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.

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.

Since opening our Mexico City office last year, we take immense pride in the work we’ve done to bring regional brands’ digital efforts to a global stage. In such a short amount of time, we managed to pull off a big win not just for a client, but for the country itself: a Gold Cannes Lion awarded to Aeroméxico’s “People are the Places” website at this year’s Cannes Festival for Creativity. The victory recognizes the region’s leaps in providing premier digital experiences, as well as the power in marrying global expertise with a local team’s insights and understanding of the market.

If anyone could pull it off, it would be Aeroméxico: airlines and other travel brands in particular must understand what kind of experiences and messages resonate not just with their primary domestic market, but with international travelers as well. And as an industry leader, engaging and unique digital experiences aren’t uncommon for Aeroméxico: the airline’s app topped the download charts in the first week since its launch. 

For Aeroméxico this was new, unexplored terrain, so it was fundamental that MediaMonks provided them with all the tools, capabilities and talent to face this exciting challenge. “What we did was build a bridge between creativity and technology,” said Carlos Rivera, Consulting and Platforms Lead at MediaMonks. One of the key elements of this process was a UX expert to guide the brand’s process with the new platform. 

In creating the platform for “People are the Places”, we wanted to craft a website experience that conveyed emotion and humanity, design a story-driven interface that fostered relatability, and build a frictionless platform where users feel invited into a seamless experience. In the end, the campaign succeeded, because users truly feel as if they are traveling to someone in the process of creating their destination. 

“Our Mexico City office served as the main partner guiding Aeroméxico through the creative steps required for this campaign,” said Marcelo Planchart, MediaMonks Head of Latam Expansion. “This meant not only providing new technologies, but focusing on solutions that would directly benefit customers and make their experience rewarding in every way.” Taking home a Gold Cannes Lion, the airline has certainly taken the country to new heights–what more could an airline hope to achieve?

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But “People are the Places”–made in collaboration between Aeroméxico’s in-house team, MediaMonks and our partners at Google–is a wholly new experience. “With ‘People are the Places,’ we want to go from being a company that transports people to a brand that builds personal relationships,” said Andrés Castañeda, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Customer Experience at Aeroméxico. “It is a huge satisfaction for Aeroméxico’s marketing team to win a Golden Lion with a campaign developed 100% at home in collaboration with Google.”

Born from the belief that traveling is about people more so than the destination, “People are the Places” lets travelers experience locales like never before–through the people actually living there. Through a savvy site, users can select a person as a destination, resulting in a personalized e-ticket with the name of the user and their selected person, as well as a dynamic video that stitches together social media content. This information then becomes the basis for creating an actual ticket, transforming individual people into destinations themselves. With 60% of leisure and 41% of business travelers arranging their trips online, according to Smart Insights, it becomes essential for travel industry players to accurately measure customer experience and improve their services and products, enhancing the experience itself and directly impacting their business.

It’s a unique spin that prompts people to change the way they think about destinations. An airline can’t change the geography that divides or connects people, but it can provide novel new perspectives that change the logic of how people conceptualize places. Whether seeing the world for the first time from seven miles above ground or discovering a place through a person, Aeroméxico accomplishes such a feat in more ways than one.

To help accomplish this, we worked with Aeroméxico to build a web platform that integrates Google technologies and social media tools with Aeroméxico’s ecommerce backend. Instead of choosing a geographic destination, users can instead directly choose the person they want to fly to, wherever they are in the world.

Interested in learning how MediaMonks partners with our LatAm or Mexican clients?

Bridging Together Creativity and Technology

As brands have designed digital experiences that accomplish the same KPIs and goals, most digital experiences across industries—including travel—have begun to feel the same. There is little differentiating factor in travel destination search engines, for example, resulting in a proliferation of search aggregates with which price alone becomes the deciding factor in purchasing decisions. This trend highlights the importance of digital experiences that provide an emotional value to consumers’ interactions with the brand.

At MediaMonks, we often argue that the interface is the brand, and that no interaction is too small or insignificant to reflect a brand’s product or services. MediaMonks helped Aeroméxico take advantage of high-end technology to create a user experience never seen before for selling plane tickets, offering a truly unique and human-centered process for discovering and selecting a travel destination. And it’s not just a flashy customer experience: with this, Aeroméxico now offers a new, scalable way of selling tickets, offering a 100% data-centered and personalized solution to make each flight unique and human-driven. Marrying together a delightful engagement with clear business impact demonstrates the brand’s role as a major digital player in the industry.

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