The new Wave covers CMOs’ need for integrated digital marketing solutions. “…As C-suite demands for growth and cost effectiveness rise, some enterprise buyers are seeking integrated and orchestrated solutions to unlock value across marketing campaigns, customer experience (CX), and commerce,” writes the report’s author, Forrester Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall. The Forrester Wave(™): Global Marketing Services, Q3 2022 evaluates partners’ abilities to meet each of these needs, helping CMOs identify the one that suits them.

Measured us among our industry peers, Pattisall wrote, “Media.Monks is a good fit for CMOs wanting to push the boundaries of digital (and partnership) with end-to end creative, production, analytics, and activation services.” This is the ambition we hold ourselves to in a time of intense transformation and the cusp of a new era of virtualization, in which insight into consumer behavior are key to unlocking compelling digital experiences and broad transformation.

Hyper-accelerated adoption of consumer behaviors and seismic shifts in the privacy landscape are putting marketers under pressure to deliver differentiated creative experiences. Those who aim to meet virtualized behaviors today require a partner who puts their own skin in the game, takes bold risks and helps them gain confidence to do so—all by seamlessly integrating a suite of services and expertise that shortcut to impact.

A new era calls for a growth partner of record.

A key insight surfaced by the Wave is how the need for integrated marketing services has erupted in recent years. “A recent COMvergence report for new business in the US shows that integrated agency reviews increased fourfold from 2020 to 2021,” writes Pattisall. “And according to Forrester’s Q1 B2C Marketing CMO Pulse Survey, 2022, 31% of B2C CMOs at organizations with 500-plus employees intend to integrate creative and media assignments to boost marketing impact.”

While integrated services are increasingly desired by brands, we’re proud to note that we were the first to bring the unitary idea to the market. Building a foundation in digital freed us from the baggage that beleaguers the more traditional names as they adapt to a new digital era. In a 2020 article, Pattisall told Campaign, “The industry is quite literally trying to move on from the shadow of its advertising heritage to better future proof itself.”

Meanwhile, we believe our newness gives us an edge over the nine other providers evaluated in the Wave when it comes to integration. “Like all others in the category, Media.Monks pursues a strategy to pair end-to-end marketing services, although its newness and mergers/acquisitions make the goal more achievable,” writes Pattisall.

This successful combination of services allows world-leading brands (and future household names) to focus their attention on outcomes that drive growth—not getting lost in a tangle of random acts of digital strung together by a group of competing partners. By bridging together expertise across four pillars—creative content, data, digital media and technology services—we can identify the quickest path to success and iterate toward longer term, broad transformational goals.

Reinventing the model, inside and out.

 “[Media.Monks’] esoteric vision to ‘win the decade’ speaks to its company’s artistic bravado,” Pattisall writes in the report, and achieving this goal relies on growing a new generation of digital technology experts. “Media.Monks’ moxie derives from its strong culture, talent, and EX, marked by an emphasis on upskilling employees, diversity, and programs for social justice and supporting employee 'side hustles’ to stoke creativity." Our Punk.Monks initiative is an example of how we do this. By spotlighting a different member of our community every other week, the series showcases the creative endeavors, businesses, charities and passion projects helmed by our talented team.

Such initiatives demonstrate a trademark of our people: we act like owners, and this foments a shared sense of trust and responsibility in our approach to collaboration. A consultancy may give you something top dollar but not exceptional, because their primary commitment is to their own brand. But truly remarkable results come from a consultative approach that brings work to life—not only consultation and strategy, but also execution derived from a maker’s mindset.

And that also means giving brands themselves greater ownership and control—something the traditional model has withheld for too long. Whether to provide ownership of data, oversight into media optimization and control over how the budget is allocated, a significant part of our service is to help brand marketers become more self-sufficient with unconstrained access to top-tier talent who can scale their ambition to new heights.

True disruption calls for strategic risk.

While the brands and technology platforms we partner with have a verve to shake up their respective industries, we’ve found that in our own market, that same eagerness to agitate is rare. Legacy setups may guarantee success for their clients by eliminating risk, but this conservative approach fails to help brands who need to become disruptive leaders in their own right. With the recent additions of TheoremOne and Zemoga to our team, our technology services pillar continues to rapidly evolve to help brands transform to a new era.

Strategy also plays a key role in balancing risk and reward. While unbridled risk can be problematic, we welcome a level of controlled risk to amplify creativity with intelligence. This helps generate unexpected outcomes for brands, particularly as the hyper adoption of new consumer behaviors challenge the tried-and-true strategies that marketers have leaned on in the past. Following this challenger’s mindset, creative briefs aren’t built just to resonate and perform, but to also generate new qualitative and quantitative data that open opportunities to co-create with audiences.

Success in this new era calls for reliable partnerships built on radical transparency and a shared desire to disrupt. Through cultivating a strong global culture of diverse digital experts with a high level of ownership, we’re committed to helping brands find the best solution—or invent new ones where they previously didn’t exist—to their needs. That’s the strength of a partner who can do it all, and we’re up to the challenge.

Just in time for putting the finishing touches on strategic marketing plans for the new year, Forrester has recently released three reports, authored by Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall, identifying key goals for modern marketers and the partners who can best help achieve them: the Q4 2021 reports “Now Tech: Media Management Services,” “Now Tech: Global Marketing Services” and “Now Tech: Marketing Creative and Content Services.”

When read together, they illustrate a marketing services industry in flux—a moment that puts the traditional advertising/marketing services model into question. Jay Pattisall writes in Now Tech: Global Marketing Services, Q4 2021: “CMOs and B2C marketing executives, if you, like so many we have spoken with, wrestle to deliver more growth and acquisition with fewer marketing resources, then it’s time for a new model. No longer will you find the effectiveness needed to elevate your marketing impact by piecing together multiple best-in-class providers from market to market.” We couldn't agree more.

It's Time for Agencies to Answer the Call

Pattisall's insight pre-empted a recent article by Jameson Fleming at Adweek that captures agencies and digital service partners wrestling with an existential question: what's their superpower? Exploring how agencies can better demonstrate their value—particularly toward marketers who are dealing with the very same urgent needs as raised by Pattisall's research—Fleming advises agencies “to show how different moving parts can function together to create more agile and responsive teams.”

Taking the opportunity to share our own perspective, S4Capital Founder and Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell explained the strength that lies in our digital-first focus: “The great thing about digital is it’s about brainpower, not brawn,” he said. “When you’re buying media in a nanosecond, the need for brainpower rather than brawn becomes more and more important.” This inseparable relationship between strategy and agile execution is crucial to unlocking the flexibility and speed that brands require to adapt and prepare for another year of disruption.

This means partners who can offer creative problem-solving supported by a customer-centric perspective when it comes to content; who can deliver growth within the stop-and-go pandemic recovery in their global marketing; and deliver expertise in media management to respond to shifting privacy regulations imposed by both governments and big tech—not to mention consumers’ own evolving digital behaviors.

The Industry is Overdue for a New Model

Flip through the names listed in the reports linked above and you'll find that Media.Monks is the only name that shows up on each—because we've always understood the necessity of integrating and unifying each of these capabilities into a new model built for a new era. Even when specialist partners belong to the same holding company, foundational complexities inherent to the traditional model often stifle their ability to coordinate swiftly together to meet a client’s need. “The irony of networks is they do not have a network effect,” Media.Monks Co-Founder Wesley ter Haar told audiences at Advertising Week New York last fall, detailing how our API model is built to scale up and flex out across solutions and capabilities at speed.

The same idea translates to our merger model. Noting that many traditional holding companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to scale capabilities and delivery, in the Forrester report noted above, Pattisall advises marketers to “ensure all the operating companies share the same goals, the same incentive structure, and answer to the same leader—ideally the global account lead.” This is where true integration thrives in building alignment. 

“For traditional companies, the old trade was you retain your autonomy and independence and we’ll do the back office. Our trade is different: you merge your company into ours, and you become part of Media.Monks,” Sir Martin Sorrell told Erik Siekmann in a recent episode of the Marketing Transformation Podcast. This approach to mergers—not acquisitions—lays the groundwork for streamlined collaboration across clients’ integrated marketing needs, because everyone is on the same team united by the same values.

Toward Stronger, More Flexible Partnership

The need for greater flexibility has become only more urgent as global supply chain issues, inflation, pandemic uncertainties and other geopolitical disruptions continue. This has led to an urgent need for scalable solutions that fit brands’ changing needs as digital behaviors evolve. One way we’ve been able to build strong, collaborative relationships with brands is our “land and expand” strategy, in which we’re brought in to solve a key need, then work along with our clients to zero in on more opportunities to make a greater impact or deliver stronger results. 

In “Now Tech: Marketing Creative and Content Services, Q4 2021,” Pattisall recommends setting “an environment for co-innovation” between yourself and partners: “Increase your brand’s and your agencies’ chances to hit the creative mark with a co-innovation partnership, where internal marketing experts and external content and campaign experts work together.” With a shared desire with both parties to innovate, our “land and expand” relationships with brands grow along with their ambition. In addition, this frees brands from a continual cycle of navigating competitive pitches that slow innovation momentum.

Such an approach only works when a partner has broken down the silos and barriers that traditionally stifle collaboration, innovation and agility—for example, marrying strategy, data with production to boost creative effectiveness in real time. By collaborating with a partner whose unitary model provides seamless access to a diverse team of global talent, brands will be better supported in strengthening the effectiveness of their marketing across the digital ecosystem.