Consumer behaviors have changed dramatically throughout 2020. We’ve become dependent on digital to discover, engage with and purchase from brands like never before. As consumer behaviors and expectations have undergone several years of accelerated (and irrevocable) change in a matter of months, it’s clear that brands must be prepared to draw the offline and online experience closer through premium digital experiences moving forward.

The fashion industry has been especially affected by this hyperadoption of digital, and across the end-to-end value chain—from supply logistics to buying & merchandising, all the way through to the consumer’s point of purchase. As fashion brands address the need to virtualize their processes, both creatively and operationally, MediaMonks stands ready to offer the industry a range of bespoke solutions with its new fashion and luxury practice.

This new team of strategic and creative category experts is helmed by the former leadership team of specialist fashion agency Wednesday, and is backed by our global team of multidisciplinary talent. Led by Liam Osbourne, formerly Group Business Director at Wednesday London, the team will bolster fashion brands’ efforts to infuse the customer decision journey (CDJ) with cultural relevance and resonance, and create the kinds of premium experiences online that customers have come to expect offline.

Making the Intangible Tangible

With purchase decisions being made increasingly online, the tactility and physicality of the experience has never been more important, whether it’s evoking the feel of the materials up-close, or the excitement of trying on an outfit. And this is especially true when it comes to premium brands, who excel in providing unparalleled craftsmanship and service to loyal audiences. “A premium customer experience within the fashion and luxury industry is one of the most important elements of success,” says Victor Knaap, CEO of MediaMonks. “Technology plays an instrumental role in conveying both the tangible and intangible aspects of luxury that are so important.”

Having long honed brand-consumer relationships in person and through retail, fashion brands must rethink the CDJ to meet customers wherever and whenever they’re in the mood to shop, from offering premium digital shopping experiences like experiential ecommerce, producing enticing original content, partnering with influencers who drive conversation and more. And what’s true for consumers is equally true for industry professionals, as buyers unable to visit the physical showroom turn increasingly to virtual experiences to evaluate the brand’s collections, and inform their wholesale purchase decisions.

Our own expertise in 3D content and AR empowers customers everywhere to examine the products up close, and from every angle. We brought these skills to bear for Nike earlier this year, helping them to unveil the latest Air Jordan release to an eager fan base unable to view them in-store. And in establishing our specialist fashion and luxury practice, we will continue to take this kind of work to the next level.

Reframing the Catwalk and Redefining the Event

One way or another, Fashion Week has evolved in recent years into an increasingly consumer-facing event. And, in the face of reduced travel and social distancing rules, 2020 has seen brands forced to reimagine the fashion show itself, exploring new formats through which to unveil their new collections.

Even as the industry returns to something like business as usual, we expect the fashion show to remain increasingly untethered from the physical catwalk, empowering each brand’s creative director to experiment more freely with how they express their vision. This will enable them to deliver an exclusive, real world experience for key opinion leaders and category decision makers, while continuing to reach a wider audience of highly engaged fans virtually.

Moments like this are defined by the confluence of creativity and technology. Our existing expertise in live streaming, experiential, VR and digital installations will be supercharged by the arrival of our specialist team, allowing us to stage breakthrough events that reflect the very exacting and highly nuanced codes of fashion and luxury. Consider how we turned any environment into a virtual catwalk for Tommy Hilfiger using volumetric AR, or how Circus (who merged with MediaMonks earlier this year) helped beloved Brazilian brand Havaianas drive real cultural impact by hosting virtual weddings during Pride month. Imagine what else could be achieved by some of the category’s most premium brands.

Matching Surface with Substance

This category has always existed as the pinnacle of expression in a commercial context—expressive imagery, evocative language and exquisite products, all providing the ultimate platform for aspiration. As brands rely increasingly on digital to reach consumers, we will be concentrating on aesthetics and innovation in equal measure.

But just as digital is transforming consumer behaviors, so is it also shifting attitudes. Matters of sustainability, longevity and more ethical standards of production are an increasing priority, and not just for younger audiences. These shifts encourage fashion brands to find new ways to exhibit their ethos through retail, content and digital platforms. And as craftspeople ourselves, we have an ambition to support brands by reinforcing the purpose and quality they promise to consumers whilst weaving digital into their social fabric.

“This is a pivotal moment for the fashion world, and the digitization of the industry is more important than ever before,” says Osbourne. “Together we can supercharge luxury, bring the brand’s purpose to life and elevate consumer experiences—both in the physical and the digital world.”

While the way in which we all, as consumers, engage with the category may have changed substantially—and will continue to change from season to season, year on year—fashion has always been a powerful conduit for creative expression, enabling each of us to explore and convey our individual identity. Fashion is more than just fabric; it’s about how it feels to be you. And just as style is unique to every consumer—and specific to their day-to-day situation—brands must be equipped to cater to those multifaceted needs.

Fashion is, by definition, intrinsic to culture and individual self-expression. As fashion labels aim to enhance the cultural relevance of their brand and products within a fiercely competitive industry, our team of experts is primed to create indelible digital experiences, services and content at speed and scale, helping premium brands make their mark on the most discerning of audiences.

Some cities and countries around the world may have reopened, but large-scale events will be the last to return–and in the meantime, brands have taken their events and experiences online.

But despite operating in a time of immense experimentation and rethinking the way we use online tools that bring people together, many brands seek to translate their existing experiences to a digital format, when they should rebuild them from the ground up to take advantage of the features that make livestreaming a unique medium–and build a sense of presence and placemaking in the process.

Unfortunately, popular livestreaming technologies lack that creative potential. Forced to rapidly pivot their event strategies, brands have latched onto platforms and tools that are familiar to them, designed for conference calls—but a video conference platform isn’t a livestream strategy. Meanwhile, setups like those used to capture live events for TV are clunky, complicated, and difficult to coordinate for production teams that remain remote.

Building on years of developing live experiential events that take place online and off, our experiential team has taken our learnings about what truly brings a live experience to life, and has developed a proprietary livestreaming suite that enables brands to take control and build dynamic experiences through a fun, lightweight and intuitive interface: LiveXP. You may have seen some of the experiences that LiveXP has enabled before, like our virtualization of BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival.

“The strength of the suite is that it’s so open and customizable that anything can be done,” says Rafael Fittipaldi, Partner & Creative Tech Director at MediaMonks Sao Paulo. LiveXP takes the baton from several of our previous live experiences–like Old Spice’s Foam Zone–and enables an even greater level of interactivity and versatility that’s missing from so many virtual events today. “Built for creatives, by creatives, the tool offers unprecedented freedom to power live, digital interactive.” Through this versatility, brands have an opportunity to develop more meaningful experiences for their at-home audiences.

Make the Live Experience Unique to an On-Demand One

Placemaking and presence might seem at odds with one of the primary benefits of a virtual event (or even a livestreamed version of an in-person one). After all, you can always catch a recording later, rather than be part of the live experience. But there’s still fun in anticipating the “big moment” and enjoying it with friends, especially when you add digital venues and game platforms into the mix. This need to partake in a collective human experience offers creative opportunities to build a sense of excitement and anticipation–and even a bit of FOMO.

“If you’re going to SXSW for example, you’re going to be going with friends and attending a lot of parties,” says Ciaran Woods, Executive Producer Experiential & Virtual Solutions at MediaMonks. “Can you expect the same for people attending something virtually—that they’ll block out their day and set things up for an optimal viewing experience?” The same goes for professional events; the value is not often on stage as much as it is in the handshakes and conversation that happens in the hallways between sessions.

Brands can try to capture this magic by building in a sense of exclusivity—that cachet of saying “I was there”—by offering digital “swag” rewarding engagement, or by including direct opportunities to participate in what’s happening on the screen. The virtual Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival used LiveXP to play to this advantage by highlighting chat comments, offering trivia questions and giving the community a chance to engage directly with performers through Q&A’s–whether they were watching on YouTube or Facebook. These indelible moments are critical to modernizing the livestreaming experience and delivering on the true potential of the medium.

Two-Way Interaction Redefines Virtual Presence

We’ve long called for digital interactivity to be baked into a live experience, though we often find that brands aren’t leaning into it enough. Consider all the webinars you’ve watched on a video conference platform whose interactive element is limited to a chat in the sidebar (or if you’re lucky, you might be given a Twitter hashtag to network or backchannel there). These tools are useful, but they fail to really capture what makes being at a live event exciting: building memories through engaging with others in the moment.

Livestreams should go further than being treated as just a one-way broadcast. This doesn’t benefit the audience alone; an event’s performer—whether they’re a musician, a conference speaker or athlete—thrives on seeing the energy of the audience at physical events. This has prompted the MediaMonks team to flip the focus not just on what’s happening on a digital stage, but what’s happening in the audience, too.

“We want to visualize a sense of presence,” says Woods. “That’s always something we’ve been pushing for in a livestream. What we’re seeing now is that it’s not just a remote in the hands of the audience, but also giving the speaker a sense of presence and the ability to listen and react.”

There are many ways this can play out, depending on the event itself: webinars can track real time interactions to topics throughout a talk, a live viewer count can translate into visual effects in a virtual conference, and cheering from the sidelines in the chat can trigger audio cues as athletes play over a livestream. Spectatorship is an important part of such events, and modern livestreams must reflect that.

By connecting seamlessly with livestream platforms and their communities, our proprietary LiveXP suite allows us to enable these interactions and more, powered by dynamic 3D assets and interactive overlays that can be switched up on the fly. Built for creative storytelling in mind, these streams elevate audiences from mere viewers to the role of true collaborators.

Of course, equally important to what happens during a live event is what happens before and after. When planning a digital live event, consider the total end-to-end experience. “What we’re focusing on is covering the entire journey—not only registration and communicating in the lead-up, but also thinking about teaser content and how to make even those interactive as well,” says Woods.

No matter what platform you’re hosting an event on, LiveXP’s versatility enables bespoke experiences to achieve your brand’s specific needs. “This isn’t about licensing a webinar tool and adapting your content to its limitations,” says Fittipaldi. “In collaboration with our clients on live experiential projects, we can customize the tool internally to fit unique brand and creative needs.”

From content that builds excitement to analytics-driven takeaways that can aid in lead nurturing or recommending further content down the line, there’s great potential for brands to upgrade their livestream strategies and connect more directly with audiences online. Building a space that enables digital presence may seem challenging, but new tools and ways of defining digital events offer opportunities to drive impact. With LiveXP powering the live digital experiences we build for audiences today, MediaMonks is able to enable these projects faster and with greater impact.

See for yourself what LiveXP can do.

Driving consumers indoors and online, it goes without stating that the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly changed the way that brands connect with their audiences. Now is the time for brands to catch up to the digital needs of their audiences and strategically prepare for the future so they bounce back stronger than ever.

Until now, many brands have already made some sort of investment in digital, whether it’s super-charging their social media feeds, building personalization into their content delivery or more. But there is always opportunity for brands to raise their digital maturity—something that’s become especially clear today.

As CTO Solutions at MediaMonks, Tim Goodman has helped brands adapt at every stage of the digital transformation journey. Despite the different approaches taken, the first step is always the same: “We really look closely at the business goals,” he says. “Are they looking to reach their clients more quickly? Improve their message? Streamline their processes?” By aligning business goals with market changes, here is how Goodman and his team help brands focus their efforts and transform at speed.

Fill the Capability Gap Between Tech and Creativity

In his keynote address at this year’s (digitized) Adobe Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen noted the importance of aligning creative teams and IT to unite such disparate experiences and the data that powers each, with both sides ultimately focused on the customer experience. “In the past, the CMO brought marketing and communications expertise, while CIOs knew how to architect systems and unite data,” he said. “But IT is becoming more customer-centric and marketing is becoming more data driven. They are working together more than ever. Your C-suite must be aligned around this customer-centricity.”

At MediaMonks, we’ve always believed in a confluence between creativity and technology, and how both work in tandem to deliver the experiences that customers need. Right now, there is a strong desire for emotionally resonant, relevant experiences in digital—and if brands aren’t prepared to offer them, then they must find a partner who can fill in those capability gaps.

Strategic Partnerships Keep Brands Current to Market Shifts

As an Adobe Platinum Partner and having won the Adobe Partner of the Year award nearly every year since its existence, the MediaMonks Solutions team is ideally situated to support brands as they aim to adapt and transform. It’s led by Goodman, who holds the record of most individual certifications (ten) and is the only individual in the Adobe Partner network globally to hold four Architect certifications (Adobe Experience Manager Forms, Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Analytics, and Campaign).

“In working with Adobe, I’m most proud of the trust we have built up together,” says Goodman. “We’ve built trust in their products, in their teams, in their understanding of the needs of the market. They’ve built trust in us to understand their technology, to implement it the way it’s meant to be implemented, and to make sure we give our clients the best advice that’s right for them.”

This close partnership and expertise has led the team to often break new ground, implementing new features from Adobe before anyone else. For example, we were the first organization in the world to implement the Adobe Experience Manager Asset Share module for a major Australian brand. This is just one of the benefits of how we keep a continuous process of learning to help brands adapt to rapidly changing market needs.

Making these adaptations can be challenging for brands, which is why it’s important to put them at ease through testing and clear communication. “Before we implement a new feature, we make sure that we’ve tried and tested it in labs before we let it loose in the wild,” says Goodman. “We also ensure that key Adobe engineers are engaged directly, because they want to see the success of these features as well.” Crucial to this process is communicating core software disciplines, including proper quality control, to marketing teams in plain English.

Translate Random Acts of Digital into a Consistent Ecosystem

Online behaviors have rapidly changed since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, but many brands have an initial foundation to build off of for digital transformation and a more connected customer decision journey. Right now, your digital experiences may primarily function as “random acts of digital”: individual experiences that build brand love or fulfill a specific business goal, but are ultimately self-contained and disconnected from other touchpoints along the customer decision journey.

Brands looking to accelerate their digital transformation in lockstep with emerging user behaviors can save time and efforts by connecting these already-existing digital experiences together—either serving the right content for the right context or carrying user data from one touchpoint to another.  Tools like Adobe Experience Manager are critical for synchronizing data to and enabling this level of contextual relevance, resulting in unique, personalized experiences.

“A unified message is critical, and this often means unifying the silos within the organization,” says Goodman. “Whether it’s moving to cross-channel communications, or multi-tenant solutions, or a Data Management platform that streamlines the audiences for the right messages, Adobe has the answer.” Goodman suggests that brands first start with the quick wins rather than boil the ocean. “We help build a strategy for organizations to move through their digital transformation in the stages that are right for their business.”

Quick access to MediaMonks’ vast, global team of creative expertise enables brands to identify opportunities to embark on overarching transformation initiatives. “Not only do we have Tim, the most-certified Adobe expert,” says Tom Nelms, Head of Partner Growth at MediaMonks. “In total, we have 188 certifications across our network. When we combine that tech ability with our creative, front-end approach, we can help brands transform at speed and scale across their ecosystems.”

Focused on system, people and process, the MediaMonks Solutions team is well versed in helping brands overcome the creative challenge of integrating experiences along a single coherent journey. Critical to the process is that creativity and technology work together to enable the experiences that consumers crave throughout the total brand experiences. And when brands are better equipped to optimize and transform at speed, they’re able to build lasting customer connections and adapt to future changes in the market.

Ready to take digital transformation to the next level?

It’s fitting that the premier digital experience conference went all-digital this year, as just one of many tech conferences that have rapidly adapted their strategies in light of the COVID-19 pandemic—building the on-demand streaming alternative in just a month. Pictured above, you’ll see MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar speaking at Adobe’s last tentpole event, Adobe MAX.

This urgency for stronger digital experiences served as a key theme for the conference. “We are clearly living in unprecedented times,” said Adobe Chairman, President and CEO Shantanu Narayen. “COVID-19 is changing everything about life and work as we know it. Now more than ever, we must come together as a community to share best practices to digitally engage with customers.”

During the keynote address, Adobe unveiled new tools and updated features that can help brands provide a better customer experience and reach their business goals: most notable is the Digital Economy Index, a tool that analyzes more than a trillion online transactions across 100 million product sales to help brands understand, act on and anticipate digital commerce trends. In addition to that and new updates to Adobe Experience Cloud Manager, Narayen called for a stronger relationship between CMOs and CIOs as brands spend 2020 refocusing their digital strategies and seek new ways to connect all known user data across the customer journey.

Digital is Table Stakes, and Brands Need to Adapt

 “Whether you’re replacing an in-person conference with a digital event, or working to engage with your customers virtually, the theme is the same: digital is revolutionizing how we interact with each other,” said Narayen. This sentiment has become all the more obvious in the past month, in which social distancing policies have shed a spotlight on the gaps that brands must fill in their digital transformation efforts and the need for emotionally resonant creative digital experiences.

Today, customer experiences are much more than just delivering delightful and relevant experiences in real time, it is supporting the users’ needs in an almost completely digital world. From e-commerce services bringing products to our door, to paperless contracts and virtual offices, or digital tools enabling students to continue with their education, “digital isn’t only changing and reshaping our daily lives, it’s driving the economy,” says Narayen.

This change isn’t exactly new, but has become a moment of reckoning for brands. “Everything has been moving remote and online in one way, shape or form over the years,” says Henry Cowling, Managing Director at MediaMonks San Francisco, in our most recent report on reactivating customer obsession. “This is the chance for brands to really look at that, and reinvent how the digital experience looks and feels, because they’ll need to do it eventually.” 

The Moment for Real-Time CX is Here

Prioritizing customer experience management has become fundamental in a world dominated by digital interactions. Users expect more and demand more from brands, and they do not have the patience to wait for it, they want it all right now. Brands need to understand and use their data to craft a personalized and relevant experience that their users will enjoy in real time.

In one breakout session, Adobe Principal Product Manager Trevor Paulson reassured audiences, “Almost everyone is trying to better understand the entire customer journey across all their channels … So, if you think you’re behind your competition, chances are you’re probably not.” Among the top challenges in customer journey analytics he identified are disconnected data, not enough data expertise and inability to action insights—each of which inhibit a brand’s ability to meet its audience’s needs throughout the full, end-to-end brand experience.

Cross-functional collaboration helps brands gather together diverse knowledge and expertise to bridge these gaps. Successfully achieving data-driven creative workstreams is key to building the creatively differentiated experiences that build brand love, assisting consumers wherever and whenever it’s most needed along the CDJ.

Get Ready for a Cookie-less Future

Third-party cookies have been a key part of digital experiences for a long time, but that is coming to an end. With browsers having banned them gradually over the last years, Google announced a few months ago that it will eliminate all third-party cookies in 24 months. We are entering a new era of cross-domain personalization enabled only for known users.

“Cookies aren’t that good for marketing, they overstate how many people brands are actually reaching, they lead to wrong demographic targeting, they miss conversions that are happening, and they overrepresent the individual you are trying to target,” said Justin Merickel, VP of Adobe Advertising Cloud. “They haven’t been great at providing the value that they were set out to do.”

“Delivering personalized experiences at scale requires rethinking the approach to data,” says Pari Sawant, Director of Product Management at Adobe. First, they must remember that personalization should aim to truly help consumers; and to execute on that need, they must realize the power of context over relentless retargeting.

Knowing that brands will soon not be able to use third-party data, which today may make up a good portion of all their data points, they need to rethink how they use it to build truly valuable experiences by owning, operating and maximizing first-party data. Data clean rooms offer one interesting solution; as brands aim to reinvent their CX strategies or digitally transform in a fast-changing digital landscape, brands can lean on their creative partners to highlight new technologies as they emerge and determine which make the best fit.

Customers Expect Control All Across their Journey

For decades consumers were forced to stay static and receive an experience where they had no input whatsoever, but with the emergence of digital and mobile environments, they have become empowered, and they know it. Consumers expect to have a say on everything, from the decisions they make, to the content they consume, at every single touch point. 

For decades, consumers have had little control over how their data was used by brands. But with brands focused on a need for building first-party relationships a cookie-less world, an opportunity emerges for them to empower customers. to become active participants in the creative experiences they consume. There needs to be a clear value exchange for users to part with their data, further driving home the need for content to be assistive. This approach requires brands to take ownership of the customer relationship.

The bar has been raised for consumers and brands alike, particularly when it comes to digital native newcomers who have forged deep relationships with consumers by aligning purpose with data-driven creativity. “The experiences they receive in the applications and services they use online every day have led them to demand the same from every brand they deal with,” said Nick McLachlan, Product Marketing lead for Advertising Cloud in APAC at Adobe. Between 65% and 70% of consumers expect highly contextual, personalized experiences in real time.

Brands face a unique challenge in order to fulfill the customers’ expectations; they need to create strategies that cater to those needs across every channel, taking a user-centered approach to how they do business. These challenges have come to a head in a year where fractures in brands’ existing digital strategies are apparent. Thankfully, the Adobe Summit streaming platform goes live at the perfect time for brands to begin refocusing their strategies for the rest of the year and beyond.

This week, marketers descended upon San Diego for ANA’s Digital & Social Media Conference, where representatives from top brands within their respective industries spoke about their approaches to digital marketing. An over-arching theme of the event was how digital experience (DX)—through a combination of investments in emerging tech, supporting cultural moments and delivering authentic social content—builds brand love in an era where consumers are increasingly critical (and annoyed by) online advertising.

From machine learning to influencer marketing to programmatic, ANA’s speakers covered it all. We’ve cherrypicked the highlights to keep you up-to-date on where top brands have met success, and the learnings they’ve taken from it.

Being a “Challenger” Brand Isn’t About Size—It’s Attitude

When you think of challenger brands, you probably think of smaller, up-and-coming brands that have sprung onto the scene with disruptive strategies that upend their respective industries. But even established, legacy brands can be challengers in their own right. Sharing the stage with representatives from VMLY&R in the talk “How Inventive Brand Experiences Are Powering New Balance’s Success,” New Balance Global Consumer Marketing Director Allie Tsavdarides positioned the athletic brand as a challenger dedicated to seeking out ways to do things smarter.

Amplify your team’s DX capabilities across the full customer journey.

One way to do this? Injecting the brand with some cultural relevance by “looking to engage in a cultural point in time.” Going far beyond tweeting a message acknowledging a holiday or event, New Balance’s interest lies in taking a more strategic approach to cultural moments. Both the brand and its agency showcased their Runaway Pub, a pub opened in the lead-up to the London Marathon, where runners could pay for drinks with digital points earned by succeeding in a series of running challenges.

The campaign leveraged a cultural moment that inspired many to achieve their running and fitness goals, giving runners a space not only to train, but to connect and unwind over a couple of (free!) pints. MediaMonks helped bring the experience to life by enabling the integration between fitness app Strava—which measured users’ running progress—and the digital wallet, and by producing a clever bartender web app to ensure simple, seamless service.

Embrace Being a Work-in-Progress

New Balance wasn’t the only legacy brand embracing tech in innovative ways. In his talk “From Bad Pizza to Machine Learning,” Domino’s VP of Digital Marketing and Global Ecommerce Christopher Thomas-Moore discussed how important it is for brands to consider themselves as works-in-progress. While many brands might find discomfort in the move-fast-and-break-things attitude popularized by startups, Thomas-Moore suggests the secret to the Domino’s pizza sauce is being an early adopter of emerging tech.

“Being an early adopter allows your brand to understand and refine,” he said. So is Domino’s—who’s prototyped delivery robots, self-driving cars, an order-taking chatbot and was named 2018’s Tech Accelerator of the Year—a tech company, or a pizza company? For Thomas-Moore, everything ties back to the core product; if the pizza weren’t good, after all, no one would want to eat it. “If we could get our product right, then the other pieces would fall in place,” he told the audience.

MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar says that “Real innovation lies in learning how to start matching your products and services to evolve with user behavior.” It’s through this desire to constantly iterate that brands like Domino’s and New Balance can adopt a challenger mindset.

You Can’t Beat a Good Story

In her talk “Target: Innovation Driven by the Basics,” Kristi Argyilan—President of Target’s in-house media company Roundel—gave a peek at how the retailer generates results for its partners and itself: relevance. Mentioning shuttered retailers like Toys ‘R’ Us, The Limited and Circuit City, Argilyan noted that “what every failure has in common is that it was preceded by a loss of relevance.” (It’s worth noting that Toys ‘R’ Us may have learned its lesson, with plans to return just in time for the holidays with a renewed focus on experience.)

Retailers—and brands in general—are at a crossroads on delivering more relevant messages and experiences to their consumers, who are spread across many different channels along the path to purchase. Target’s Roundel media company exists to hit a bullseye on consumer needs by pushing relevant content tailor-made for Target guests.

From applying the retailer’s own insights to crafting creative and picking the most relevant channels, Roundel, quite simply, is dedicated to giving people what they want. “People don’t like online ads,” says Argyilan. “They like good stories.”

With user journeys becoming increasingly fragmented, these stories will need to fit within a larger strategic narrative that can be easily reconfigured to different segments and channels. In the conference’s first kickoff session, “From Alligator to Zebra: Digital Storytelling at the San Diego Zoo,” the zoo’s Director of Marketing Debra Erickson discussed how “a great story is great, and it’s platform-agnostic.”

But how do brands envision a platform-agnostic story? Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell noted later during the conference that the “big idea” approach is outdated, and that brands must leverage data to address end-to-end customer journeys. Along these means, Argyilan noted the importance of leveraging partnerships—even for in-house media companies like Roundel—to expand a brand’s capabilities for maintaining relevance across channels and from all directions in the decision-making process.

First and Foremost, Social is About People

If anyone understands applying data to achieve relevance, it’s MGM Resorts. Their VP of Social Portfolio Strategy, Beverly Jackson, spoke about how data is key to meeting customers’ expectations. But just as important is authenticity, which the brand maintains through social-first, fit-for-format content.  Some of Jackson’s most interesting ideas were about social: “Selling FOMO is becoming just as important as selling a ticket,” she said.

According to Jackson, “social marketing is on the frontlines of bringing the brand promise to life.” By applying data-driven insights to content that in turn drives experiences, the brand has adopted a lean, nimble approach to social marketing that helps it better deliver upon consumers’ shifting expectations.

One of the key ways that MGM inspires consumers is through strategic influencer partnerships—and they weren’t alone. In her talk “Creating Digital Content That Sparks Engagement,” Emeline Berlind, VP of Content Strategy at Sephora, mentioned that “social was created for people, not brands,” highlighting the unique points of view that influencers offer to brands and their audience. As for how to remain authentic in these partnerships, she said that “It’s a balancing act … We can’t be too prescriptive with the brief. We create guidelines, but are not prescriptive.”