In celebration of the launch of the brand’s new shape–the Japanese-inspired Tradi Zori, signalling Havaianas’ goal to take the streets with an urban audience–the Brazil team at Circus set up a global campaign of unboxing videos from influencers in the streetwear space. These included Leo Mandella (@GullyGuyLeo), Kofi McCalla (@Icykof), Enrico Cardoso (@EnricoCardoso) and Suyane Ynaya (@Suyane_Ynaya), whose content portrays the diverse ways that the Tradi Zori enhances personal style.

From virtualized commerce and events to driving real-world, societal impact, Havaianas has used digital to move the needle in several ways around the world. By establishing partners upstream in the planning process (like Circus’ involvement with the Hana team), the brand is able to quickly pivot campaigns without losing focus of long-term goals and tasks. Through this approach, it’s no surprise that Havaianas has achieved so much success in its march to digital.