“The customer is not a moron, she is your wife.” This less famous quote by David Ogilvy is about 70 years old, but has lost none of its relevance.

In fact, it is directly in line with Apple’s Tim Cook’s appeal at CPCD on January 29. Coverage of it has been very one-sided, focusing on Cook’s alleged criticism of Facebook. However, Cook gave a tour d’horizon of using technology for good, and the resulting corporate responsibility and positioning of Apple.

David Ogilvy couldn’t have known any of this 70 years ago, but he urged even then to take consumers seriously, to respect them as people who are intelligent enough to see through over-the-top advertising and who had better not be bored to death. “You cannot bore people into buying” in 2021 also means that you don’t buy the data of umpteen marketers together, in order to then track a consumer via targeting across the most diverse applications. In the 20s of this century, as in the 50s of the past, you need content: advertising that fascinates, that interests, that can generate resonance on its own.

But we no longer live in the time of Ogilvy or Bernbach. We live in the time of technology and data. If Ogilvy understood creativity as a measure of courtesy to consumers, modern marketers must face the challenge of how the demand for this courtesy plays out in their own strategy on data and technology. Or within Tim Cook’s logic, how to live up to one’s social responsibility as an advertising company—and thus as a service provider in this field. 

Not everything should go through the cycle of it emerging, being misused and consequently banned before we look at it critically and allow it to be possible with the right effect. The events surrounding elections in once democratic fortresses, or the division of societies through the spread of fake news should concern everyone who uses these media or uses them commercially for themselves. This is not solved with a one-time boycott as an advertising partner of Facebook, as effective as the #StopHateForProfit initiative was. 

But even then, criticism was mixed in with the applause, and questions were raised about financial or moral motives, about one-time restrictions or permanent consequences.

There was little discussion, however, about whether it was enough to point the finger at the social media giants or whether the company should reassess its own handling of customer data. In Germany in particular, the discussion about customer data usually only takes place in connection with legal initiatives, i.e. the DSVGO. What is allowed and what is not seems to be more important than what is right and what is not. The sudden abandonment of cookies is understood as an obstacle in the same way as the advent of adblockers five years ago.

However, in 2020, the year of COVID, two other major developments are significant that put the issue in a different light. One is the debate around purpose for brands. More and more marketing decision-makers believe their brand needs to communicate what role it wants to play in society, what it should stand for. One can argue whether candy bars need a socially relevant role or whether such a question should be decided in marketing and addressed in communication. But one can hardly argue whether brands that claim such a strategy for themselves also need to provide answers about their responsibility in handling and using data. This topic is causally located in marketing and is a direct question of communication. 

The second major issue in 2020/21 is that of direct customer access. D2C (direct to consumer) was one of the big winners at a time when many brands felt that the absence of a strategy in ecommerce; the dependence on a few platforms can make business very cumbersome, to put it nicely. The investment of a billion on the part of Dr. Oetker was not about a few leased delivery trucks, but about owning the last mile, bringing access to customers and the use of data for assortment and sales planning.

And while this deal was one of the big headlines in Germany during COVID, it’s important to note that most marketers have a purpose strategy in place rather than a data strategy. The Marketing Tech Monitor 2020 suggests that this strategy isn’t even in the drawer—no, it’s mostly not even in the planning stages.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to engage with customers because their media behavior has changed so massively. And even if many still carelessly release all cookies with every single website visit, marketing that continues to rely solely on the data policy of third parties will be too expensive in the long run. An idea about direct access to customers, about a first-party data strategy and on which technology this should be mapped, is becoming more and more essential. Technology for the benefit of people, as Tim Cook put it. And how do companies position themselves in this regard, what is their responsibility, who wants to be “a good corporate citizen in a tech world?” Marketing has to answer these questions, because the customer becomes pickier, but never becomes stupid. As David Ogilvy described it 70 years ago.

This article was originally published in German at Horizont. You can find follow-up coverage from Horizont here.

The imperative to keep up digitally is felt by many, though the challenge is especially felt by museums under pressure to infuse their collections with cultural relevance for their patrons. In aiming to make a historic event more tangible or a culture more understood, digital media offers museums and cultural institutions an excellent opportunity to reconsider how they will continue to inspire the visitors of tomorrow.

Few institutions have the built-in relevance to contemporary pop culture than the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which honors the music genre’s most iconic and influential artists, both past and present (and just recently announced its inductees for 2020). Just in time for its new honorees, the Hall of Fame unveiled the fruit of its own reimagined efforts, made in collaboration with MediaMonks: a complete overhaul of its website, which now offers a bold, impactful visual style that complements the forward-thinking acts and artists to whom the museum pays tribute.

Drive Innovation with Purpose

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s mission is “to engage, teach and inspire through the power of rock & roll.” The new website delivers on this promise through a content-heavy theme that brings artifacts from the museum’s collection to life through scans and images. This way, users can preview what the museum has to offer before they visit—or can enjoy bits from the collection even if they’re unable to make a trip.

“The artifacts enhance the discovery phase and tease the collection,” says Brook Downton, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. Users find this content strung across more than 300 Hall of Fame Inductee biography pages, which lend each artifact context and meaning. The biographies are also linked contextually; for example, each page invites you to explore other artists inducted in the same year or that are particularly relevant or influential.

On one hand, this encourages users to explore and browse through the Hall of Fame’s website much like they would wander around the museum itself—balancing a sense of aimless browsing with meaningful curation. “We bring the user into rabbit holes from one artist to another,” says Downton. “It’s a website where you can spend an hour, rather than just five minutes.”

This web of interconnected artists also enables a more personalized experience by making it easier for visitors to find and discover items they’d most like to see. Museums can be overwhelming, after all, but a data-driven user journey can help users not only find the most relevant exhibits, but also discover something entirely new. “Museums are a reflection of humanity and society, of art and movements,” says Downton. “With digital, museums can make the experience for patrons much more accessible and personalized.”

Build Efficiency to Build Momentum

So, how does one not only embark on such a transformation, but actually sustain it from concept to market? One of the biggest pain points that hinders a project of this scale is time, making it difficult for brands to continue their efforts to achieve long-term goals.

Noting that CMOs historically don’t last more than a few years in their role, Forrester Senior Analyst Tina Moffett writes in her report “Marketers, Stop Sacrificing Long-Term Goals for Short-Term Wins” that “This revolving door makes it difficult to execute long-term marketing strategies, especially ones that depend on data-driven insights that take six months to a year to measure.”

A digital revolution is a lengthy process—so much so that it’s ever-evolving and never complete. There’s the need to transition away from legacy systems, invest in new skillsets and measure whether the transformation has even been effective. To meet success in these efforts, brands must carry momentum throughout a multi-phase process on the path to success.

That’s why we begin with a laser focus on delivering fast results that fuel investment in long-term goals. For the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, for example, we began by transforming the look of microsite that allows fans to cast their vote for new Inductees—an important, annual activation that drives fan participation and renews public interest in the museum year after year. This smaller-scale transformation gives us (and brands) the chance to take our learnings and apply them to the main project once completed.

Honoring the Past, Looking to the Future

As you develop a project, continually look for new opportunities to improve the total brand experience. For museums, this means extending focus beyond the website and what role it plays in ultimately getting visitors through the door. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame achieved this by offering a series of curated, self-guided tours on its website, though future plans include a feature that will let users build unique, personalized tours based on their favorite artists. Such features not only inform patrons of what they will see before they visit, but also functions as a tool to help them truly connect with what the museum has to offer.

Best-in-class digital design offers incredible opportunities for any brand to build impactful experiences, whether it be through social media-inspired navigation as described above or simply a remarkably designed website. This is especially true for cultural institutions with a mission to educate patrons and provide access to cultural artifacts—offering new ways to infuse relevance in a shared cultural heritage.

Discover new ways to engage audiences digitally.

Hay una estadística que nadie en la industria de viajes puede ignorar: el turismo generó un ingreso de US $1.7 trillones en 2018, según la Organización Mundial del Turismo. Desde hoteles, hasta casinos o aerolíneas, abundan las oportunidades disponibles para la gran cantidad de jugadores en esta industria, y en una región en particular esto es claro como el agua: América Latina. En nuestro más reciente reporte Destination América Latina: Tendencias que dan forma a la experiencia del cliente de viajes en la región, nos centramos en esta parte del mundo para resaltar las principales tendencias que están dando forma al presente y el futuro del turismo a través de una enfoque regional pero con una perspectiva global.

Las nuevas tecnologías, la transformación digital y los nuevos jugadores disruptivos son sólo algunas de las tendencias que están revolucionando la industria de viajes en todo el mundo. Pero hay una cosa que los une a todos: estar enfocados en brindar la mejor y más innovadora experiencia al cliente.

Si las marcas quieren sobrevivir en esta industria cada vez más competitiva, necesitan comprender mejor y abordar las necesidades de sus clientes, y luego entregarles experiencias digitales diferenciadas y de primer nivel. Pero lograr esto es una tarea compleja que requiere adoptar nuevas estrategias de contenido y producción que estén mejor equipadas para la personalización y posicionadas para satisfacer a los usuarios en todo el ecosistema digital.

La transformación es un desafío enorme no sólo para los recién llegados que tienen un presupuesto limitado, sino también para las marcas establecidas. La inversión necesaria para lograr esto pondrá a prueba sus capacidades en todos los niveles de la organización. Querer satisfacer las necesidades del cliente no será suficiente, las marcas deben desarrollar procesos ágiles y forjar asociaciones repartidas en el recorrido más amplio del consumidor, para que puedan apoyar mejor las necesidades de viaje de sus usuarios.

Teniendo en cuenta la experiencia del usuario, las marcas pueden comenzar su transformación digital para que sus usuarios viajen de la mejor manera posible, al tiempo que mejoran su negocio.

Descubre cómo impacta y mueve la experiencia del cliente a la industria de viajes en América Latina.

In today’s landscape where personalization and relevance are critical, marketers are increasingly asked to understand both the creative and technical sides of the equation when it comes to delivering digital experiences to customers. S4Capital, a new-era model offering end-to-end advertising services to brands and organizations around the world, bridges that gap: “Data is at the center of what we do,” Sir Martin Sorrell, Founder and Executive Chairman of S4Capital, told IBC365 in a recent interview. “People that claim data destroys creativity or hinders it are talking nonsense. Good data and good insights inform creativity and makes it more effective.”

Achieving this requires close collaboration between MediaMonks, whose forte lies in creativity and enabling efficient production at scale, and MightyHive, who provides consulting and services in the areas of media operations and training, data strategy, and analytics. Emily Del Greco, President of the Americas at MightyHive, puts it succinctly: “MediaMonks is about taking the risk, and MightyHive comes quickly with feedback [backed by data.]”

We sat down with Myles Younger, Senior Director of Marketing at MightyHive, to discuss one of the biggest challenges that brands face when it comes to measuring performance and developing insights-driven content: privacy. From GDPR to the new California Consumer Privacy Act, privacy is going to become more challenging through 2020. For brands that struggle to look beyond the walled gardens of partner and platform data to gain a fuller view of their customers, Younger offers some advice: consider investing in a data clean room, which enables partners to develop new insights without compromising their audiences’ privacy. Younger walks us through what data clean rooms are, what you might consider before setting one up and more.

How would you explain data clean rooms?

Myles Younger: My analogy for how I would explain it is: imagine you have two data owners, ColorCo and FoodCo. ColorCo has data on its audience, including everyone’s favorite color. FoodCo has a similar audience to ColorCo, and knows their favorite food. ColorCo would like to know what the overlap is between their audiences, maybe identifying what the most popular combinations are in favorite color versus food—but neither wants to reveal to the other any personally identifiable information that could compromise the value of their data or the privacy of their audience.

A data clean room allows them to bring their data together in a neutral environment to figure out where the overlap is, meaning they might find that 300 people in their audience favor yellow and hotdogs—but neither ColorCo nor FoodCo know who those 300 people are, they just get the overlaps. That’s the special thing: you build new insights while protecting individual privacy.

Speaking of privacy, that’s a major concern for brands and their audiences. How do data clean rooms ensure brands still get a high quality of insights?

MY: Traditional methods of understanding the user are beginning to erode and brands are embracing first-party data that gives them a truer sense of who their audience is and what they need. What’s important to remember about data clean rooms is that they offer you access to insights gained from the first-party data of others.

As cookie-driven campaign measurement continues to become less reliable, brands are going to have to start looking elsewhere for insights on creative performance, reach and frequency, and attribution. Because data clean rooms generate insights from first-party data, they should be towards the top of every marketer’s list to at least become familiar with, if not start tinkering with.

At MediaMonks, we often discuss with clients the importance of delivering a total brand experience, applying insights and user data across a customer decision journey that extends beyond a single platform. Could data clean rooms aid in this process?

MY: Absolutely! Data clean rooms could aid in delivering the total brand experience in more meaningful ways than we’ve ever seen before. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it’s justified.

Up until now, digital ad targeting, personalization, measurement and optimization have been based on what you might call the “total cookie experience.” Cookies and ad tech tracking IDs form a big universe, but it’s an isolated place. Even before things like GDPR and Safari ITP, it was very difficult to connect millions of ephemeral (and often fraudulent) browser cookies and third-party tracking IDs back to genuine business data (customers, products, transactions, loyalty and preference data, stores, apps, strategic partner data, etc). Given that clean rooms run on first-party databases and not cookies, brands gain the opportunity to tap into the totality of CX data sets when making analyses or optimizations. For marketers who have been used to making fuzzy inferences from nebulous, siloed cookie pools, I think working from actual business data is going to seem like a revelation.

What else would excite brands about data clean rooms?

MY: Data clean rooms are a big win for measuring performance and ROI. Let’s say you’re a CPG brand, meaning you’re likely selling your product through distributors and retailers. Traditionally, you might have to wait months for reportage on transaction data. But we have a CPG client who uses data clean rooms to interrogate or query a retailer’s POS data in almost real time.

Given the rapid access to insights that data clean rooms offer, what are some other ways that working with one would change my day-to-day as a marketer or strategist?

MY: There really is a promise for far more rapid access to data. Previously, many marketers’ approaches were cookie-driven, which adds latency and degrades fidelity of the data. Data clean rooms let you act on a more instantaneous basis.

And while data clean rooms inhibit ownership or direct access to others’ data, it really can bring you closer to it. That might sound counter-intuitive, but data clean rooms prompt you to shift your perspective a bit. We always ask our clients: what do you want, the data or the insights? You probably want the latter, and while data clean rooms might keep you an arm’s length from the data itself, they bring you closer to the insights.

How easy is it to partner with another brand or company to join data in a clean room? Do you think data clean rooms will usher in greater collaboration as brands discover overlaps between their audiences?

MY: This is clearly an area for early adopters right now, but MightyHive is seeing early success and we’re onboarding advertisers into clean rooms left and right. The momentum is clearly there.

A smart place to start with respect to inter-brand collaboration is with existing strategic brand partnerships. For example: whenever consumers travel, they’re inundated with sophisticated partner marketing programs across airlines, booking sites, hotels, loyalty programs and credit cards. These brand and audience partnerships already exist, and clean rooms are probably going to come into play more and more as a means to share audiences, CX touchpoints, measurement data and insights.

Get your hands dirty with data clean rooms.

You might want to sit down for this: Gartner recently released its report looking ahead at 2020, and in it, they offer some surprising findings. Most notably, the firm predicts that “80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both” by 2025.

Yet consumers love personalization. According to Adobe’s 2018 Consumer Content Survey, 67% of respondents think brands should automatically adjust content based on context, and 42% are annoyed by content that isn’t personalized. Personalization isn’t something that gives a brand an edge over competition; it’s an expectation from consumers who crave relevance among an abundance of content. But when personalization seems tough for many marketers, what can be done?

These challenges identified by Gartner exemplify how important it is that marketers set themselves up for success when investing in personalization. Because personalization isn’t the problem—it’s whether marketers have built an attribution model, have enabled it to surface up insights or drive action, and are revising that approach based on the results they receive. Those who don’t will ultimately fail, leading to the frustrations raised by Gartner. While brands shouldn’t abandon personalization, they could do without unwieldy investments and initiatives that take years before their value can be adequately measured, perhaps even locking them into a setup that doesn’t actually work. Here’s what to do instead.

Strategic Planning is Key to Effective Personalization

In light of recent privacy concerns, some brands are completely rethinking the way they target audiences. Google and UK newspaper The Guardian, for example, teamed up to offer Google Home ads that are relevant to the types of recipes next to which they were placed. To achieve this, they taught a machine learning model to identify qualities about each recipe (like sweet versus savory or ingredients), which was then used to dynamically build relevant ads—basically, targeting data about the actual recipes rather than the readers that are interested in them.

There are two takeaways when it comes to initiatives like this. First, it signals the growing importance of contextual triggers and how they relate to the consumer’s mindset—consider, for example, programmatically delivering a piece of content in response to a playlist based on mood (“Songs for Relaxing”) or activity (“Background Music for Cooking”). Second, the strategy demonstrates the importance of having a backend taxonomy of content that can plug into the systems needed to deliver such a personalized experience—and that’s precisely where many are having trouble.

Data isn’t really the primary inhibitor to personalization, nor is it technology; it’s often people, and this can range from digital literacy to operational structure. According to data from eMarketer, only about a third of US marketers are confident in their ability to create or deliver personalized advertising to customers. A whopping 44% say that they have no real CX strategy or tech capability.

“Even digital professionals who have customer data often say that their teams are disconnected from other groups and lack the resources to find insights in the data to improve CX,” writes Forrester Senior Analyst Nick Barber and VP Principal Analyst Brendan Witcher in their report, “There’s No Personalization Without Content Intelligence.” “Failure to find the right size and structure for the organization is a common problem; in fact, digital execs cite it as the top barrier to the successful delivery of digital experiences.”

Brands need confidence in their data and ownership in orchestrating the digital experience, though the size and scale of digital transformation required have made this cumbersome for many. To avoid becoming stuck in lengthy implementation phases, brands should seek out agile partners that can help them build momentum and quickly and achieve faster results.

In an interview with LinkedIn, Digital Analyst Brian Solis describes the process thus: “While you’re migrating things to the cloud, while you’re doing bigger, more infrastructure-focused investments, we can also look at other investments across the journey, across functions, that are going to have immediate payoffs and that are actually smaller in their efforts.”

We call this zero-to-one: rather than boil the ocean by going immediately to a level-ten experience, we prioritize initiatives with the smallest investment but highest return. An example of this is when we developed a quiz for supermarket brand Jumbo, which helps customers find a wine or beer that best fits their tastes.

The first step was to build a basic questionnaire that could provide value to any customer; after the simple iteration went live, we expanded it to include a more advanced and diverse line of questioning to accommodate those with more nuanced preferences and taste. This shows how brands can iteratively implement more personalized solutions that drive meaningful value to consumers through an agile process.

It’s time to adapt to agile.

Personalization Fails When It Doesn’t Add Value

“Today’s landscape has an amazing amount of engineering, but it’s used with little to no empathy: this idea that just because the technology’s there, we need to relentlessly retarget and stalk them across the web,” says MediaMonks Founder and Board Member Wesley ter Haar. “When you start thinking about the user, you start thinking about what we call personal inflection points. Where is the value for the user in how we communicate? How can we be assistive?”

Experimentation is key to adopting a more customer-driven approach to data—in a way, it’s about thinking of data as a two-way street, through which user feedback can be applied to further the relevance and reach of your message. This again ties back to the need for an agile production process, in which teams can implement this feedback with speed and iterate from there.

For example, we took an interests-based approach to raise awareness of the research behind skincare brand Gladskin’s award-winning formula. The campaign centered on boosting reach while targeting its most relevant audiences based on interests, driving down CPM (cost per impression) to stretch budgets further and increase ROI in the process.

Through weekly split testing and reportage, we could determine which combination of assets made the most impact at both awareness, consideration and purchase stages across the funnel, per channel. Instead of being followed by the same ad throughout the social media experience, users ultimately found content tailored more toward their needs at each stage of the funnel.

Data can be powerful, but hoarding it away without building in the channels or workflows needed to activate it does little to help you build meaningful relationships with your audience. As consumer demand for relevant content grows, brands must be strategic in their investment with data and the architecture that powers their ability to derive insights.

There is one statistic that no one in the travel industry can ignore: tourism generated a revenue of US $1.7 trillion in 2018, according to the World Tourism Organization. From hotels, to casinos or airlines, the opportunities available for the myriad of players in this industry abound, and in one region in particular this is crystal clear: Latin America. In our most recent report, Destination LatAm: Trends Shaping the Travel Customer Experience in the Region, we focused on this part of the world to highlight the main trends that are shaping the present and future of tourism through a regional lens—viewed with a global perspective.

New technologies, digital transformation and disruptive new players are just some of the trends that are revolutionizing the travel industry all around the globe. But there is one thing that unites them all: a focus on delivering the best, most innovative customer experience. 

If brands want to survive in this increasingly competitive industry, they must better understand and address their customers’ needs, then deliver upon them with premier, differentiated digital experiences. But achieving this is a complex task that requires adopting new content and production strategies that are better equipped for personalization, positioned to meet users across the digital ecosystem.

Transformation is an enormous challenge not only for small, budget-limited newcomers but for established brands too. The investment needed to achieve this will test their capabilities at every level of the organization. Wanting to satisfy the customer’s needs will not be enough, as brands must develop agile processes and forge partnerships spread across the wider consumer journey to better support their users’ every travel need.

With customer experience in mind, brands can begin their digital transformation to make their travel as smooth as possible while enhancing their business.

Find out how customer experience is impacting and moving the travel industry in Latin America.

What separates your brand from competitors? Across industries, brands are increasingly investing and allocating resources to improving the customer experience (CX). While that’s great news for customers and the audiences they serve, for brands, it means they’ll have to work much harder to stand out. With a sea of sameness looming over the horizon, brands must hone in on their key, unique qualities that differentiate them from the rest through best-in-class creative experiences. 

Creative differentiation is more than simply raising awareness or traditional notions of driving customer loyalty. In his Forrester report “The Cost of Losing Creativity,” Jay Pattisall writes that “every brand offers the same digital experience because they all address the same customer needs.” Rather than fulfill the same KPIs as their competition, organizations must seek out opportunities that fulfill a unique brand promise and offer memorable creative experiences.

MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar notes that what separates average or even good creative from truly exceptional work is impact. “It’s not just about big ideas. If you have the right idea, you have to go really big on the idea itself,” he says. “The scale of those ideas–the way you commit to them to have real impact–defines the pinnacle of creative work.”

One way brands can begin thinking about this is through purpose. Look at it this way: while you might know your brand’s purpose, what really matters is whether consumers do. 76% of brands may think their organizations have a defined purpose, but only one in ten have actually defined a purpose statement that they’ve put into action, according to the ANA. 

When faced with competition from digitally-native brands that have integrated purpose well within their platforms (like making it easier to get a ride in a couple of taps at a guaranteed rate), brands must likewise ensure their promise is fulfilled through the creative user experience. It’s through these experiences, if done right, that brands can strike an emotional connection and build brand love in the mind of consumers.

Creativity as a Key Factor

The challenge of creative differentiation is felt across all industries these days, though it’s especially relevant to industries that push traditional strategies around growing loyalty–retailers, travel brands, and fintech are just some of the industries that could benefit most by embracing creative differentiation. As part of a digital transformation process, MediaMonks worked with leading Mexican airline brand Aeroméxico to revamp their app, turning the typical ticket-booking experience into a space for wanderlust and travel inspiration.

“What differentiates one brand from another nowadays?” asks Carlos Rivera, Consulting and Platforms Lead at MediaMonks Mexico. “Loyalty is not easily achieved unless through experiences that result in habits or small moments that inject emotion to the customer journey.”

Craft alone doesn’t solve the challenge. Brands must leverage consumer insights and data to address and solve the primary needs of customers, aligning the essence of their brand with a strategy that reacts to those needs. This makes all the difference between novelty and designing truly differentiated experiences that cultivate lasting emotional and business impact. “Differentiated creative combines an understanding of culture with real, heavy-lifting business impact that drives real bottom line value,” says ter Haar.

The process must begin with placing the human at the center of your creative focus. Working with Aeroméxico, MediaMonks put this idea into practice, helping the brand creatively differentiate by striving to truly transform the full scope of the customer experience. 

“Often it’s not about the place you’re going; it’s about the person you’re visiting,” says ter Haar. “This insight bubbled up, can we build people into the app as a destination? That’s a really nice message and normally if you look at the siloed nature of our industry, that’d be it–with some shiny creative around it. Instead, we’re filling the gaps. Yes, there’s creative and an app, but what’s happening in between?”

This question sparked the development of “People are the Places” for Aeroméxico, a state-of-the-art platform that enables the brand to build meaningful relationships by letting travelers experience places like never before: linking them to the people actually living there. This experience was recognized with the Gold Cannes Lion 2019 in Brand Experience & Activation.

What separates the best from the rest?

The challenge in embedding such emotive experiences in a platform lies in “trying to communicate different experiences to different audiences,” says Aeroméxico’s Angélica Romero, UX and Web Optimization Lead. Brands must design strategies to create personalized experiences that impact users directly and make those experiences memorable. For example, once a user fills in their profile in the Aeromexico app, their name appears throughout the reservation flow, along with geolocalization and recent searches, which anticipate their needs and require fewer taps for them to take.

Redesigning the Customer Experience

Nowadays, many brands are redesigning their corporate image, but these tweaks are often a matter of brand identity. True transformation requires balancing commercial goals with experiences that resonate with consumers. The challenge with the Aeroméxico app was clear from the start: establish a strategy to increase ticket sales by improving the experience of buying a ticket in mobile format. This prompted the team to study the booking process, looking for opportunities to redesign the process as a whole, from discovering flights to inspiring users to act on a destination–a strategy that we’ve taken with subsequent campaigns for the brand, too.

The focus was put not only on helping the user find flights, but also on inspiring them to travel. “And so we launched the complete redesign of the reservations section with a user-thought experience process,” says Carlos Rivera. “We carried out prototypes, interviews and even testing sessions to ensure that every button made sense and to determine what information to show at what time during the reservation flow.” From color choice to animations, each element in the process serves a specific purpose to impact the user experience. Through ongoing analysis, MediaMonks and the Aeroméxico team can tweak and adjust the app to enhance the CX even further and continuously iterate.

González notes that the centerpiece of the design is how visual elements change and conform as the user follows the flow. From the background image that changes when you select the destination, to the copy and image that indicate the step in which you are in the header of each screen, the design builds a sense of excitement and anticipation before culminating in an animated message that lets you know that “Your trip is ready!”

“We know that buying a plane ticket is a rational decision,” says González. “But that carries a very important emotional load because, in the end, it materializes in your next trip: It’s happening!” 

Creating user-centered experiences goes a long way to help brands make their purpose clear and to establish the differentiator that will make them stand out from the crowd. Addressing customer’s needs is something any brand can do, but doing it in a relevant and unique way is something only brands with defined purposes can aspire to achieve.

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