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.

With many consumers still at home around the world, brands’ need to show up for audiences digitally has never felt more urgent, particularly through immersive content and experiences that recapture some of what’s lost in interacting with a brand, loved ones or product in-person.

And with this need, a perhaps unlikely tool for marketers has emerged: game engines. The role of gaming in the marketing mix has also risen, providing new, engaging environments to meet consumers. Glu Mobile’s apartment decorating game Design Home, for example, lets players customize a home using real furniture from brands like West Elm and Pottery Barn—and is now even offering its own series of real-world products through its Design Home Inspired brand, effectively turning the game into a virtual retail showroom.

But game engines aren’t just for making content consumed in games. They also provide an environment for brands to build and develop 3D assets to use both internally and to power a variety of virtualized experiences. We recently announced receiving an Epic MegaGrant to automate virtual tabletop production using Unreal Engine, and additionally we use Unity Engine—which powers 53% of the top 1,000 mobile games within the App Store and Google Play Store—to build mobile and WebGL experiences with consumer audiences in mind.

3D Adds a New Dimension to Content Production

In addition to serving increasingly digital user behavior, the use of 3D content has the potential to help brands build efficiency across the enterprise and customer decision journey. A new report from Forrester, “Scale Your Content Creation With 3D Modeling” by Ryan Skinner and Nick Barber, details how 3D content solves a critical challenge that brands face today: the need to keep up with demand for content while faced with dwindling budgets. “Particularly in e-commerce, marketers have learned they need product images to reflect every angle, every variation, and a multitude of contexts; without updated and detailed imagery, engagement and sales suffer,” the authors write.

One solution mentioned in the report is building a CGI-powered production line. MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar notes in the report that “This is very top of mind for us right now,” a sentiment that is reinforced by how we’re powering creative production at scale using tools like Unreal Engine and Unity, as mentioned above.

“What’s exciting about real-time 3D is that it ticks a bunch of boxes for a brand,” says Tim Dillon, SVP Growth at MediaMonks, whose primary focus is on our game engine-related work. “You can use it in product design, in your marketing, in retail innovation–it’s touching so many different end use cases for brands.” A CAD model used internally for product design, for example, could also be used in virtual tabletop photography, in a retail AR experience, in 3D display ads and more—reconfigured and recontextualized to accomplish several of a brand’s goals in producing content and building experiences.

When it comes to content, game engines make it easier for teams to create assets at scale through variations in lighting, environment or color—especially when augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. “When creating content in real time, brands not only make content faster but can react and adapt to consumer needs faster, too,” says Dillon. “Things like 3D variations, camera animation and pre-visualization become much faster to achieve—and in some cases more democratic too, by putting new 3D tools in our client teams’ hands to make these choices together,” he says.

A case in point is the car configurator we built for Genesis, built in Unity and covered in their recent report: “25 Ways to Extent Real Time 3D Across Your Enterprise.” The web-based configurator offers a car customization experience as detailed and fluid as you’d find in a video game, letting consumers not only see what their custom model would look like with different features, but also within different environmental factors like time of day—all in real time.

Making a Lasting Impact Through Immersive Moments

Through greater adoption of immersive storytelling technologies and ultra-fast 5G connection, we are entering a virtualized era capable of placing a persistent 3D layer across real-world environments—already made possible through Unity technology and cloud anchors by Google, which anchor augmented reality content to specific locations that people can interact with over time. Consider, for example, a virtual retail environment that never closes and provides personalized service to each customer.

These experiences have become all the more relevant with the pandemic. In the Forrester report mentioned above, ter Haar says: “With COVID, we’re seeing greater interest to demo in 3D. The tactile and physical nature of seeing something makes it easier to buy.”

But perhaps more important for brands is that immersive experiences have the power to create real, lasting memories—a focus of a recent talk by Quentin de la Martinière (Executive Producer, Extended Realities at MediaMonks) and Ron Lee (Technical Director at MediaMonks) at China Unity Tech Week.

“We start from the strategy of who you want to engage with,” says Lee, delving into the storytelling potential of 3D content. “From there, we try to understand the vision we want to build to grab the user’s attention and put them in the world.” This includes deciding on the best venue for a 3D experience: augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality or on the web? By making the right selection, brands can build experiences that explain while they entertain.

Lee and de la Martinière showed Spacebuzz as an example of how immersive experiences can have lasting impact. Through a 15-minute VR experience built in Unity, school children are taken to space where they experience the “overview effect”: a humbling shift in awareness of the earth after viewing it from a distance.

“The technology and the story bring together the vision and the message of the experience,” says Lee. “Building that immersive environment in Unity and translating this information on a deeper level creates real memories for the kids who engage with it.” Likewise, brands can leave a memorable mark on consumers through 3D content. “These extremely personalized experiences allow the brand to leave a deep impression on audiences and intensify brand favorability,” Lee says.

From streamlining production to powering experiences across a range of consumer touchpoints, the value of 3D content is building for brands. Working closely with the developers of leading game engines that enable these experiences, like Unity and Unreal Engine, we’re helping brands add an entirely new dimension to their content and storytelling for virtualized audiences.

MediaMonks has been awarded an Epic MegaGrant to explore the next frontier in automated tabletop and production using Epic’s Unreal Engine, the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool built by the developer behind Fortnite and other high-profile videogames.

Product packaging and tabletop production are table stakes in the advertising industry, as bespoke assets are needed for a single brand in every market around the world. Producing assets, packaging and labels at speed and scale has never been without challenges—and in 2020 it was upended by COVID-19. That’s why MediaMonks is setting out to automate an age-old process, leveraging Unreal Engine to maximize quality, speed and efficiency in advertising production through innovation. 

“A tremendous amount of time and money is spent on product photography and videos for food, drinks and other consumer products,” said MediaMonks SVP, Growth Tim Dillon. “These shoots are costly, slow and must be repeated with each new product, or product version, for each region on a seasonal basis. It’s an aspect of the advertising industry that has been slow to innovate and could benefit from the speed, flexibility, repeatability and quality controls that Unreal Engine delivers.”

These benefits go well beyond the short-term solution of safely and efficiently producing creative in a time of social distancing. Virtual production in game engines like Unreal Engine are particularly attractive for global brands that seek to deliver a cohesive experience for consumers across markets. These 3D assets could also be ported to other touchpoints, including immersive experiences and more tangible product listings for ecommerce, making virtual production an approachable starting point for CPG brand virtualization.

A team of Monks in India has been especially hard at work, creating and iterating in Unreal Engine to translate these ideas into tangible outputs. With a keen eye for creativity and storytelling, they’re harnessing the power of this new technology to advance and disrupt. India CCO John Paite says, “From an artistic standpoint, I see so many opportunities to up-level our creative outputs in Unreal Engine, blending creativity and technology to shape better content and stronger stories that propel the industry forward. Having witnessed what the team has accomplished so far, I can’t wait to see what the future holds.”

“In a constant pursuit to further disrupt the industries we innovate in, I’m thrilled MediaMonks has received this support from Epic,” said MediaMonks Director of Creative Solutions Lewis Smithingham. “With our MegaGrant we have a great opportunity to develop an Unreal Engine-based solution that empowers advertising agencies and commercial production companies to efficiently, and cost-effectively increase flexibility and customization, while also improving quality.”

MediaMonks is proud to join the Epic MegaGrants community, backed by Epic’s commitment pledging $100 million to support game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing amazing things with Unreal Engine.

“At Epic Games, we are working constantly to give creators, agencies and brands the freedom and control to deliver cutting edge content, interactive experiences and immersive virtual worlds,” said John Buzzell, Enterprise Licensing Lead for Unreal Engine in the Americas. “Our customers work at a pace that demands innovation, collaboration and iteration—all at high quality. MediaMonks shares this vision, and I’m honored to invite them to the Epic MegaGrant community as they work to reinvent production processes with Unreal Engine.”

Around the world, MediaMonks’ future-forward teams are identifying opportunities to leverage game engines to drive efficiency across a variety of industries and sectors. MediaMonks aims to foundationally disrupt the production process for speed and scale, pushing the industry forward through branded 3D content that connects consumers seamlessly across digital ecosystems and builds brand love.