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

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

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

The Cornerstones of Great Digital Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Integrated Approach Ensures the Greatest Impact

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

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

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

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

Día de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, is a holiday steeped in tradition, developed from ancient customs of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past.

The three-day holiday, which takes place from October 31 through November 2, celebrates the memory of the dead, and Cerveza Victoria has long built on its cultural significance–most notably through a series of annual films that bring Indigenous mythologies to life in new ways. MediaMonks has collaborated with the brand and Ogilvy to produce each of these films, including this year’s, “Icnocuícatl,” which pays tribute to the power of the written word in saying goodbye.

Unifying People by Celebrating Traditions

The film is emotional and gripping–and complimented by digital touchpoints, seeks to make an ancient tradition more accessible to modern audiences as they celebrate the memory of their loved ones. “Each year we try to find a new cultural tradition to unearth,” says Mauricio Gaya, Copywriter at MediaMonks. “Mexicans are well acquainted with tradition, but there are always new things that we can learn about when we look back to our past.”

In modern decades, the Day of the Dead has served as a unifying national tradition, making the holiday an ideal opportunity to help people–both in Mexico and afar–engage with old traditions that may be new to them. “One of Victoria’s objectives has always been to bring people closer to their traditions, and to help empower those traditions and give people the opportunity to celebrate them together,” says Gaya.

Mexico is culturally rich, home to several Indigenous communities who each have their own customs and traditions. Our two previous films with and Cerveza Victoria depicted traditional mythologies of the underworld, as conceived by the Aztecs in 2018 and the Mayans in 2019, using post-production and CGI to transform time-honored stories into visually stunning realities.

This year’s film introduces audiences to icnocuícatl, an ancient poetic genre to say goodbye to the dead that is still used by Nahuatl-speaking communities today. An old and traditionally oral genre, icnocuícatl isn’t particularly well-known by most. “Icnocuícatl” aims to represent the genre faithfully, and the team worked with Nahuatl writer Natalio Hernández, who served as a cultural advisor, early in the concepting stage.

The film is also presented in a version narrated in Nahuatl, giving viewers the chance to hear the poem in the genre’s traditional language. (“Journey to the Underworld,” our first Day of the Dead film with Cerveza Victoria, was notable for being the first native-language TVC aired in Mexico and was also narrated in Nahuatl.)

Adding New Relevance to Today’s Audience

The decision to move away from the underworld as the film’s subject matter came from the team’s desire to treat this year’s film with added sensitivity due to the pandemic. But the team didn’t want to make something that future audiences would look back on as a “COVID ad”: the goal of the annual films is to transcend time by letting modern viewers engage with the past, and by focusing on the people and objects left behind this time around, “Icnocuícatl” amounts to an experience that remains universal.

“They managed to make something meaningful out of empty spaces—it’s about the person’s belongings, incomplete portraits,” says Gaya, noting the palpable void left behind while family members solemnly inhabit domestic scenes of the departed. “The film is visually powerful because they tap into that: these objects really resonate and talk about personality and character.”

While the film speaks to a universal human experience, digital elements make the campaign’s focus on celebrating tradition more personal. Through a WebGL experience, we invited visitors to make an ofrenda, or offering, at a digital altar to celebrate their loved ones–much like they’d do in their own homes. This is inspired by what we did for last year’s Xibalba campaign, which won an FWA of the Day—but this time, we encouraged visitors to try their hand at writing an icnocuícatl poem themselves, directly engaging with the poetic form to become acquainted with it.

“Once you tap into the tradition, it’s pretty visceral and powerful,” says Gaya. “The tagline is: ‘dedicated to those who left without the chance to say goodbye.’ By giving people the chance to dig out those words and find closure, the experience can be powerful and cathartic.” In this way, Cerveza Victoria leverages the reach of film with the personalized power of interactive, digital experiences–a perfect way to make an ancient tradition feel more tangible and accessible to new audiences, both local or new to Indigenous Mexican culture.

You’ve probably heard the joke before: one can buy a top-of-the-line TV, only to find that it’s already become obsolete by the time it’s installed in the living room. Joking aside, the rate of change in technology seems faster each day, prompting some brands to feel as though they’re treading water when getting accustomed to the platforms available.

Digital-only brands like Uber and Airbnb have significantly raised the bar for digital user experiences in growth markets like Latin America, and while the regional market privileges social relationships and recommendations, brands that haven’t prioritized the digital customer experience should view digital transformation as an opportunity—rather than a challenge—to better meet their customers’ needs in an exhilarating time of change. According to Forrester’s eCommerce Trends to Look Out For in Latin America, “By 2022, the number of unique smartphone subscribers will grow to 68.5% of the total population in Mexico, 71.0% in Argentina, and 74.6% in Brazil,” which means there’s great potential for brands to engage digitally with a growing audience—and time is of the essence to prepare.

The most important thing to understand about digital transformation is that it’ll have no end: it’s a process, not a project. With every new channel comes a new way of interacting with consumers, and as soon as you become comfortable with one, another arrives. Due to the speed at which this occurs, brands must move away from a desire to simply chase the next (or even current) big thing and instead focus on building a culture that is agile and ready to adapt to emerging channels. In fact, you’ll likely find that a desire for a new app or website is in fact indicative of a need for a new business model.

A New Perspective for New Experiences

The digital transformation process challenges not only the way brands reach their audience, but also their internal structures. They must be ready to break down silos and look for more collaborative ways for talent across departments and levels to work with one another. At Gartner’s CIO & IT Executive Latin American Summit in 2017, one of the key findings was that “CIOs play a crucial role in transforming the enterprise,” particularly by providing an outsider’s perspective on user experience thanks to their informational skills. “It always helps to have someone see you from the outside,” says Carlos Rivera, Consulting & Platforms Lead at MediaMonks MX, on the need for organizations to seek new points of view to provide new experiences.

Digital transformation typically begins by taking stock of the business’ KPIs, assessing its internal structure and polling stakeholders at all levels of the organization. From there, organizations must benchmark themselves to industry competition. Much like how Instagram has done well to absorb features from competing brands (like stories), organizations should take a look at what’s working for digital-only brands within their industry and pay special attention toward how they drive change in the way consumers interact.

The next step is to envision the goals of the organization. We call this a digital playbook, which is a plan that maps out the digital transformation journey for the organization. While a digital playbook serves as a useful guide to an organization’s initial steps, the partner relationship shouldn’t end at the assessment. Instead, the partner should be able to translate that assessment into actionable steps every step of the way. “We provide this resource to help you better understand and activate our digital playbook,” says Rivera. As your goals evolve or new channels emerge, “your partner can connect you to the rest of the agency and production network to further bring in the expertise you need along the process.”

Embarking on the Journey

A manageable way for organizations to execute their new digital strategy is to take a channel-by-channel basis. “We can approach things on single channels, like on the mobile side for example,” says Rivera. “From there, we can turn our approach to the website or whatever else comes out naturally.” For example, we previously revamped the Aeromexico app in order to provide a mobile experience that was consistent with the website. Having netted over 100,000 downloads in just a month, catapulting it to the top spot in Mexican travel apps, our next opportunity was to streamline its digital booking process—a process that entails external transactional platforms in addition to just those owned by the brand.

This works well for some brands, but those who strive for a more consistent user experience can take a more holistic approach from the start: one can easily imagine all the various ways that platforms and channels tie together and feed into one another. Optimizing an offline call center can inform chatbot development, which in turn contributes to a digital messaging or social strategy, which can tie to creative content and so on.

As part of an ongoing digital transformation engagement with Club Premier, we put together an attractive app that helps customers take care of all their spending needs, enhanced with personalized content to improve the user experience. The result is a modernized experience that aligns Club Premier’s loyalty spending program with other apps users are seamlessly using daily. Through the app’s success, we’ve gone back to the drawing board with Club Premier to collaboratively build a sustained, ongoing digital transformation process that can spread across their entire ecosystem.

Recognizing the integrated nature of platforms and the dynamic user journeys across them return us to the earlier point that digital transformation cannot be treated as a project with an endpoint, but is rather a permanent progression in which organizations must open themselves up to new ways of thinking. This makes long-term partner relationships ideal for digital transformation. One example of what this looks like is the shared risk revenue model in which both parties have shared skin in the game: a dedicated team that lives and dies on their client’s success. “Digital transformation is a service where we are coupled with you and go hand-in-hand,” says Rivera. “We want to be there along the way.” Wherever the path to digital transformation takes you, remember: it’s all about the journey, not the destination.