Capping off a raft of regional and global event cancellations, the International Olympic Committee announced that the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games will be postponed until next year. The announcement is toughest for the athletes who have worked so hard over the years to qualify and compete in the Games, but it’s also tough on audiences–many desperate for entertainment amidst social distancing, seeking something to unite under and look forward to.

As brands rethink their Olympics media and advertising strategies, they must consider how they can still continue to connect and inspire today’s consumers. While the Olympics’ postponement certainly throws a wrench into brands’ advertising strategies for the summer, there’s still opportunity for them to refocus plans and offer comfort and connection to audiences who need it.

Earlier this year, The Drum estimated that the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, among other major events, would drive global growth in ad spend by 3.9% in 2020. Now, brands are wondering how they can reallocate their budgets—or their big ideas—to next year, shifting plans that were made months, if not years, in advance. This includes not just traditional campaigns, but also in-person and in-store activations intended for attendees. Here’s how brands can kickstart and rethink and rebuild their strategies for 2020.

There Are Still Big Needs to Fill, But Strategies Must Change

While many brands might aim to reallocate budgets and current strategies to next year, there’s still a real need to keep relevant—and customer needs aren’t going anywhere, either. “This doesn’t mean brands can stop engaging with their audiences this year,” Michel de Rijk, CEO APAC at S4Capital, told host Dan Murphy on CNBC’s Asia Squawk Box. “They need alternative plans.”

The possibility that social distancing will remain into the summer—or that consumers will hold onto new digital habits and behaviors that are emerging right now—will elevate the role that digital must play in alternative campaigns and creative experiences. “A lot of these activities that marketers were planning to do were in-store and offline activations,” de Rijk said. “But because of that change in user behavior, those now need to be digital. You’ll see a lot of innovation in this space.”

That said, there’s no direct, one-to-one translation of an Olympic experience from in-person to digital: imagine mingling with people from around the world and being inspired by watching the games in-person. Brands certainly shouldn’t copy and paste existing strategies to a virtual space, but they do have an opportunity to innovate by blowing out specific parts of their narrative.

For example, consider how messaging around the Olympics usually focuses on determination and coming together as a global community—a message that resonates well with a world transformed by a pandemic. It also sits well with what digital experiences uniquely achieve. “By the nature of digital and creating these virtual brand engagements, [brands help] entertain audiences no matter where they are and have the power to bring them together within a shared experience.”

For Resonance and Relevance, Play Toward New Consumer Behaviors

Digital behaviors have shifted significantly over the span of the past few months, and we still can’t say for certain how the landscape will look months further down the line. Brands must be proactive in recognizing shifting needs, behaviors and priorities for today’s audiences to strategize and refocus their efforts on supporting their audience.

One way to do this is through social listening to stay up-to-date with what matters most to your audiences and to identify new ways that they’re connecting with one another. This attention toward social can also clue you into interesting, new user behaviors that you can tap into to find value for consumers—like “cloud clubbing,” in which DJs began livestreaming their sets to at-home audiences in China before COVID-19 made its way west.

By remaining up to speed on conversations and emerging digital communities, brands are better prepared to connect with audiences in meaningful ways. For example, without live sports to watch, consumers are gathering online to compete in video games (or watch others play via livestream).

We Look Forward to More Innovation—and More Voices

While digital transformation has widely been a slow and incremental process for some brands, it’s become clear so far this year that strong digital maturity is essential to continue meeting audience needs. And that importance isn’t just temporary: “I think what you’ll see in 2021 during the Olympics is a blend of the original plans that [brands] had scheduled, as well as the learnings that they are having in the coming 12 months in a forced virtual environment because the consumer behavior has changed,” de Rijk told Asia Squawk Box.

And without attention focused on a single global event, there’s more room for all brands to connect with their audiences. “The brands who decided not to have a lot of activity out there during the Olympics because of the sheer amount of activity happening through Olympic advertisers now have the opportunity to get it back,” says de Rijk. This means even small to mid-size brands can look for ways to break down and build more impactful experiences.

The postponing of the Tokyo Olympics presents a double whammy: brands not only have to strategize again on their messaging in the summer when the games were originally meant to take place but will also want to apply new learnings to their Olympic plans for next year, too. By aligning strategic goals with emergent consumer behaviors, brands adeptly pivot to engage and support their audiences in better, value-added ways.

To Keep Up with Consumer Needs, Double Down on Customer Obsession

It can be tough to adapt to the relentless pace of change in digital. From a need to meet and engage with customers on new channels to the rise of digitally native competitors, there are many ways that established, legacy brands can improve their digital maturity—and they might begin that process by taking inspiration from what’s worked with DTC brands in particular, whose close connection with consumers is arguably unmatched.

The secret? Adopt a challenger mindset. DTC brands have honed their digital prowess by necessity. Newer and lacking the big marketing budgets of legacy brands, they’ve shifted focus away from broad-reaching TV spots to instead focus on digital marketing. Through this practice, they’ve developed measurable marketing strategies that aid in discovery and are backed by data.

Shift Toward Data-Driven Messaging

“DTCs opt for targeted appeal over mass appeal (at least initially),” write Ryan Skinner and Sarah Dawson in the Forrester report, “Lessons In Customer Acquisition: Learn From DTC Disruptors’ Awareness Strategies.” “Only when DTC brands more firmly establish themselves do we see them branching out into more expensive channels like broadcast TV.”

Remco Vroom, Head of Business Growth and Platforms Solutions at MediaMonks, notes the role that experimentation has played in getting to know what resonates with their customers, helping them increase the effectiveness of communication through fresh content. “Brands can learn from them by getting to know their audiences better, getting a feel for them how they operate,” he says. “In this area, these smaller, digital-native companies aren’t afraid to try things out, producing hundreds of pieces of content to see what sticks, then taking those things that were successful and building more content.”

It’s a strategy that we’ve used with skincare brand Gladskin, enhancing the creative of their awareness campaign by mixing (and remixing) an initial set of assets, seeing how they performed with different segments. Depending on the performance, we tweaked the creative even further while also reassessing the media spend for those segments, incrementally zeroing in on the most effective and interested groups per each channel. The tactic provides a dependable way for budget- or resource-strapped brands to optimize creative and better understand their audience while avoiding the strain that even digital native brands may feel in a need to refresh branding and content at an increased rate.

Elevate Social’s Role in Your Marketing Strategy

The focus on the role of data above should drive one point home for brands that aim to take a page out of the DTC handbook: they must not treat social media as an afterthought. Instead, they must elevate the role of social media earlier in the planning cycle.

With a leaner and more agile approach, brands can strike close, one-to-one connections with consumers through smart use of data that leaves their audiences feeling heard. Yet bigger brands limit themselves by focusing their investment on traditional formats that focus on broadcast rather than the interactive elements of newer social channels like TikTok.

“Traditional formats like TVC or OOH are safe bets for the larger companies, because it’s something they’ve done for the past 20 years,” says Vroom. “They tend to put millions into these channels and pennies in social media, but that’s not substantial enough if one of your goals is to connect with your audience.”

There are a couple ways that brands can adopt a challenger mindset by upping their social strategy. One way brands can adopt a challenger mindset is by helping consumers see themselves in the brand by breaking down barriers between audience and what goes on behind the scenes. For example, our influencer activation team IMA worked with womenswear brand Noisy May to help the brand partner connect with six regional influencers, who each designed a series of products for a capsule collection titled #NoisyMayInfluenced. The influencers documented and shared every step of the design process, reaching their target audience in an authentic and community-driven way.

Consider Building Brand Passion by In-Housing

Not every brand is going to be so radical in breaking down the barriers between product development and their audience. But they can take initial steps to a greater strategic investment in social by building a task team dedicated to seeking the potential benefits of tapping into novel, new formats and user behaviors on social platforms, which Vroom compares to the trend of brands taking their creative in-house.

“If you want to be successful, you have to bring the message really close to you—which is key for new channels like that,” Vroom says. When brands give creative freedom to passionate teams like this, they can break free from tradition while still remaining true to their core values.

And that gets at the heart of what legacy brands must do to keep up with digitally mature brands: connect authentically with consumers where and when it matters most. Through adopting data practices that inform the creation and delivery of content to elevating social media within the marketing mix, brands can do more than just weather disruption from competition—they can cut become challengers in their own right.

Having joined the Monks in December 2019, we’ve fully initiated BizTech into our monastery, where they continue their commitment to delivering digital transformation expertise and customer experience management to brands worldwide.

The move comes at a critical moment when brands seek to deliver personalization and content at speed and scale, across channels both owned and earned—and made headlines at publications such as Yahoo Finance, Campaign and Little Black Book.

“Nowadays, everyone is making experience their business,” says Vera Cvetkovic, VP Solutions for the Americas and MediaMonks. “We’re helping them by delivering end-to-end solutions that enable those omnichannel experiences.”

“What everyone is going through is building an ecosystem to manage the whole [marketing] funnel,” Victor Knaap, CEO at MediaMonks, told Campaign. “We can add value throughout the process–from the discovery of what a platform should be to the defining and implementation for the best customer experience,” he added.

Adobe plays a crucial role in these efforts: a study described in the report “The Total Economic Impact of Adobe Experience Cloud,” cowritten by Forrester, found that organizations using Adobe Experience Manager achieved 14% year-over-year growth in new, unique visitor traffic and a 10% increase in average order value. Furthermore, marketing teams equipped Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target were able “to build campaigns in half the time it took with their legacy tools.”

An Unprecedented Partnership

Since its inception, BizTech has served brands big and small, including enterprise-level clients spanning industries that include banking, telecommunications, education, government and more. They’re the leading experts in Adobe’s online infrastructure and ecosystem, being one of the small few companies to achieve Platinum partnership. Our adept Solutions team is led by Tim Goodman (CTO Solutions at MediaMonks), who’s recognized as the most-awarded Adobe buff in the world.

With many of their clients juggling several workstreams and vendors, BizTech has gained trust by tackling the full, end-to-end experience on behalf of their clients. Specialized in Adobe Analytics, Campaign, Experience Manager and Experience Manager Run & Operate, BizTech has won an Adobe Partner of the Year award nearly every year since the award has existed.

Closing the Gap Between Creativity and Engineering

Now fully integrated with MediaMonks, the Solutions team is uniquely poised to marry together creative and engineering. “In order to bring complete solutions to clients, we must bring technology and creativity together at the outset,” says Cvetkovic. “Making that integration complete, we have a working process to implement and support creative solutions via Growth’s ongoing conversations with clients or Operations’ planning and execution of projects.”

This balance of flexibility, innovation and technical expertise enables brands to better meet their consumers with insights-driven creative delivered through personalized, omnichannel paths. “Every large enterprise has challenges with siloed data, legacy systems and joining teams,” says Michael Patishman, SVP Solutions at MediaMonks. “We help overcome them through considered efforts around system, people and process—removing the walls, connecting the dots.”

Enabling a Smoother, More Impactful Digital Transformation Process

When it comes to digital transformation, we believe in an agile, phased approach that prioritizes the most practical and impactful changes first. This approach simplifies the process and delivers faster results. Our unmatched Adobe expertise gives our clients the opportunity to quickly build experience-led solutions that drive customer obsession and impact, whether they’re just starting their digital transformation journey or want to quickly implement the newest technology.”

“It’s one thing when you are growing a business to get to the top, and another to stay there once you’ve made it,” says Cvetkovic. “We’re a leader in innovative solutions for our clients, and we go through a whole maturity model assessment to determine where they are and what they need to do next to move from one stage to another.”

This added knowledge and expertise helps us scale up our efforts to meet that growing demand of brands that seek to incite and sustain digital transformation efforts. Working with clients such as AkzoNobel, McLaren, HP and others to rapidly transform and elevate the customer experience, BizTech and MediaMonks are a natural fit—and we’re delighted to have fully integrated BizTech into the fold.

There’s more to explore in the Monk monastery.

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.

MediaMonks was recently included in the   Forrester report, “Supercharge Your Marketing with Creatively Focused Digital Agencies” by Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall. Noting the imperative to seamlessly integrate creative and technology in the Age of the Customer, Pattisall includes us as one of their ten agencies they’re watching:

“[MediaMonks] combines a crafted approach to content with technology, data, and production scale that results in volumes of creative communication, experiences, and social content customized for the channel format,” writes Pattisall. “MediaMonks’ capacity to scale across programmatic, retail, and owned channels comes from the agency’s efficient approach that focuses on cost per asset, rather than cost per project.”

Forrester is a leading market research firm providing research-backed insights on technology’s impact on brands and consumers. The report homes in on the challenge of integrating digital experiences seamlessly within an environment in which they have mostly begun to look the same. Brands can overcome such concerns by working with partners who understand the need to deliver on a total brand experience.

Ready to supercharge your marketing? So are we.

In fact, another recent report, The Forrester Wave™: Global Digital Experience Agencies, Q4 2019 offers a benchmark on the types of criteria modern brands must consider when selecting a creative partner. “Digital experiences have risen to the level of strategic imperative, and experience-led transformation has become the mission for any digital business,” writes VP and Principal Analyst Ted Schadler in the report. But business transformation is an immense initiative to undertake, requiring brands today to carefully consider how potential partners take a diverse approach to transformation with varying goals, priorities and processes.

Makers for a Medium-Driven World

The secret to our clients’ success lies in a process that combines strategy, media spend and creative, through which we’re able to provide hundreds of bespoke assets from just a couple shoots and fast post-processing. At MediaMonks, this touchpoint service is a cornerstone of our truly collaborative fashion, in which we strive to empower clients through expanding their capabilities and achieve greater value through creative, like developing an asset building platform that streamlines the in-house design of assets and asset approval across teams and markets.

This capability also noted by Forrester in their report on agencies to watch: “Amsterdam-based digital agency MediaMonks produces hundreds of assets during efficiently scaled production shoots to produce hundreds of content and campaign executions, as they did for a campaign promoting a Nestlé/Starbucks instant beverage product.”

Don’t take our word for it. See what Forrester had to say.

A project like the asset building platform mentioned above demonstrates how partnerships in today’s world should go above and beyond the initial ask—and should bolster brands’ flexibility as they seek to develop meaningful experiences for their audiences, no matter where they are. This becomes especially important as audiences spread across channels, and each seek out solutions to their own unique needs. In this respect, we view storytelling as a never-ending personalized path that extends across digital touchpoints within the total brand experience. Achieving as much requires the pairing of innovative tech with best-in-class creative.

For example, an ecosystem tightly connected through value-added personalization can position brands as true partners in their customers’ success. Take the digital ecosystem we built for Weber, for example, which identifies user inflection points as opportunities to inspire users and lead them to improve their grilling skills.

To an audience at this year’s Adobe MAX conference, MediaMonks Founder and Board Member Wesley ter Haar explained how such ecosystems aim to provide meaning and usefulness to consumers throughout their daily lives. “The inflection point is getting someone from a burger to a brisket,” he said. “The moment you start trying more difficult stuff and it fails, it kills your journey as a grilling hero—it changes your landscape as a griller. How can we use content to be assistive to someone using the grill?” A smart partner helps brands consider and roadmap the “yes, and…” content throughout the customer decision journey: the content that meets the user’s immediate need and anticipates their next by pointing them to a successive piece of helpful content.

How to Build Momentum from Zero-to-One

The smart, contextual brand ecosystem built with Weber is the result of an experience-led transformation strategy that challenged the brand’s traditional way of communicating with its customers. We shifted focus away from making a hard sell for grills, and instead focused on selling the lifestyle of grilling. The Age of the Customer requires that brands likewise reinvent the way they communicate with customers through experience-led transformation. Recognizing the magnitude of such an initiative, we offer solutions bespoke to each organization and scaled to their size, ensuring anyone can achieve produce more relevant content for any channel or moment with more efficient budgets.

This is the foundation of MediaMonks’ zero-to-one engagements, in which we build momentum by starting with the quick wins that drive impact and gain internal buy-in to ladder up toward long-term goals. With a laser focus on demonstrating results faster, whether it’s efficiency gains or CX improvements, we eliminate steps and silos to do more for less and prioritize accelerated growth for our partners. A lighthouse approach—in which two teams work in parallel, one focused on day-to-day tasks and the other focused on future vision—gives brands the plan and perspective they need to manage large-scale transformation incrementally.

We also employ a method that we call Accountable Agile, where we’re able to earn trust with brands by delivering measured impact faster. By taking the best strategies from processes like agile and SCRUM, we can guarantee the highest quality of product that fits clients’ workstreams and help them. This helps break down the perpetual process of end-to-end transformation or other long-term engagements, ensuring the projects, campaigns and initiatives don’t drag on or lose focus.

A Mindset to Coordinate Strategically and Transparently

MediaMonks is a next-generation partner that combines global offices into a single team under a single P&L, offering a full suite of services without betraying the nimbleness and flexibility that so many organizations require to remain competitive today. As a part of S4Capital, MediaMonks is closely linked to MightyHive, a programmatic solution that empowers brands to take control of their data.

We rely on close coordination within our network—a global team including platform experts, content connoisseurs, film aficionados and influencer services—offering an end-to-end service that brings data and creative together to facilitate experimentation and optimization. The Forrester Wave report notes that “The best digital experience agencies operate horizontal practices to create guilds of expertise that they can quickly assemble, integrate, and deploy anywhere in the world.”

This is an area where the traditional agency model may struggle, highlighting a strength for agile teams. In a 2018 report, Forrester wrote about how consultancies have excelled in global practices, and where agencies can go further: “When they spot an important new service line, they build a capability practice led by an executive to develop skills, best practices, and assets. Agencies can go further than they have already and move even more employees into practices where they can build their discipline and be ready to join an agile client team at a moment’s notice.”

It’s a similar approach to how we embed ourselves within client workstreams for shared success. This model provides brands with the opportunity to quickly tap into other capabilities and service offerings to push their marketing even further. Emily Del Greco, President of the Americas at MightyHive, said it best: “MediaMonks is about taking the risk, and MightyHive comes quickly with feedback [backed by data.]”

The digital landscape is fractured and continually evolving in tectonic shifts—and the onus falls on brands to put those pieces back together into a seamless, integrated and cohesive customer journey. By offering transparent end-to-end partnerships and accountability through client success, we put into practice the next-generation creative partnership that we envision as being so necessary today.

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.

Dive into the latest Cannes Titanium Trends.

There’s a great opportunity ahead for brands in Mexico and Latin America, where access to the internet is still growing: only 55% of Latin Americans had access to the internet in 2017, according to Statista. As more of their audience go online, brands are met with a golden opportunity: offer differentiated, premier digital experiences that will impress the next generation of digital users in the region.

Of course, that’s easier said than done–and brands that fail risk losing their audience to major global players who have invested years in perfecting their UX learnings. And challenges in retaining talent or having the resources available to execute creative ideas exist for brands anywhere in the world, not just Latin America. But organizations navigating this new demand for premier digital experiences can still go far by standing on the shoulders of giants–or tried-and-true veterans of digital who know their stuff and can lead on the path of success.

In fact, helping unlock brands’ abilities to build these creative, digital experiences is a key goal of the MediaMonks Mexico City office. With a team native to the region and augmented by the larger, global MediaMonks network of talent, we’re uniquely positioned to respond to the greatest challenges that brands across Latin America face. “With the outstanding Mexican talent that has joined our Mexico office, we are able to create campaigns with international standards that work locally,” says Marcelo Planchart, Head of Expansion LatAm.

What’s Rafahu’s passion? Pop culture, which he tries to sneak into all of his work with a creative, unexpected spin. “I’m a geek of animation, science fiction, design, comic books, video games, illustration and art,” he says, “so I always try to put something of all that pop culture that I consume every day into my work.” Through this approach, he tries to create concepts that will resonate emotionally with audiences, while keeping the key message intact. It’s a perspective that differentiates his projects, making them a bit more unique and artful in the process–and shows how important it is for brands to provide their teams creative freedom and flexibility. 

Being creative should be fun, after all. “That part of exploring, of facing a void where there is nothing, starting to shape that idea visually and defining what is going to communicate–that is my favorite,” Rafahu says. 

Whether they face challenges in executing a creative idea or finding entirely new ways of adapting to the digital landscape, brands all over Latin America can augment their teams through strategic partnerships that fill those gaps. Guidance in digital transformation and cultivating the creative flexibility for teams to chase their passions or investigate their curiosities are just two of the ways that brands in the region can forever change the way they work. Through these processes, Latin American brands face great potential in strengthening equity and helping to differentiate from their competitors. 

Putting Innovation at the Forefront

Innovation is a key element of MediaMonks’ philosophy around the world, and at the Mexico City office that’s made clear through its dedication to digital transformation, a service that’s strengthened by our vast expertise and insight from working around the world. These efforts are spearheaded by Carlos Rivera, Consulting and Platforms Lead, who is in charge of leading the platform development operation in addition to digital transformation. 

A great example of the digital transformation guidance provided by the office is the work we’ve done with Club Premier, Mexico’s top loyalty program. From the process of building the app to supporting it over the long term, we’ve worked side by side with Club Premier to make decisions and help envision the digital future of the company. “And that dedicated, long-term relationship has a lot of value versus projects where I do the work, then I leave and I don’t see you again,” says Carlos Rivera. “We are changing that, and our Mexico City office is one of our global offices spearheading this approach, and thinking about long-term projects where we sell not only services, but value and strategy.”

Rivera’s expertise on the matter is wide-reaching, as he has traced a journey not just across the sea and back, but through the early years in ecommerce and app development to today. Having founded an ecommerce startup in Mexico selling custom-made surf suits during the industry’s infancy, Rivera had an itch to learn more about how technology could help organizations succeed. This drive prompted him to pursue a master’s degree in France, before getting his PhD in Innovation and Technological Transference in Spain. While in Madrid, Rivera founded an app-developing startup, which quickly grew to become one of the top app developers in the country.

See how we helped Coppel scale up production for back-to-school.

Rivera’s expertise on the matter is wide-reaching, as he has traced a journey not just across the sea and back, but through the early years in ecommerce and app development to today. Having founded an ecommerce startup in Mexico selling custom-made surf suits during the industry’s infancy, Rivera had an itch to learn more about how technology could help organizations succeed. This drive prompted him to pursue a master’s degree in France, before getting his PhD in Innovation and Technological Transference in Spain. While in Madrid, Rivera founded an app-developing startup, which quickly grew to become one of the top app developers in the country.

“Europe is some years ahead of LatAm in terms of innovation and digital transformation. So there is an opportunity to apply trends, strategies and processes that you can’t find yet in the region,” says Rivera. Through the expertise and insights of talent like his, MediaMonks can apply its global capabilities, while imprinting local projects with the vision and knowledge to fill the clients’ needs.“I saw the opportunity to bring the know-how I had learned in Europe to the Mexican market and apply it to local brands,” says Rivera. Leading digital transformation for brands like Club Premier has allowed him to apply his acquired knowledge to enhance the brand’s capabilities to compete and succeed in an extremely competitive market.

Offering Flexibility to be Creative

Since joining MediaMonks, Rivera found that the company has an environment that invites him to be proactive and propose ideas. “The management team is very open to test these ideas and takes away your fear of being wrong,” says Rivera. “I really liked something [MediaMonks founder and COO] Wesley ter Haar said: it’s better to make mistakes trying to do something new to improve, than to always be wrong and keep repeating the same mistakes.” This goes hand in hand with his personal philosophy: “I am not afraid of change. My life path proves it.”

Brands should likewise cultivate an environment that facilitates flexibility and a passion to experiment and learn through creative problem solving–but they’d be forgiven if they don’t have the budget or time to allow for such an approach. These limitations are only some of the reasons why IHAs in particular struggle to retain the talent they need, but brands can make up for it by augmenting their teams with specialized, experienced talent through partnerships.

Rafael Aguilar–or  “Rafahu” as he is known in the creative world–is MediaMonks Mexico’s Art Director. Attracted to the variety of talent and disciplines cultivated in the MediaMonks team, Rafahu joined the monastery in early 2019, and has already made an impact through his very particular and striking visual style.

“There is no shortage of resources. If you look anywhere there is strength in any creative task,” he says. “Although the Mexico office may not have hundreds of employees…yet, you can get support or additional resources that you don’t have here, you can get them from any of the many offices MediaMonks has around the world, anytime.” What’s unique about his current position compared to other regional agencies is that he has the resources to fully develop the creative potential in every project he undertakes–and brands strapped for talent can just as easily tap into that pool of passionate artists and creatives.

Raising awareness or building compelling content around destinations that are newly offered, remote or struggle with mixed perception can be a challenge for travel brands. But through emerging tech and improvements in mobile platforms, brands can provide experiences that let consumers explore far-flung locales without having to leave their homes, letting them intimately learn about a place through immersive storytelling. 

According to a report from Expedia Group, one third of Latin American Gen-Z and millennial travelers perform the entire travel shopping journey via mobile devices. The finding showcases the importance in offering mobile experiences that streamline the decision-making process through value adds, attention-seeking imagery and tie-in to social platforms.

Know Your Audience & Grab Their Attention

In essence, brands can better reach these young travelers through mobile moments: the points at which users turn to their devices to seek inspiration or answer a question. Brands can achieve this by adopting a mobile-first mindset when designing user experiences. Start by thinking about the context through which consumers engage with their devices.

Next Destination: Our 2019 Travel Trends Report

When Edelman sought to promote Hawaii as a destination, they targeted busy New Yorkers on their daily commutes—a key moment in which users are staring at their phones.  With an attractively redesigned MetroCard directing users to an elegant mobile site, the campaign intervenes with commuters’ daily grind to inspire a sense of wanderlust. Produced by MediaMonks, the mobile site lets users discover each of the archipelago’s islands in stunning visual detail before entering a drawing to win a free trip. In addition to its visual design, another strength of the campaign is how well it “gets” its local New York audience and situates itself within their daily routine.

Innovate through Scalable Experiences

With competition shifting its focus to mobile as well, it can be a challenge for travel brands to stand out. But investing in emerging technologies or supporting new social platform features provide opportunities for brands to reach consumers in fascinating and noteworthy ways. Take airline brand KLM for example, which is no stranger to using mobile AR to transport users to another place.

MediaMonks worked with the brand to innovate even further by offering AR advertising directly within Facebook’s newsfeed—a feature that isn’t yet available to the public. The ads invite users to open a virtual door as they scroll past, which activates a 360-degree photo allowing users to view landmarks from different angles by moving their device. The immersive content focuses on new or lesser-known destinations serviced by the airline brand, making use of the technology to drive awareness and allow users to almost literally stumble into a brand-new environment.

A similar example is STC’s “Unveil Saudi” series of VR experiences. STC isn’t a travel brand—the content serves to showcase the strength of its network—but it does an excellent job of letting users inhabit remote landmarks in stunning 360-degree video. Users can enjoy the content by strapping their device to a VR headset, or simply drag their cursor to control the view on desktop. This versatility showcases an important consideration for immersive storytelling: it’s easily scalable and accessible to audiences.

Reap the Full Potential of Mixed Reality

The strategies above are great for raising awareness about destinations or pique consumers’ curiosity about a place. But what better way is there to showcase a travel destination than by giving consumers the opportunity to really feel as if they were there?

A best-in-class example of bringing the destination directly to consumers is the 4D trishaw ride in VR that we developed with TBWA for the Singapore Tourism Board. Users strap into a real trishaw equipped with a VR headset, which transports them to Singapore’s hustle-and-bustle. The trishaw makes for an excellent vehicle—excuse the pun—for such an experience, as participants inhabit the role of a passenger.

By focusing their gaze in different directions, users can choose the path they want to take. Along the way, spatial sounds, vibrations and scents provide a multi-sensory, immersive experience that makes users feel like they’re really there. This type of experience won’t be practical for every brand; as an installation, it makes a better fit at trade shows, for example. But travel brands that want to make an event out of highlighting a destination (like a tourism board) can benefit greatly from the technology.

Improvements in emerging tech and consumers’ favorite social networks provide new opportunities for brands to connect with audiences and inform them about their services or destinations. By letting users inhabit or explore an immersive location—whether it be just a quick moment on their phone or a lengthy drive through a city in VR—brands can raise awareness in compelling ways and increase their digital maturity.

Retail just isn’t what it used to be. The Apple Store is no longer just a store, but is branded a “town center” where shoppers can pick up skills, and Amazon Go stores are revolutionizing retail by offering close integration with its website’s digital features. And it’s not just the future-focused tech brands that are reinventing retail; even the most stalwart retailers like Macy’s are poised to put their fun spin on the old formula, as seen in its new store-within-a-store, “Story.”

The thread that connects each of these developments is the effort to provide consumers with an experience as they shop. But while this discussion is still largely an abstract one in the west, the transformation from storefront to product showroom is already complete in eastern markets like China. “Going in-store gives customers the opportunity to see and interact with the brand’s products, but the purchasing is still usually done online here,” says Thomas Dohm, a Sr. Producer at MediaMonks based in Singapore.

The retailers Dohm is talking about have adapted to customer’s online shopping behaviors rather than try to fight against them. And this is a smart approach, because digital touchpoints and brick-and-mortar retail have a symbiotic effect on one another: in its “The Art And Science Of Retail eCommerce” report, Forrester Research estimates that “digital touchpoints impacted 51% of the $3.7 trillion total US retail market in 2018,” though only 14% of the US retail purchases occurred online, according to the same report.

These findings suggest that digital touchpoints play a significant role in offline purchasing decisions as well as online ones, which provides brick-and-mortar retailers an opportunity to better utilize digital (through which consumers often initiate product research) to support their business. In-store installations provide a unique way for brands to marry their digital strategies with in-store visits. Using two examples of in-store installations hailing from the east, we’re diving into what makes an effective, compelling experience that gets feet through the door.

Plan Around the Store Environment

Retailers must plan the in-store experience around the environments that will host them. A flagship location, for example, can offer plenty of space for high-profile experiential—and it may already attract throngs of shoppers who can participate and build buzz. Digital experiential can help put general store locations on the map, but retailers must understand the variables present—such as local market differences, square footage available, flow of foot traffic and more—when seeking to translate an experience across different stores.

“Local markets have all sorts of budgets, available space in store and of course maturity in experiential activation,” says Dohm. Dohm worked on a retail experience for Calvin Klein’s 37.5 line of thermoregulating jeans, which rolled out to APAC markets and walks users through a poetic VR experience that prompts them to reflect on temperature. This experience came in several tiers depending on the space and resources available in the stores where it was installed: “We approached the Calvin Klein 37.5 activation in a way that would be modular and flexible to cater to these factors,” says Dohm.

Retailers must begin by zeroing in on the core of the experience that would fit within any store—for the Calvin Klein installation, this included the VR headset and accompanying touchscreen device—then developing tiers of experience that enhance it where possible. With the Calvin Klein activation, for example, stores with the space to spare included a tiny house installation that drew attention and provided shoppers with a partitioned space to strap on the headset. In its largest iteration, dressing room-inspired places could be used to fully immerse the shopper.

The difference between experiences doesn’t have to be drastic. For example, Nike got shoppers running to six of their Chinese stores by prompting them to launch a rocket through the power of their sprint on a treadmill. At their flagship location in Shanghai, Nike offered a multiplayer variation in which users could compete with their friends. The difference here is minimal, yet adds a remarkable competitive layer on top of the experience by making the most of the space available.

Understand Local Market Differences

If you plan on rolling your experience out to several markets, don’t treat localization as an afterthought. Good localization isn’t just a matter of translating aspects of the experience; you’ll also need a clear understanding of behaviors that are unique to the different markets that you target. As retail provides a direct touchpoint for consumers to meet and engage with your brand on an individualized level, it’s crucial that your retail experience is relevant and comprehensible to local audiences.

This can be as innocuous as a registration form. The Calvin Klein 37.5 activation, which rolled out to four APAC markets, prompted users to provide contact details. For stores in China, it made sense to enable signups through WeChat—the reigning messaging app in China that many shoppers use as an e-wallet. For markets where WeChat is less common for retail and commerce, registration via email was the default channel. Brands should likewise identify the channels that are most popular or engaging for shoppers to understand the best way to tie the in-store experience back to an overall digital strategy.

Planning around the nuances of a local market at early stages of the creative process also highlights opportunities for transcreation to save time. An important feature of the Calvin Klein experience is a meditative narration that focuses the user’s attention on the temperature around them, prompting them to reflect on the elements, but the poetic narration posed a challenge for offering relevance among local audiences. “The nature of the experience was intentionally very abstract,” said Dohm. “But this was not something that translated easily into Mandarin, so we transcreated the copy to make it more pragmatic.” Effective transcreation enabled the team to roll out to all markets within eight weeks.

Give Shoppers Something to Take Away

Shoppers love to share their experiences, and in-store installations should support this need for maximum effectiveness. This not only reminds users of the product your experience promotes, but can also expand its reach by driving user-generated content (UGC) through social. While the main goal in providing a digital takeaway should be to commemorate the experience, providing a suggested hashtag or offering a digital portal that collects UGC can also prompt shares.

“It’s great to give people something to remember their experience by,” says Dohm. “If it was a positive experience, they’ll hopefully share that on social media channels.” Content that best fits this purpose is that which documents the experience: a photo, video or even a gif that captures the magic of the experience in a personalized way. The Calvin Klein activation lets users walk away with a heatmap selfie—a clever way to distill the experience’s concept behind the promoted thermoregulating jeans. The Nike experience, meanwhile, provides shoppers with a video of their sprint that includes their personal record to encourage sharing via WeChat.

In essence, digital retail experiences should not only inform shoppers, but provide a sense of fun. In-store experiential that pulls this off successfully delights consumers while helping them understand the unique features or value of your products. As retailers are still adapting to an industry disrupted by digital and ecommerce in the west, brick-and-mortar retailers should act now to carve out a space and land on top.

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.