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.

The results are in: MediaMonks, Circus and Firewood have each been placed in the annual Adweek 100: Fastest Growing feature, following each of their placement last year. Fastest Growing honors the top 100 agencies and 10 top solution providers—large and small, from all over the world—whose industry presence is on the rise. MediaMonks ranked number 57 on the list overall; MediaMonks, Circus and Firewood each placed among the top 10 large agencies.

Because the list honors international agencies spanning every category, type and size that have achieved significant growth, we’re honored to be in such good company. But we’re especially excited to stand as three individual partners that have since banded together to offer a distinct, differentiated offering that helps brands innovate and resonate with digital audiences today—and while our approach is resonating with brands, we’re just getting started.

“I’m thrilled to see that it isn’t just MediaMonks that made the Adweek 100: Fastest Growing feature, but also our amazing colleagues at Circus and Firewood,” says Wesley ter Haar, founder of MediaMonks. “The mind wanders at what happens when you put three of the fastest growing agencies into a unitary structure and single P&L—there are many great things to come, and I’m looking forward to it.”

Independently, we continue to serve brands with the signature offering that made us each great from the start—with a continued passion for the clients and work that got us added to this list in the first place. MediaMonks is a premium digital experience partner, helping brands better understand and digitally connect with their audiences and build brand love in the process. Circus is a multicultural, fully integrated digital agency that partners with its clients to develop high-impact ideas, strategies and content that wins in the attention economy. And founded on the belief that good people are good business, Firewood is a pioneer of the “embedded” model, building in-house creative, strategy and technology teams that become extensions of its clients’ teams—and amplify their power.

Throughout 2020, these capabilities have helped brands show up in significant ways. Together, we gave sports fans the best seat in the house (their house); we brought people together as they marched for Pride from their living rooms; we extended the world’s most innovative AR/VR conference into AR and VR; and we’ve helped scale teams up while others have pulled back—facilitating not only our own growth, but that of our client partners as well.

“All of us come from a very different non-agency mindset,” says Juan Zambrano, cofounder of Firewood. “We’ve been disruptors from the start, and our goal has always been to support our clients at scale delivering speed, quality and value across the board—particularly at a time when taking a digital-first approach has become essential.”

“Circus’ roots lie in breaking new ground with impactful ideas led by data, fed by emotion and built at scale,” says Bruno Lambertini, founder of Circus. “As we look toward the future, we look forward to further empowering brands through greater collaboration and a cohesive offering with MediaMonks and Firewood.”

We’ve grown alongside our clients through this commitment to shared success. Together, we’re offering brands a one-stop solution as a best of breed partner in the digital marketing space. The results are advanced marketing and advertising technologies, with world-class creative, strategy and production on a global scale.

We believe innovation doesn’t wait. Let’s keep moving.

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

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

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

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

What Brand Virtualization Is — And Isn’t

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

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

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

Brands Are Facing an Urgent Need to Broadly Transform

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

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

Next Steps on the Path to Virtualization

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

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

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

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

Take a bold step to brand virtualization.

Retailers may have taken a hit from the COVID-19 pandemic, with non-essential businesses closed around the world. Online shopping on the other hand has been a lifeline for consumers and non-essential retailers alike, resulting in an extraordinary increase in online sales for businesses. Brands can enjoy similar success by making themselves and their products more widely available to customers online, taking inspiration from the direct-to-consumer (DTC) model.

“One of the biggest challenges CPG brands face right now is reaching their customers without relying on big box retailers to do the heavy lifting of increasing visibility,” says Kate Richling, CMO at MediaMonks. “But the advantage for brands is that you know your customers best. You may not know their specific demographics, but you know their interests, needs, motivations. You know why they ultimately buy your product.”

This highlights another benefit that the DTC model offers to CPG brands: a true understanding of the customer. Not knowing what your customers are feeling at every stage of the customer decision journey can feel like a liability these days, when everyone has been affected by COVID-19 differently. By investing in robust digital ecosystems and personalization, brands can better balance product availability and mental availability, making themselves ready to anticipate and meet consumers’ needs throughout and beyond the pandemic.

Supercharge Transformation in Just Weeks

In a disruptive moment, consumers seek many things from brands: assurance, accessibility, value and more. Now, brands have a responsibility and an opportunity to transform and meet those needs. “There’s going to be a rolling wave of COVID-19’s effects and the different ways we live,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “I think it’s a perfect time to think about how to authentically talk about your business post-pandemic. How do we reposition the brand?”

Going DTC may feel like a long, hefty initiative, but brands can make real moves in only a matter of weeks. In fact, speed over perfection should be the focus for brands as they rapidly shift to accommodate their audience’s new needs—in this case, product availability and a brand who really understands their concerns. And getting started with an ecommerce platform is actually easier than you might think: over at Forbes, MediaMonks Director of Business Growth & Platform Solutions Pablo Stefanini notes that you need only plug into one of the many ecommerce solutions available to get up to speed, followed by iterative testing and rigorous, yet turnkey reporting tools to improve from there.

Connect Ecommerce and Social Experiences

Embracing the DTC mindset isn’t just a matter of having an ecommerce platform set in place and calling it a day. In particular, consider how your brand engages through social media and how you can drive conversation toward conversion. The Forrester report “Lessons In Customer Acquisition: Learn From DTC Disruptors’ Consideration Strategies” notes that “Progressive Pioneers, who make up a disproportionate share of DTC shoppers, are more likely to rely on word of mouth or recommendations to find products online, more likely to say they frequently research products online before buying them online, and more likely to read what other people post about products or services at least daily.”

The finding suggests that building a holistic content strategy that accommodates users throughout the research phase by building social proof is a great way to support this behavior. Think, for example, about testimonials and tips for success written in the comments of a promoted post or the use of UGC shared via social media collected on an ecommerce page. UGC not only demonstrates the value that the brand is already providing to customers but serves as a great way to keep social content fresh and focused on the brand’s community, too.

Market research firm WARC writes that “[DTC brands] have a great product and service offering but beyond that use social media and great end-to-end customer experience to gain and maintain a connection with an increasingly devoted audience who evangelize and socialize the brand.” Likewise, consider the role that social plays in the overall brand experience, and how you can use this ecosystem in addition to your product to lend value to consumers during this time.

Anticipate Consumer Needs with First-Party Data

Many brands are finding now that they require first-party data to better understand the consumer throughout the customer decision journey. In the webinar “Next Wave: Respond & Thive,” hosted by The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s Group and Betaworks Studios, S4Capital Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell anticipated that brands will have to rethink their approach to build up data maturity. “Google and Apple nixing cookies will have huge implications in how clients use first-party data and use those signals to enrich the first-party data they have.”

DTC wield first-party data in a way that helps consumers feel heard—for example, when Quip asks new signups what type of product they would like to see the brand offer in addition to its toothbrushes. While brands might invest in the DTC model as a means to accommodate customers now, the benefits to building a strong personalization infrastructure will extend well into the future, transforming the brand’s understanding and engagement with its audience.

“If you have a DTC platform and are augmented with first-party data, that’s more robust,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “If you have the capability to reach out to people who love your service in a meaningful way with personalization, that’s more robust. Those with success will be those able to communicate with people and be more mindful where they are in the current situation.”

With that in mind, it’s important to note that robust personalization doesn’t necessarily equate to the need for more content and assets. Instead, effective personalization strategies aim to truly understand the customer by recognizing and responding to their unique circumstances. “DTCs are frequently cited as masters of personalization, but—while this may be a major component of subscription boxes such as Stitch Fix or BarkBox—it’s mostly absent from prospect emails,” according to the Forrester report mentioned above. “Out of 22 DTC brands’ initial emails we were able to review via email signup, not a single one featured any personalization beyond use of a first name, and only one DTC even used a first name. Later emails rarely reflected the brand’s awareness of activity on its digital experiences (a male shopper on a fashion DTC would still get emails about men’s and women’s fashions).” As brands transition to a DTC model, they must not diminish impact by limiting opportunities to personalize communication in smart ways.

We’ve long championed for brands to take a DTC-inspired approach to better know their customers. But now, when many retailers struggle to meet supply with demand, the model has become an imperative for businesses to remain connected to the consumer. Through a DTC offering that wields data to provide audiences with the information and solutions they need, brands may not only weather the storm through the COVID-19 pandemic but build loyalty and brand love into the future.

The DTC model is just one way to achieve customer obsession.

Digital transformation isn’t the only process that has accelerated in recent months: so has in-housing. Gradually becoming more popular over the past few years, the trend has suddenly become table stakes for some brands amidst production challenges.

“Whatever creative that you need to develop has come, in a great part, from in-house capabilities,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice told Campaign in an interview about marketing challenges during the pandemic. “So, I think it’s actually been a boom to be able to lean on that infrastructure that has, in many cases, developed quite significantly over the course of time.”

That’s great for brands that have built up in-house capabilities over the past few years—but for those that have relied heavily on external agency partners until now, how can they adapt to continue serving their audiences? “In-house teams will do more of the work that companies would have previously sent to agencies, but that doesn’t mean the internal agency is ready themselves,” says Warren Chase, COO of Firewood, which merged with MediaMonks last year.

The true measure of who will not only survive but thrive in the coming months are brands that are prepared to digitally transform, he says. Simply seeking short-term gains that don’t provide longstanding value won’t cut it. “You have to adapt to the mindset of how to become productive when you can’t have your creative team around you,” says Chase. “But people will adapt—they’ve been forced to catch up.”

Strategic Alignment is Key to Long-Term Success

As many brands embark on their in-housing journey for the first time—or seek to adapt new skillsets and ways of working within an existing in-house team—collaboration and alignment is critical to long-term success. “It’s not just about the marketing department,” says Marco Iannucci, Senior Director of Strategy at Firewood. “What is the CMO’s relationship with the CTO, CIO, CSO and the rest of the C-suite? More than ever, the CMO must be a true partner with the rest of them—and if not, everything fails.”

This heightened need to align marketing’s efforts throughout the organization reflects the nature of marketing today. “Intertwining of marketing and technology is inevitable,” writes Thomas Husson, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, in a recent report. “As the designer and orchestrator of personalized customer experiences, the CMO must increasingly leverage big data, real-time analytics, and a host of technology platforms.”

This means strategic success relies on solving the CMO-CIO paradox, ensuring that tooling and workflows enable collaboration throughout the organization. Iannucci notes that dashboards and new tools have made it easier than ever for teams to take specific capabilities in house, but “everyone loves their specific tools, and whenever something isn’t working, they say, ‘If we only had these tools, I could do my thing.’ But then you end up with tools that aren’t syncing up or talking to one another, making it hard to see things big-picture.”

Prioritize, But Be Open to Shifting Gears

In establishing an in-housing strategy, brands must be committed for the long term. Chase balks at the idea that things will ever go back to normal as we knew it. “We have to create the next normal, and that requires feeling comfortable with being uncomfortable, and recognizing all the opportunities to do things differently right now.”

He notes that this idea of adapting to discomfort or inconvenience is something that external agencies are already used to managing, though in-housing brands can achieve stability by ensuring their priorities are clear and in order. Consider the primary motivators that drive the in-housing trend: cost savings, faster speed to market and consistency over the brand narrative. Brands must carefully prioritize which is most important to them and instill a sense of purpose in the existence of their in-house team.

While that might look different for everyone, Chase advises that enabling faster speed to market should be a top concern for most brands, as it puts a strategy in place to quickly come up with solutions to new, unprecedented challenges. As shifts in the digital and economic landscape continue to reverberate, brands must be ready to act. “When you have clarity on your priorities and need to put one in front of the other, right now it’s time to act quicker, adjust and pivot, and that’s where being in-house gives you an upper hand.”

Embrace the People Factor

Acquiring and energizing creative talent has historically been a challenge for in-house agencies—a challenge that may feel compounded when the need for new skillsets emerge and budgets tighten. This presents a new challenge to in-house teams: how do you keep teams inspired and build space for innovation?

“Bring in the people that know how to do this well, that have gone through this and can speak that language,” says Chase. “We all know we have to accelerate, but the big question is: how? Bring in the folks that are comfortable with that ambiguity.”

In discussing the embedded team model that Firewood is known for, Chase notes, “Across the board our culture is fundamental in making things work. We are zooming along again because our focus is on, ‘How can I help you do better for our client?’ And that attitude really spills over beyond our internal team and permeates into our client culture as well.” Despite the talk of upskilling tech, strategic alignment and agility, don’t overlook instilling a purpose-driven creative culture—a critical factor in long-term in-house success.

From new ways of working come new ways to engage.

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.

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?

The rate of hyperadoption in digital retail has accelerated in recent months: consumers are buying online more than ever before, and retailers selling non-essentials online saw a 65% uptick in online revenue from March 14 to April 17, according to Forbes. As consumers adapt to the necessity and convenience of discovering, researching and purchasing online, retailers must also harness this moment to bridge the online and offline shopping experiences.

Econsultancy reports that “47% percent of respondents from large enterprises say that in the past several weeks, they have observed product or service innovations at their organizations as a result of the outbreak, while 49% have observed innovation in marketing messaging or branding that they might use post-outbreak.” One such innovation that marketers are exploring is augmented reality (AR), specifically for industries in which meeting in-person was previously thought to be critical in making a purchasing decision—take luxury retailers, commercial and residential real estate, car buying and more.

AR Offers an Intuitive Digital Shopping Experience

Many consumers are already familiar with AR technology thanks to the ubiquity of AR filters in camera apps like Instagram or Facebook Camera. In fact, Facebook also offers AR-based advertisements within the newsfeed, allowing customers to “try out” products virtually—for example, testing lipstick shades using the front-facing camera.

AR technology links the convenience of shopping from home with the ability to inspect, explore and assess products on a store shelf. This offers a comfortable middle ground for consumers who want to bring the retail experience closer to home, either out of personal preference or due to a need for contactless shopping solutions.

A new normal requires new ways to engage.

Retailers are also primed to become the next big media platforms for brands to tell their stories, according to insights from the Forrester report, “Retailers: You’re The Next Media Moguls.” “Shopping is fragmented and the shopping journey isn’t linear, but consumers are nonetheless likely to discover and research high- and low-consideration products in retail stores and on retail websites,” writes Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali. “As sources of information, retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart know they are well positioned to tell brand stories to these shoppers on their and other websites.”

Big-box retailers and leading ecommerce platforms can transform the shopping experience and support the businesses they represent by offering such highly personalized digital experiences. By baking AR into its app, for example, Amazon enables brands to engage with customers while they’re already in the mindset to shop. But perhaps more important to the role that retail must play for consumers moving forward, these experiences build a personalized connection and emotional resonance.

In his talk “Extending Beyond the Horizon,” delivered to the In-House Agency Forum, MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar discussed the impact that engaging with an object—physically or digitally—has on consumers. “Interacting with product in physical space makes you feel like you own it. Building that into the digital experience delivers on that user expectation for personalization that’s often missing.”

Streamline the In-Store or Showroom Experience

While the immediate benefits of AR are clear to at-home shoppers, the technology can enhance and streamline the brick-and-mortar retail experience as well. Examples include wayfinding toward specific products via a mobile camera or offering AR directories that may make it easier to find specific stores and departments. AR product demonstrations like those mentioned above serve a purpose in-store, too, offering a high-tech alternative to display products or expert-led demos, enabling an overall contactless shopping experience.

In this respect, retailers should approach AR with a sense of purpose, ensuring the space embraces a “camera-ready” approach. “Is your packaging ready for cameras, is your retail space ready for cameras?” asks ter Haar. “In building an overall AR infrastructure, consider: What do I want people to unlock when they scan something?”

Supporting these technologies also establishes a long-term strategy for real estate businesses to activate spaces and build a sense of placemaking for their retail tenants. Similarly, 3D content offers an engaging way for these businesses to entice new tenants: for example, offering an AR overlay that virtually furnishes the space, adds data visualizations or lets users see the effect that time of day has on lighting. In response to social distancing, for example, venues are building digital twins that let online users truly inhabit spaces digitally. Such features would also prove useful to both retail and residential real estate.

Focus on Simplicity and Efficiency in Building AR Experiences

For brands that are experimenting with AR for the first time—either as one-off campaigns or as a sustained feature in an ecommerce platform—it’s important to keep things simple. The most complex and feature-rich AR experiences require users to download and install a brand app, which many users may be unwilling to do. “One aspect that’s very critical is how seamlessly you can enter an AR experience,” says Marie-Céline Merret Wirström, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. “Downloading an app is a huge barrier of entry.” Instead, retailers may consider web-based AR experiences that plug in directly with an existing ecommerce platform with just a simple tap.

Social AR experiences, like those you can find on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, offer a simple way for brands and retailers to experiment with AR. “AR is really powerful in the funnel,” says ter Haar. “Lenses are often thought of just as something that is entertaining but a throwaway experience, buy you can build really impactful functionalities by connecting AR with platforms like Facebook Messenger.”

Build snackable AR experiences that inspire.

Web-based AR is another simple platform to get started on, with an added benefit: users can jump seamlessly into the experience through their web browser. It’s also a very easy platform for brands to develop for. “If you are, say, a luxury brand and have a product that people will want to examine for size and detail, you should be using WebAR,” says ter Haar. “It’s very easy to implement because you just need the 3D format, the model of the product.”

Merret Wirström notes that even the most simplistic AR experiences can be effective for driving digital engagement. “Being able to see a product in 3D in high resolution is all you need, and from there you can expand to include specific features or variations in product,” she says. “That’s just a bare minimum approach, but it’s already so much more effective than looking at a flat image or reading product specifications.”

The Purina One: 28 Day Challenge serves as a good example of how a simple web-based AR experience can inform users while also building an emotional connection. Once activated, users simulate feeding a pet dog or cat that appears within the space they’re in. As the pet eats the Purina blend, the web app highlights signs to look for (and when) to determine improvements in health.

As a means to become more equipped to offer AR experiences, ter Haar suggests that brands elevate the role of 3D content in the marketing mix. “Try to make the AR or 3D element part of your production workflow,” he says. “One of the biggest challenges we run into with AR is that brands don’t have the assets available.”

Volvo’s Polestar 1 Experience, developed for the Geneva Motor Show in 2018, offers a high-end product demonstration by overlaying the Volvo Polestar with AR assets that showcase internal features. While this showroom experience is much more complex than what a retailer might offer at home, it provides an example of how AR can uniquely demystify product attributes through intuitive, customer-led exploration using CAD assets.

Augmented reality remains an efficient and effective way for retailers and real estate businesses to, well, augment the digital experience by building personalized impact. By integrating AR features natively into an ecommerce platform or even in a store, businesses can bridge the gap between online and offline shopping, providing a middle ground that accommodates the shifting needs of consumers.