We’ve hit our stride over the past few weeks in announcing new members of the S4Capital family—but we’re not hitting the brakes just yet. Today we welcome a new member to the Media.Monks team: STAUD STUDIOS.

STAUD STUDIOS is a full-service, data-driven marketing solution serving the world’s most iconic automotive brands. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, the team enables brands to match customer insights to a data-driven production pipeline, delivering personalized assets powered by real-time production.

“STAUD STUDIOS is already playing a key part in the marcom engine solution we have developed for BMW & MINI, and their automotive expertise is second to none,” says Victor Knaap, Media.Monks CEO and S4Capital Executive Director. “Going forward, Pascal and his team in Stuttgart will become the global center of expertise and mobility at Media.Monks.”

Giving Content Production Additional Horsepower in Real Time

One of the greatest challenges faced by brands across industries is producing the volume of assets needed to offer relevance to a variety of audiences, especially when marketing budgets have been slashed due to the pandemic. This is especially tough for automotive brands, who have been hit especially hard in the past year. But as the year looks increasingly optimistic for the automotive industry, brands require a solution that will help them drive cultural relevance and conforms to local market regulations.

Of course, individual consumer preferences also play a major role in performance as well, demanding automakers represent the vast breadth of possible car configurations to cater to consumer taste. And just like our smart production approach, STAUD STUDIOS eschews the need to shoot individual assets by instead using a composition technique they compare to the way atoms make up a molecule: swapping individual details like backgrounds, car color, lighting, headlines, legal copy and more based on where it’s delivered.

Real-time 3D rendering plays an essential role in this process. Using the Unreal Engine made by Epic Games, STAUD STUDIOS dynamically builds every permutation of a car’s configuration, seamlessly delivering the most relevant one to consumers. This approach is far faster than setting up a real, in-person photoshoot of each model and its various configurations—without sacrificing quality. Last year, we were awarded an Epic MegaGrant to explore Unreal Engine’s potential in automating content production at scale. STAUD STUDIOS’ expertise will help us apply that talent with a dedicated service to auto brands around the world.

Media.Monks’ New Global Mobility Hub Built on Heritage and Craft

Founded in 1983 by legendary photographer René Staud, STAUD STUDIOS has grown alongside the automotive industry and has worked with almost every auto brand in the world. More than just a heritage, high-end production studio, STAUD has pushed the evolution of marketing technology over the decades by marrying a classic commitment to craft with innovative technological techniques, helping auto brands embrace digital in the process.

STAUD’s unique competence is its combination of real shoot capabilities with CGI and interactive production methods to develop assets at scale and in real time. An international and interdisciplinary team of 75 individuals is led by Pascal Staud (CEO), Patrick Staud (Chief Creative Technologist), Uwe Jakob (Chief Creative Engineer), Marco Rex (Chief Delivery Officer) and Dagmar Kraus-Stubenrauch as CFO.

STAUD joins in our approach to aligning data and creativity to facilitate a true, one-to-one dialogue with audiences across the customer decision journey (CDJ). Through reverse-funnel planning and helping brands seamlessly connect ownable data into third-party systems, they give tech-savvy auto brands a head-start in delivering the right creative to the right audience in the competitive race to attract consumer attention.

“We see a huge demand for change in the automotive industry with a specific need for direct-to-consumer models, personalized interactions and scalable digital and 3D experiences,” says Pascal Staud, CEO of Staud Studios. “As Media.Monks’ Global Mobility Hub, we are very excited to help clients on their path of transformation. We look forward to transforming the way automotive and mobility brands go to market alongside our new colleagues at Media.Monks and S4Capital.”

Today, brands everywhere are challenged to achieve more with less: more audiences to reach, more products and configurations to represent and more channels to serve. Martech innovation—from data-driven production pipelines to real-time 3D production and more—will prove essential for brands as they aim to capture audience attention at ever-greater speed and scale.

“The possibility to plug in our production pipeline into Media.Monks makes our work truly global and scalable, which is essential to serve car brands on their future needs,” adds Patrick Staud. With STAUD STUDIOS on the team, we’re better equipped to help auto and mobility brands tune up their marketing across the CDJ.