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.

Film award season is upon us, and we were delighted to find a friend of the Monks bestowed with high honors: Fredrik Bond, who was nominated for an Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials by the Directors Guild of America (DGA). And he’s in good company: other nominated directors include fellow MJZ member Spike Jonze and Ridley Scott.

Bond is already highly decorated, with nine career nominations under his belt, all for commercial pieces. In a profile on the director, DGA Quarterly magazine reported on Bond’s feelings toward working within the advertising industry: “He thrives on the collaboration with clients and agencies and the genre hopping he’s able to do in the work.”

We’re delighted to hear it, because we agree—MediaMonks collaborated with Bond on “Lighter Than Air,” a 60-second film promoting HP’s Elite Dragonfly convertible laptop. The film takes a humorous approach to showcasing the HP Dragonfly’s portability and versatility, and is one of three spots that secured Bond’s nomination. When we asked Bond for his thoughts on being recognized by the DGA, he said, “I feel truly honored to get selected by my peers and to be part of the group of nominees whose work I love, adore and constantly steal from.”

“A Hollywood Production, Condensed into 60 Seconds”

The idea behind the Dragonfly film, which humorously portrays a woman being carried ever-upward by her gravity-defying convertible laptop, is two-fold. First, it puts the product’s key feature—lightness—on full display. More meaningfully, it hints at the barrier-defying potential of both the product and the people who use it; as the woman is pulled higher and higher by the device, she quite literally breaks the glass ceiling along the way, until she is joined by her Dragonfly-toting cohorts towering over the world.

The creative process  thrived with a series of high-profile partners and best-in-class talent, including Bond from MJZ, The Mill (whose VFX work touches feature-length films) and Marshall Street Editors. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we were given the opportunity to elevate the genre with a premium quality of work. “HP’s ‘Lighter than Air’ encompassed literally everything you would expect from a high-profile Hollywood production, virtuously condensed into 60 seconds,” says Falk Eumann, Creative Director at MediaMonks leading the Dragonfly campaign.

Expanding the Big Idea

The campaign’s idea outlined above was bigger than the 60-second film at its center.  We don’t believe in cutdowns, and instead build fit-for-format content designed from the start for the channels and contexts in which consumers will find them. “During shooting, we were already thinking about which sequences could fit as a pre-roll,” says Eumann, noting that some sequences were shot in square as well for social channels. But we staged photoshoots simultaneous to the film’s shooting, too, resulting in content that wasn’t just format-optimized, but also format-exclusive.

Because so many of the shots involved both pyrotechnics and visual effects editing, it was a challenge to plan how each could be efficiently revised for the campaign’s various formats. But we made it work—while production is in our blood, we’re well-equipped to make efficiency gains wherever possible.

Making Impact Across Channels—and the World

We love the chance to tell a meaningful story steeped in cultural relevance. Recently, MediaMonks has beefed up its capacity to tell those stories at-scale. In November, we merged with the high-end production shop WhiteBalance, based in India. As a one-stop shop for premium content in India, WhiteBalance’s talent and tech-driven process enable us to expand our efforts in infusing cultural relevance around the globe—much like the solemn and beautiful “Journey to the Underworld” film that our Mexico City office made in collaboration with Mexican beer brand, Victoria, to celebrate the Day of the Dead.

This news follows last fall’s opening of our new film and content studio in the heart of Amsterdam, catering to a diverse clientele. “With fully equipped studios specializing in food, beauty and fashion videography on one hand as well as a team of dedicated creatives on the other, the way the office is set up is unique for The Netherlands,” says Vivian Opsteegh, Head of MediaMonks Film and Content. “And the office will also enjoy the support of a network of more than 1,100 Monks worldwide.”

Likewise, our LA office has similarly opened the doors to its own in-house production studio. Designed for versatility and delivery at speed, both studios put clients in close proximity to creative teams to aid in collaboration and time to market. From tighter integrated campaigns and a more seamless transition from shooting to post-production all in one space, the studio bolsters our promise to offer efficient, consistent and emotionally resonant content optimized for any channel.

In essence, what makes good storytelling are the people behind it. We’re honored to work with passionate tastemakers like Fredrik Bond, whether on our team or through partnerships, to enable a higher quality of creative across channels and around the world. Congratulations to Bond, and here’s to more nominations in the future!

Recent months have brought up all-new challenges for brands, and as the situation continues to unfold we’ve never seen a better time to refocus advertising on delivering real value and reactivating customer obsession. “It’s the time to start thinking about the scenarios for how your business and your brand will live in a different world,” says Wesley ter Haar, MediaMonks Founder. Innovative production approaches have arisen throughout the world as many brands continue to “keep moving” – as the shift towards digital becomes increasingly inevitable, speaking to a time post-COVID-19 as well. 

VFX Transports Us to Another World

For MediaMonks, we’ve updated our traditional approach to shooting with new formats (including our new safe, sanitized shoot studio) but additionally, we’ve continued work via other established types of production that remain within local safety guidelines by the very nature of being digital. One such visual experience was created last year between our Mexico City and Amsterdam offices to bring to life an eight-meter high panther made of flint-like material, an entity made of smoke, among many other things, to recreate the Mayan underworld in “Xibalba” for Mexican beer brand Victoria Cerveza.

In “Xibalba,” we follow our protagonist on an emotional journey through the underworld, where he fights mythical beings in a fantastical setup for the chance to meet with his loved ones once again. This scenario demanded the creation of several visual elements that, to achieve their full effects, could only be done through VFX artistry.

From the get-go, one of the main challenges for the VFX team was to create all the visual elements in just ten days. “We needed to think of a way to work very efficiently without compromising quality, so we could stay ahead of the curve and do multiple reviews a day,” says Okke Voerman, VFX Lead at MediaMonks. “There were also shots with some heavy smoke simulations without the time to do a lot of iterations. By connecting our Houdini artist with one of our VFX compositors, we layered many renders to get the smoke that we wanted.”

But that was not the only challenge. The film, shot in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, home of the ancient Mayan civilization, was produced and edited in Mexico City, while the VFX treatment took place at the same time in Amsterdam. 

“Working from different offices around the world can be very challenging. To make it work, you need to look for the benefits it can bring and focus on those,” explains Voerman. “By having our VFX production team setup in Amsterdam and our client-facing producers in Mexico, we had more hours in one day than normal.” So instead of working just eight hours a day, we combined our work in different time zones to achieve an otherwise exhausting 16-hour workday. Our diverse teams in two continents worked together to create a high-quality film in time.

Our film promoting the HP Dragonfly convertible laptop was another collaborative tour-de-force, involving several award-winning partners working together across continents – among them being The Mill, an award-winning VFX house whose work touches feature films. The film’s special effects and beauty serve as a testament to the value of close, speedy collaboration between teams that are unconstrained by physical space.

A Closed Office, An Open World

With global production companies – working in TV, film, experiential and other visual content – having to close or otherwise stop work due to the economic effects of the pandemic, brands are understandably worried about how they can continue producing content. But new, innovative production methods and close digital collaboration enable them to bypass common constraints. 

As brands adapt to working through the pandemic, this spirit of collaboration and innovation become key to success. From virtual production and CGI to post-producing pre-existing content, there are many ways that brands can continue their output without missing a beat. “During this global pandemic, there are a lot of physical limitations which make shoots very challenging,” says Voerman. “In post production, we don’t have them.”