As we continue into the new year, we have more exciting news to share. TOMORROW, the boutique Chinese agency founded in 2015 by Rogier Bikker, is joining our existing team in Shanghai—offering additional expertise and growing our services for both local and global brands operating in the country.

Like us, TOMORROW blends the strategic and creative power of a creative agency, the execution mastery of a social agency and production house—building campaigns and content that redefine today’s perspectives with the strategic foresight of tomorrow. It’s one of the most exciting agencies in mainland China, having been named the “Greater China Independent Agency of the year – Gold” in Campaign Asia’s Agency of the year awards for both 2020 and 2019. Notable clients include Burberry, Budweiser, Beyond Meat, Coca-Cola, Crocs and more.

By joining together, TOMORROW’s local clients now have access to a global team of talent and award-winning capabilities, including digital production, mixed reality experiences, immersive broadcasting, building content at scale and more. On the flip side, we’re now better positioned to help global brands show up for Chinese audiences with greater relevance and speed—which has become increasingly important as eyes turn to the first major economy to experience positive growth following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are incredibly proud of what we have built at TOMORROW and couldn’t be more excited about this next stage as we partner with MediaMonks and S4Capital to be a disruptive creative force in China,” says Bikker.

Helping Brands Play to China’s Strengths

Despite the COVID-19 outbreak in Q1 of last year, China’s online advertising market has staged a strong recovery, achieving 17.1% growth in 2020 according to Credit Suisse’s China Internet Sector 2021 Outlook report, with a further 18.1% in growth predicted this year. In addition to remaining on the path to recovery amidst a global recession, China has doubled down on investment in emerging technology.

Last April, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for businesses to “push forward with investment in 5G, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, the industrial Internet and other new-type infrastructure.” At the same time, China’s online population has been growing: eMarketer expects it to surpass 975 million by 2022. Last year, MediaMonks Technical Director Ron Lee and Business Director James Zhang shared with Campaign Asia what brands can expect from China’s 5G boom: a transformed CDJ, immersive new experiences and streamlined content production, each of which signals important opportunities for brands to lead in the virtualized market.

Both technological innovation and a more connected population will also elevate the role of the young Chinese consumer. Believing that they will make up a significant cohort both in China and around the world, TOMORROW adds strong insight in youth marketing and creative applied to our platform and ecommerce expertise.

“TOMORROW has quickly established itself as a creative leader specialized in representing global brands to the Chinese youth in a challenging market like China,” says Michel De Rijk, CEO Asia Pacific, S4Capital. “We look forward to scaling new heights as Rogier leads the combined MediaMonks/TOMORROW team and drives forward S4Capital’s Content Practice.”

A Boost in Relevance at Home and Abroad

Regardless of tech innovation in China, foreign brands often miss the mark in trying to reach audiences on even the country’s more established channels. According to WARC, “40% of US marketers apply the same marketing plans in China as in the US, despite the huge differences in platforms, culture and demographics,” effectively making their marketing efforts dead on arrival.

Key opinion leaders and social proof play an important role in brand health, for example. And in response to lockdown under the pandemic, the popularity of livestream commerce has flourished in China—and has even inspired similar content for markets in other parts of the world. Platforms unique to the nation (like WeChat) can prove essential for brands servicing Chinese audiences, but can also inspire ecommerce strategies in the West, writes Ramzi Chaabane from our office in Shanghai.

With TOMORROW and MediaMonks joining forces, we look forward to focusing on social, influencers and building content studios that better offer brands the tools and insights they need to make a greater impact through award-winning work. And by offering brands in China closer access to our unitary structure and global team of talent we’re equipped to multiply our successes in the APAC region and around the world.

Our team is growing–today we’re welcoming Dare.Win, an entertainment agency based in Paris and Berlin, into the hallowed halls of our monastery. Founded by Wale Gbadamosi-Oyekanmi, Dare.Win is dedicated to building culture through engaging creative and entertainment content.

We’re excited to connect with Dare.Win’s diverse team and lean on their support in bringing a new, flexible model to brands in France—an important market—and offering stronger support to our shared clients there. With Dare.Win’s strong foundation of clients in entertainment and technology, we look forward to working together to find new ways to innovate and drive impact across the customer decision journey.

A Team You Can Bet On

Like MediaMonks, Dare.Win’s team is focused on creating next-generation experiences that build lasting effect. This is reflected in its team culture as well as in its work: while we close deals in Fortnite, Dare.Win has interviewed candidates on the platform, highlighting just how intertwined digital platforms have become in the ways we connect, play and collaborate with one another.

When it comes to consumer-facing experiences, Dare.Win is adept at taking a fit-for-purpose approach that builds on platform features and user behaviors to deliver rich, resonant experiences. Their Meet Vermeer campaign, which lived in the Google Arts & Culture’s Instagram stories, is a great example of this: it invited users to take a screenshot of drawings based on the Dutch master’s work, which they could then color in, remix and share to their delight. The campaign shows how creativity and technology intersect to infuse new relevance for consumers.

Giving People What They Want

The work mentioned above also showcases how important it is today to build relevant content that audiences actually want to consume and take part in. Dare.Win nourishes culture, not adblockers—and we ourselves have railed against the annoying, intrusive content that brings personalized panic to consumers in the form of banner ads that seemingly follow you everywhere.

Instead, we’ll advocate for original storytelling and experiences that help users and stand on their own legs. “The way we think about creating here is simple: we are the generation that uses an ad-blocker, the generation that can create the same stories we want to see, like, comment and share,” says Fabienne Fiorucci, Creative Director at Dare.Win. “We all have the same passion for ideas: the ones that will evoke emotion through cool, insightful and innovative content—the ones that people will actively seek out and enjoy.”

With an extensive client base of entertainment brands and digital platform partnerships, Dare.Win knows what resonates with audiences. “Backed by ambitious talent, a strong culture and diverse team, and coupled with its pursuit to create impactful, entertaining work that audiences actually look forward to, it’s a great fit,” says MediaMonks CEO Victor Knapp. Through our recent signing with talent agency CAA and with our influencer activation team IMA, Dare.Win’s team adds to our ability to heighten the cultural relevance of creative digital experiences for brands across platforms and borders.

Sustaining Culture and Redefining Relevance

Throughout 2020, brands have been forced to confront preconceived notions that drove their marketing and production strategies throughout the decade before. A reliance on the traditional big idea resulted in gaps in the consumer journey, making it tough for many brands to adapt to the digital-first environment we find ourselves in today.

“The greatest trick traditional agencies have played on marketers is hiding behind the principle of the big idea,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar, arguing that most traditional work doesn’t make the big impact needed to be called a “big idea.” Big ideas should drive user behavior and influence culture in significant ways, and brands can achieve this by populating consumer journeys with bespoke experiences.

“Dare.Win has a pulse that beats in tune with society’s. This resonates throughout our campaigns which are rooted in culture, values, and references shared by a whole generation,” says Gbadamosi-Oyekanmi. “Culture is the missing link between users, behavior and brands. That can actually help superpose the performance of the content you produce by making it interesting and relevant to the conversation that users have in mind.”

Brands are looking for ways to break out of the traditional mold and find innovative ways to bring value to consumers. Together, Dare.Win and MediaMonks are primed to help fast-moving digital brands deliver at speed and scale by redefining emotional resonance for a new age by placing special focus on entertaining original content that today’s audiences demand.

Today’s CMOs have a lot on their plate: their role is increasingly responsible for overall business growth, managing brand communications, customer experience and in some cases the adoption of new technologies. Each of these responsibilities touch upon the different ways that consumers interact with a brand, making it essential for CMOs—and their teams—to manage a wide-lens view of the consumer journey. But in order to successfully integrate business objectives with data and customer experience, they’ll need to establish marketing strategies in which both work hand-in-hand to support one another.

By achieving this through constant performance measurement and optimization of content, organizations empower themselves to adopt a more agile process of marketing, which enables them to rapidly experiment and optimize campaign content and media spend through engagement. This culture of experimentation—with results to back it up—is key to achieving the always-on stream of content that today’s consumer expects, offering several relevant, personalized permutations of a message rather than the “big idea” campaign that was so popular in the past.

Close the Loop on End-to-End Marketing

Effective marketing today isn’t born just from an initial set of figures, but in fact results in new data that can be used to further optimize that content. This strengthens the creative so that it remains relevant to consumers along the digital journey. Whether an initial set of metrics lives up to expectations or not, data-confident organizations that continually measure performance may use those insights to increase content effectiveness, save in costs over the long-term and maintain trust in their creative partners.

Think about what a campaign that uses data poorly looks like. We’ve all found ourselves haunted by a product we’ve viewed (or even purchased) in our travels across the internet—an experience that can come off as annoying or even downright creepy. That this situation is all too common demonstrates how brands often miss key opportunities for effective retargeting or adapting their message to consumers’ changing priorities or intents. Those who continually optimize content through an agile process rapidly gain and apply new insights to adapt their message to the consumer’s interests or place in the sales funnel, resulting in more relevant and effective targeting.

We took this end-to-end approach in a recent awareness campaign for Gladskin, the Dutch skincare brand, and their award-winning acne treatment. The processes described below enabled the brand to five-times lower CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) and higher-than-forecasted reach. To achieve this, we measured what content brought audiences past initial engagement, then applied those insights to continually change the positioning, messaging and creative for greater results.

Optimizing Content for Increased Relevance

As with any campaign, this one began with an initial set of research on a hypothesized audience. Through preliminary engagements from consumers, we were able to quickly zero in on key insights that informed the next phase of production and user targeting. For example, we noticed that Instagram Story content focusing on models’ faces performed especially well in the awareness stage; this content achieved a 37% higher CTR than story content that focused on the product’s effect on the skin.

This aligned well with what you would expect from a platform like Instagram, as the face-focused content was akin to your standard beauty deliverable. But we found that the opposite was true in the consideration phase: Instagram Story content that performed better at this stage fixated on the skin and science behind the product.

Similarly, content that drove more users to convert focused on the research behind the product’s award-winning formula and customer testimonials, depending on the format used. The former was most effective with carousels that let users dive deeper into the product benefits in detail, while the latter performed best in single-image link ads.

Which type of message performs best per platform or format isn’t set in stone; it’s different per campaign, driving home the importance of closely measuring performance across the course of any campaign. But what both winning formats in the consideration and purchase phases had in common was that they provided consumers with justification to buy after their interest had initially been piqued, a key insight for subsequent retargeting efforts.

One can imagine how sticking to a single type of content throughout the consumer journey is comparatively ineffective in pushing consumers through the funnel; think back on that example of a product listing stalking a customer who happened upon it once. By highlighting new insights through frequent A/B testing, we could rapidly remix transformable assets into more and more attractive deliverables—and even support new creative formats, like Instant Experiences on Facebook.

Boost ROI with Optimized Spend

Cracking the code to the most thumb-stopping, relevant messages to consumers is one thing, but it doesn’t do anyone good when those messages fall on deaf ears. In addition to optimizing content, agile marketing processes let you plug data in to deeply target new groups (or continue to retarget engaged ones) for continued success.

For Gladskin, we worked with Brainlabs (an award-winning digital marketing agency) on a new approach to organizing target interests. Rather than sort them by theme—in this case, things like “teenage skincare” or “acne treatment”—we identified how well each individual interest performed. From there, we divided the top-performing ones from the bottom.

Weekly reporting enabled us to continually replace the lowest-performing interests with new ones. Over time, this process will result in ever-higher engagement rates and reach into new, increasingly relevant audiences over the course of the campaign. Tied with the process of optimizing insights-driven content as detailed above, this end-to-end approach is truly reactive to audience engagements and intents.

As measurement becomes increasingly essential for CMOs to improve customer experience, increase communication effectiveness and drive overall business goals, brands must embrace agile processes that allow for the continuous optimization of campaigns. This repeated experimentation through closed-loop, end-to-end systems provides brands with the insights they need to achieve specific business outcomes for long-term success.

Performance marketing is just the first step.

It’s widely understood that social media has fundamentally changed our culture—so rapidly, and in so many ways, that it can be difficult to gauge. For example, many still struggle to understand the role that social media plays in the lives of young people, an important segment of the market that enjoys increased purchasing power and exemplifies a radical shift in consumer values.

A new white paper from IMA, our brand activation and influencer engagement team, seeks to demystify Gen Z’s impact on culture, and provides key learnings on how today’s brands can retain relevance and build impact amidst shifting cultural values. Titled Anticipating Culture & Changing Behavior, the white paper lays out what separates Gen Z from those that came before it, and how influencers are key to reaching these community-obsessed consumers.

Surveying Today’s Social Landscape

Anticipating Culture & Changing Behavior opens with a look at the current state of culture and how it is shaped online. A key change that’s emerged in the past few years is that influencers have stepped in to replace brands as the intermediaries of culture, “bringing innovations from the margins of society into the mass market.”

How, or why, have influencers risen to take on this role? IMA’s describes a phenomenon called “crowdculture” to describe the new ways that younger consumers—most notably, Gen Z—are reshaping the way we gather together, build identities and discover or engage with brands.

Crowdcultures operates in two different ways. First, they include subcultures built around passions and hobbies. Second, they include “art worlds,” or the “loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art,” according to IMA. The former includes niche interests, while the latter addresses the fact that individuals in such communities inspire and compete with one another, fueling an exchange in ideas and content that is amplified on social media. It’s within these new environments and networks that brands must learn to engage with audiences authentically.

Understanding Gen Z

If anyone is embedded within crowdcultures, it’s Gen Z—and forward-thinking, future-proofed brands across industries are eager to understand this unconventional consumer base that has largely eschewed labels. But IMA has one useful name for them, which gets at the heart of what they care about: they’re “the truth generation.”

With digital fluency and the ability to research products and brands, Gen Z is always in the pursuit of the truth. This includes expressing their own individual truths or connecting with those of others—such as experimenting with different identities.

Communication and dialogue are key for this type of exploration. “Gen Z’ers are always in search for authenticity since they believe it generates greater freedom of expression and greater openness to understanding different kinds of people,” reads the white paper. “They value connecting to different truths,” whether it be investigating diversity, environmental sustainability or more.

IMA’s work in casting and producing influencer-driven content illustrates this well. Working with audio equipment brand Marshall, they partnered with influencers to develop content for the brand’s Guided by Music social content series—a digital city guide through the lens of music and rock and roll—IMA developed a multi-tier influencer strategy for both reach and engagement. Giving influencers like musician Charlie Barker and professional skateboarder Boo Johnson creative freedom to produce content (backed by the help of professional assistance), Marshall was able to develop a full-year framework for authentic content.

Where to Begin Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

To evolve your digital strategy to accommodate these cultural shifts, first understand that influencers today are not just popular users, but innovators in their own right. They embody a new set of shared values and have risen through the ranks as leaders in their own respective art worlds and subcultures. Challenge yourself to extend your view outside of the conventional influencer “image” and recognize that they are authorities whose insight and opinions are trusted by today’s consumers.

Second, understand that consumers want to engage with other people—not faceless brands. “What’s happening now is that brands are facing a structural problem, not a creative one,” notes IMA’s paper. “They have the budget and the creativity to go above and beyond, however, they fail to arouse consumers’ interest and attention because they do not immerse themselves in their culture, their community, and their ideologies.” In a drive to become more customer-obsessed and assistive in their audience’s lives, brands would do well to explore how influencers can fit into their marketing mix to build relevance.

Driving online conversation and bolstered by increased purchasing power, Gen Z has fundamentally changed our culture. Brands that refuse to acknowledge shifts in younger consumers’ values and how they affect engagement with brands risk falling behind into obsolescence. For those that need guidance for integrating influencers into their marketing mix, Anticipating Culture & Changing Behavior is a great starting resource.

Get cultured in crowdculture.

In early February, Nike CEO John Donahoe discussed with CNBC Nike’s efforts to become more sustainable. “The consumer increasingly cares about sustainability,” he told CNBC in an interview. “It matters to Nike and to consumers. … [Consumers] are looking to companies like Nike to lead.”

The feeling that one must evolve in accordance with consumers’ shifting values and needs is a familiar one for brands and their CMOs, who have adopted a greater sense of purpose in how they position themselves within the world. And brand purpose is increasingly important to today’s consumers: according to data from eMarketer, 59% of US consumers are more loyal toward brands that support the causes they care about. But despite this, 61% of consumers believe that too many brands use these issues as marketing ploys for their own gain, according to the same survey.

As brands strive to share their values and tell their stories, influencers serve as an excellent way to do so more authentically in a way that resonates with today’s consumers—making them an important factor within any marketing mix that aims to forge a genuine connection with consumers.  Given their relevance to niche audiences and participation in close social communities, partnering with influencers gives brands the opportunity to put their money where their mouth is and take a more active part within cultures that stand for something and drive change—here’s how.

Enhanced Storytelling Capabilities

Content creators know their audience better than anyone else. They’ve established deep relationships with followers and viewers by creating a regular stream of quality, relatable content; it’s precisely this content and closeness to the audience that has gained them a following in the first place.

This skill is invaluable to brands that seek to make themselves more relatable, though it’s important that brands understand what kind of content consumers gravitate toward. First, brands shouldn’t focus all their attention on follower counts and likes—both of which Instagram is experimenting with getting rid of, and do little to measure exactly how influential any user on the platform is.

But don’t despair; this doesn’t mean influencer marketing is a free-for-all with little attribution or no way to vet effective partners. In fact, data from our influencer activation team IMA notes that quality is the true benchmark of value: what matters more than the number of viewers an influencer brings to your content is how many of those viewers will engage, seek out and explore your brand. Looking beyond hard numbers and toward quality and engagement also enables more genuine and authentic content.

Irresistible Shoppable Content

Shoppable content is gaining steam with consumers. Last year, US social referral share of total traffic to ecommerce sites grew from 3.1% in 2016 to 9.1% in 2019, according to data from Adobe, and has become the fastest-growing driver of referrals. With Gen Z’s increased interest in shopping on social channels like Instagram, influencers present an excellent opportunity for brands to support this trend by generating shoppable or inspirational content that resonates with consumers.

What’s influencing influencer marketing?

In fact, trust in influencers is strong: another eMarketer survey states that 25% of US/UK children and teens aged 6-16 cite them as leading influences on purchasing decisions, sandwiched between friends (28%) and family members (21%). Despite this, it’s critical brands don’t treat influencers as another media buy; they’re creative partners through and through, and should be treated as such.

“When you find influencers who match your brand perfectly, you should trust that they know their following best. So when you are tapping into their community, you’ll have a stronger outcome by giving them the creative freedom to create credible content linking to your brand,” says Emilie Tabor,  Founder & CMO of IMA. “Of course, we always brief the influencer closely and the content is always approved by the brand before it goes live.”

Greater Focus on Customer Obsession

Finally, influencer partnerships enable your brand to become more customer obsessed with relative ease. What is a customer-obsessed brand? Customer obsession takes a handful for forms: “Forrester sees three common expressions of customer obsession—‘Count on us’ (reliability), ‘At your service’ (service), and ‘On your side’ (advocacy)—depending on a company’s strengths and what its customers value,” writes Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Shar VanBoskirk in the report, “How To Build Your Company’s Customer Obsession Strategy.”

Influencers fit this model by building a close relationship with audiences based on their needs—for example, a beauty content creator who helps viewers understand which cosmetics are best for them, and how to apply them. Community advocacy and authority as a knowledgeable resource are two key influencer attributes at work here.

MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar notes that “Differentiated creative combines an understanding of culture with heavy-lifting business impact that drives real bottom line value.” In achieving this, influencers must be knowledgeable about their audiences; selecting the best influencer to reach your target audience requires you understand them and their needs, too.

This means a good place to begin your influencer marketing efforts is investing in social listening and market insights. “In selecting influencers for clients, we dig deep into all data: analytics, social listening, engagement, sentiment, quality of content and overall brand match,” says Tabor. “Who are their followers? Where are they based? Age groups, interests? Have they worked with competitors? There’s so much more beyond the surface.”

The points above points illustrate a handful of ways that influencers can help brands stay ahead of the game in social media marketing. Serving as knowledge experts, inspirational figures and talent, influencers offer several benefits to the brands that partner with them and are key to enhancing and strengthening the relationships they have with consumers.

The decade is drawing quickly to a close, and it’s been a wild ride. From new technologies to new members of our family (we welcomed BizTech, IMA, Firewood Marketing and WhiteBalance this year), 2019 presented us with a lot of thrilling changes—and some exciting opportunities as we enter a new era. Looking back, we polled managing directors from our offices around the world for their favorite trends and technologies that have emerged in the past year—and what they’re looking forward to next.

Extended Reality Gets Real

Interest in mixed and extended reality (the combination of real and virtual objects or environments, like augmented or virtual reality, enabled by mobile or wearable devices) has been growing. At the same time, mixed reality has made strides in maturity over the past year, like Google’s efforts in making virtual objects feel truly anchored to the environment with occlusion, in which virtual objects are responsive to their surrounding environment—for example, disappearing behind real-world objects.

For Martin Verdult, Managing Director at MediaMonks London, extended reality is among the innovations he’s become most excited about going into 2020, and not just for the entertainment potential: “Virtual and augmented reality will become increasingly prevalent for training and simulation, as well as offering new ways to interact with customers.” For example, our Spacebuzz virtual reality experience gives children a unique look at the earth and environment they may typically take for granted, using the power of immersive tech to leave an indelible mark.

As the technology that powers extended reality matures, so will its potential use cases. But when a technology is still evolving significantly in short time, it can be difficult for brands to translate their ideas or goals into clear, value-added extended reality experiences. “We have introduced creative sprints for our core clients to get these ideas in a free flow,” says Verdult.

Among Verdult’s favorite examples of augmented reality projects MediaMonks has worked on this year is Unilever’s Little Brush Big Brush, which uses whimsical, virtual animal masks to teach children proper brushing habits and turn a chore into playtime. Similarly, extended reality can bring products to life in an engaging way—or if used in a customer’s research phase, it can help customers interact with a product with minimal (or no) dedicated retail shelf space.

Part of the Little Brush Big Brush’s charm is that it extends beyond simply AR, connecting to a web cartoon series and a Facebook Messenger chatbot to reward kids with stickers at key milestones. “Value comes from connecting an IP to a brand through a deeply engaging hyper reality experience,” says Olivier Koelemij, Managing Director at MediaMonks LA. “One that only a well-executed integrated production can offer, combining digital and physical in new and extraordinary ways.”

AI/Machine Learning Grows Up

One can’t reflect on past innovations and look to the future without mentioning artificial intelligence and machine learning. From programmatic delivery to enabling entirely new creative experiences—like matured extended reality powered by computer vision—to connecting cohesive experiences across the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence “will change our interaction with technology in ways we can’t imagine yet,” says Sander van der Vegte, Head of MediaMonks Labs, our research and development team that continually experiments with innovation.

The most creatively inspiring uses of AI are the ones that will help us understand the world and our fellow humans. In collaboration with Charité, for example, we programmed a 3D printer to exhibit common symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and its effect on motor skills. The result is a series of surreal art-objects that make real patients’ experiences tangible for the general population.

Social Content and Activations Build Impact

Ask Sicco Wegerif (Managing Director at MediaMonks Amsterdam) what struck him this year, and he’ll tell you it’s the elevation of social content in purchasing—for example, how Instagram made influencer posts shoppable early this year. Wegerif notes that about a quarter of consumers have made a purchase on social media, signaling new opportunities for brands to build connections with consumers.

“Looking at this from an integrated and smart production perspective, we can help brands create so many assets and storylines that tap into this trend, especially when combining this with data so we can be super personal and relevant.” When social media is prioritized early in the creative and planning process, it can enable more meaningful experiences.

For example, our “People are the Places” activation for Aeromexico used Facebook content to transform the way users discover destinations around the world. Instead of researching and booking a city, users get to learn about people around the world—then purchase a ticket to where they call home. The social content enriches the experience and builds emotion into the experience. “It’s in essence a very simple thought that can change the whole CX,” says Wegerif.

Social Activations and Digital Experiences Weave Together

Speaking of social media, it can become a powerful tool to build relevance and connection with experiential. Jason Prohaska, Managing Director at MediaMonks NY, says: “Experience and social work hand-in-hand as part of the digital plan for many brands, and are no longer below the priority line.” With live experiential—which elevates the role of the online audience to interact, take part in and build buzz around experiences—brands can achieve greater strategic impact in how they build connection with their consumers.

But doing so successfully requires a confluence of data, influencers, experiential storytelling and production. The future of this looks good to Prohaska. “We expect 2020 to deliver several use case scenarios at scale for brand identity that may set benchmarks for personalization, automation, customer journey optimization, efficacy, performance and engagement.”

Koelemij looks forward to stronger investment in digital and consumer understanding as brands begin to integrate experiences even further going into 2020. “With most good work, success and performance can now be better attributed to digital as we get more advanced in understanding what success looks like,” he says, “especially in how we can measure it across blended activations.”

And that’s exactly how we’d like to spend 2020: helping brands achieve their goals with data-backed, insights-driven creative across the customer decision journey. Through added capabilities thanks to companies like WhiteBalance, Firewood, BizTech and IMA joining the S4Capital family in 2019, we achieve this by greatly prioritizing and enhancing key elements of the marketing mix for daring brands—and as we reflect on the past year, we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Seemingly as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers are put away, consumers rush to retailers online and off to get a start on their holiday shopping—at least in the US. But late November ushers in the biggest shopping season throughout the Western world, influenced by global digital retailers who have set a new pace by creeping the holiday calendar earlier and earlier. Still, it’s not too late to develop a relevant holiday campaign to reach consumers.

But don’t fear—it’s also the season of miracles, and brands still have time to get into the holiday spirit with influencers. Whether you need to quickly implement a campaign from concept to market or simply want to add a dash of spice to one that’s already in the works, there are still ways to cut through the blizzard of information overload in the cluttered holiday season with the aid of influencer partnerships.

They’re Agile & Up-to-Date

One of the biggest benefits that influencers bring to the table in a holiday campaign is that they are agile by nature; well-versed in what resonates with their audiences, influencers have strong, authentic and creative voices—and can deliver in short time. In fact, partnering with a handful of influencers is a great way to co-develop a robust collection of content needed to keep your brand at top of mind in the lead-up to the holidays.

But in addition to providing scale, the flexibility that influencers bring to the table can also give your brand an edge against holiday-season competition. Shoppers have a rising interest in searching for the most up-to-date recommendations: Google highlights that “Best” and “right now” searches have grown 125% over the past couple years. Influencers have the speed and agility to weigh in on the most current trends or topics that their audiences care about, engaging them with an authoritative voice that consumers trust.

They’re Authentic—If You Let Them Be

As they begin working with influencers, many brands become concerned that they must relinquish some control of the message to someone else. Trust is key to safeguarding campaigns from getting muddled in rework and repeated review cycles—and is key to ensuring the deliverables are made on-time in the short and competitive holiday season. Realizing this, we’re ardent supporters of the idea that influencers are their most authentic when they have creative freedom in developing their content in partnership with brands.

This is the approach we used in an influencer campaign for a major UK insurer. The brand wants to raise awareness amongst Millennial and Gen-Z audiences, because some of the products and guidance they offer—such as cybersecurity and travel—are highly relevant for these audiences.

“The challenge for this brand is that they have a super strong cyber offering for consumers but mental availability in the category and for the brand themselves is low among Millennials and Gen-Z,” says Alistair Vines, Business Lead at MediaMonks.

For the campaign, influencers were briefed on the desired content, which was planned out in a quick creative phase. Overall, influencers were able to create authentic content (within some guidelines) because they bought into and endorsed the message from the brand.

The result is a coherent campaign that tackles several cybersecurity issues, delivered in a way that relates to the target consumer groups (one piece of content generated over 4,000 likes in just two days). And because the influencers produced their own content, the whole campaign was developed from brief to launch in just five weeks.

They Offer Intimacy

In addition to expanding reach, partnering with influencers can also help tailor your brand to emergent search and shopping behaviors. According to holiday insights from Facebook, mobile shoppers are 1.85 times more likely to seek gift inspiration through Instagram. When focused on millennials alone, that number jumps even higher: they’re 3.19 times more likely to. The findings show how social media is increasingly important to consumers as they research purchases.

Google also presents interesting insight on digital shoppers’ search behavior. “People indicated they are more than 2X as likely to add items to their basket and 40% more likely to spend more than planned when they identify the shopping experience as highly personalized,” they note. When brands hear “personalization,” they might think about recommendation engines and highly targeted creative—essential components of any campaign, ecommerce platform or overall brand experience. But influencers can also accentuate personalization through the intimacy they provide to their audiences, helping online shoppers find the gift inspiration and ideas most relevant to them and their needs.

The statistics mentioned above might inspire practical KPIs that brands can achieve through influencers: gain mindshare, increase awareness and drive new sales. But it’s important to remember that connection is critical to influencer success; the branded content shouldn’t feel disjointed from that which an influencer routinely offers to their audience.

From delivering cross-channel content quickly to injecting intimacy and authenticity, influencers fit several strategies for brands to connect closer to audiences old and new. This can be with a campaign built from scratch, or an added layer on top of an existing one. Either way, influencer partnerships make a great way to build relationships in the season of togetherness.

The FTC recently released a set of guidelines informing influencers of how they should disclose branded content. They range from some of the more obvious points (definitely disclose that you’re being paid to promote something) to more stringent ethical concerns—for example, influencers can’t talk about an experience with a product you haven’t tried, nor can they praise a product that they don’t think is good.

These guidelines are not only useful to maintain transparency with consumers. In fact, they remind us how brands and influencers can—and should—form more meaningful partnerships that benefit them both. Doing so achieves a truer sense of authenticity, authority and integrity, exactly what a brand seeks to infuse in their story when working with influencers. Here’s how to make that happen.

Adopt a Community-First Mindset

The surest way to build authenticity into an influencer campaign is to center the story around the community you hope to connect with. Consider, for example, how many leading content creators interrupt or introduce their content with a scripted spiel about a product that doesn’t have anything to do with the content itself. For many in the audience, these ad reads might have a “it’s what pays the bills” kind of vibe, rather than a reliable endorsement from the influencer.

While such a tactic might increase reach and awareness, it doesn’t go far enough in creating a meaningful connection with the audience. “A lot of companies think about influencer partnerships like they would a media spend,” says Claudia Cameron, Head of Digital Marketing at IMA, a digital influencer agency that merged with MediaMonks in August. “Get at the heart of what the influencer means for their audience, rather than focusing on getting in front of as many people as possible.”

In an ANA presentation on how brands can retain relevance through influencer partnerships, Hot Wheels Sr. Marketing Director/Head of Brand Marketing Ricardo Briceno discussed the toy brand’s strategic, long-term partnership with vlogger Tanner Fox. As an automotive enthusiast, it was clear how Fox’s content overlapped with the brand’s mission to ignite a challenging spirit in children through cars. “What is the shared value between what Hot Wheels stands for and what the creator stands for?” Briceno asked rhetorically, demonstrating key questions that brands should consider in forming their approach to partnership.

Allow Creative Control for Added Authenticity

Defining this shared value and goals does more than ensure a brand’s goals and influencer’s audiences are aligned. It can also help build confidence and comfort in giving the influencer freedom to create content how they choose. Cameron advises that brands provide influencers this flexibility.

This enables the brand to achieve authenticity and relevance by building the story around the influencer’s audience. “Set the campaign to fit the feed, rather than the other way around,” Cameron says. “You can give influencers parameters in how you want to position the brand, allowing them to connect strategically with the audience.”

And no niche is too small or obscure to make a meaningful connection. In promoting its new navigation device, electronics company TomTom faced a challenge: how could they reach an audience of truck drivers, who are notoriously hard to reach with so much time spent on the road? Inspired by the insight that truckers combat loneliness through social media connection, IMA tapped into an online community of drivers and discovered 18 of its most influential users, paving the path for TomTom to engage with the community in a genuine way. It shows how the value of influencers extends beyond the glossy image that the term “influencer” commonly conjures up—and that even those without big followings can earn big user engagement.

Build Lasting Relationships and Trust

Brands can do more than give up some creative control to maintain authenticity. Cameron suggests they achieve a higher quality relationship with influencers by moving away from short-term campaigns and cultivating longer-term partnerships instead—at least six months at minimum. “You need an understanding of how the influencer talks with their audience, then apply that with your strategy,” says Cameron. “When connecting with niche audiences, this becomes very specific.” Nurturing a longer-term relationship helps build that understanding.

This also helps influencers feel more involved with the brand. “If you’re a makeup brand and there’s a new release, make sure your influencer gets it before anyone else,” says Cameron. She notes that gifting products alone is no longer an effective strategy for building social buzz, though brands can build involvement by offering influencers—and their communities—with an exclusive experience.

Keep Up with Evolving, Cross-Border Guidelines

Regardless of how deep your relationship is with an influencer, it’s important to keep abreast of regulations and guidelines like those recently released by the FTC. But this offers a challenge to global brands: each market has different rules to follow. A global partner like IMA can help brands and influencers alike ensure their message is within local guidelines while maintaining a global brand standard.

Cameron also notes that disclosure is quickly getting better on social platforms like Instagram, which offers a paid partnership tag that clearly labels branded content. Far from harmful to branded content’s effectiveness—“We don’t see any negative ramifications yet,” says Cameron—the tag offers greater visibility for the brand by highlighting its role in creation of the content.

With greater visibility for the brand, added authority for the influencer and transparency toward the user, it’s easy to see how improved disclosure offers a net positive for everyone and builds stronger relationships. And that’s what influencer marketing is about: forging a meaningful connection and offering real, relevant value to the audience.

Shoppers care a lot about what their friends have to say: 90% of consumers believe in brand recommendations from friends. With consumers increasingly turning to each other to make online purchasing decisions, brands should take advantage of the inherently social nature of shopping to expand their reach and enhance their campaigns.

This doesn’t mean pestering your shoppers to share a purchase to their social feeds or spam friends with personalized discount offers. Instead, businesses can build social interaction into their ecommerce platforms in ways that go beyond simply enlisting customers as sales reps. Brands that will truly lead in this space are those who provide innovative social shopping experiences that build off consumers already-existing shopping behaviors. Here are some takeaways for designing your own social shopping experience.

Bring Friends Together

An ideal shopping experience brings a group together by encouraging friends to seek one another out to participate. Doing so inspires the most enthusiastic member of a social circle to function like a brand ambassador, encouraging friends to engage. Build this into the delivery of your content, but don’t make customers feel like you’re using them just for reach.

Instead, provide a real value proposition demonstrating how more participants enhance the experience. One shopping platform that expertly recreates the fun of shopping together at a mall is the Tommy Hilfiger video look book for SideFlix. SideFlix is a new visual platform from Facebook that allows multiple users to lay their phones side-by-side as a video plays stretched across the devices’ screens in unison. By inviting viewers to connect through Facebook Messenger, the platform sets the stage for in-person interaction despite its digital nature. It treats viewers to content that features influencers wearing the latest Tommy Hilfiger looks straight off the runway.

Content unlocks depending on how many people are connected in a group, with a minimum of two devices required to view one video. As more people join, more perspectives become available in the video: one device might focus on one model, a second device on another model, while the last two devices might provide a sweeping view of the scene and atmosphere. While content is gated behind a headcount, having more devices connected enables a more visually engaging experience with to the added screen space. The more the merrier, indeed.

Build Upon Customer’s IRL Shopping Habits

The delivery of your social shopping experience should in some way connect with your industry or product. With a platform like Sideflix, pretty much any project with strong visual storytelling can succeed by enhancing a film. But for a truly shoppable experience, you may need to get a little craftier. Look for ways to enhance and build upon existing consumer habits: how do your customers engage socially with your industry already, and how can you translate that experience to a social platform?

Fashion is one industry that relies heavily on outside opinion: while you may gravitate toward your own sense of style while shopping for a new look, you’re likely to ask a friend what they think before you make a purchase. In addition to the social nature of clothes shopping, the industry thrives on consumer reaction with the unveiling of new collections and runway shows. The Tommy Hilfiger video look book builds upon both of these consumer reactions by encouraging friends to huddle around collection-focused videos together, sharing their opinions about the line while browsing specific looks before making a purchase.

“SideFlix disrupts the traditional online viewing experience by mixing digital and physical interactions,” said Yentl Bresseleers, Senior Producer at MediaMonks. “The technology enables the brand to get more creative with the execution by stitching together multiple perspectives into a cohesive whole, thereby creating a compelling multi-user experience on and offline.” The experience makes smart use of the platform; activated through Messenger and hosted as a Facebook Instant Game, it breaks the conventions of the platform to create something entirely new.

Elegantly Integrate Content and Point-of-Sale

When designing a creative experience that so closely aligns with the buying process, a big challenge is integrating that experience with the point of sale. It takes finesse to transition from content to purchase without being pushy or taking users out of the experience, but it’s not impossible. Striking the right balance requires trust and good communication across the organization and partners to align and maximize goals—for example, a content/marketing team versus IT versus the ecommerce platform.

The Tommy Hilfiger SideFlix campaign demonstrates one way to do this correctly. The process of browsing and selecting items is built directly into the content itself, allowing viewers to save looks to a wishlist. Afterward, the platform hands them over to the Tommy Hilfiger site to complete their purchase through a handy link. This allows for a shopping experience that’s cohesive and seamless for the user, yet allows each stakeholder to own their respective place along the customer journey.

Offering social interaction is a great way to enhance the digital shopping experience. In addition to making the customer journey more exciting, your business becomes more relateable by presenting an experience aligned with the platforms that customers use to connect with one another. Where will you open up shop next?

This week, marketers descended upon San Diego for ANA’s Digital & Social Media Conference, where representatives from top brands within their respective industries spoke about their approaches to digital marketing. An over-arching theme of the event was how digital experience (DX)—through a combination of investments in emerging tech, supporting cultural moments and delivering authentic social content—builds brand love in an era where consumers are increasingly critical (and annoyed by) online advertising.

From machine learning to influencer marketing to programmatic, ANA’s speakers covered it all. We’ve cherrypicked the highlights to keep you up-to-date on where top brands have met success, and the learnings they’ve taken from it.

Being a “Challenger” Brand Isn’t About Size—It’s Attitude

When you think of challenger brands, you probably think of smaller, up-and-coming brands that have sprung onto the scene with disruptive strategies that upend their respective industries. But even established, legacy brands can be challengers in their own right. Sharing the stage with representatives from VMLY&R in the talk “How Inventive Brand Experiences Are Powering New Balance’s Success,” New Balance Global Consumer Marketing Director Allie Tsavdarides positioned the athletic brand as a challenger dedicated to seeking out ways to do things smarter.

Amplify your team’s DX capabilities across the full customer journey.

One way to do this? Injecting the brand with some cultural relevance by “looking to engage in a cultural point in time.” Going far beyond tweeting a message acknowledging a holiday or event, New Balance’s interest lies in taking a more strategic approach to cultural moments. Both the brand and its agency showcased their Runaway Pub, a pub opened in the lead-up to the London Marathon, where runners could pay for drinks with digital points earned by succeeding in a series of running challenges.

The campaign leveraged a cultural moment that inspired many to achieve their running and fitness goals, giving runners a space not only to train, but to connect and unwind over a couple of (free!) pints. MediaMonks helped bring the experience to life by enabling the integration between fitness app Strava—which measured users’ running progress—and the digital wallet, and by producing a clever bartender web app to ensure simple, seamless service.

Embrace Being a Work-in-Progress

New Balance wasn’t the only legacy brand embracing tech in innovative ways. In his talk “From Bad Pizza to Machine Learning,” Domino’s VP of Digital Marketing and Global Ecommerce Christopher Thomas-Moore discussed how important it is for brands to consider themselves as works-in-progress. While many brands might find discomfort in the move-fast-and-break-things attitude popularized by startups, Thomas-Moore suggests the secret to the Domino’s pizza sauce is being an early adopter of emerging tech.

“Being an early adopter allows your brand to understand and refine,” he said. So is Domino’s—who’s prototyped delivery robots, self-driving cars, an order-taking chatbot and was named 2018’s Tech Accelerator of the Year—a tech company, or a pizza company? For Thomas-Moore, everything ties back to the core product; if the pizza weren’t good, after all, no one would want to eat it. “If we could get our product right, then the other pieces would fall in place,” he told the audience.

MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar says that “Real innovation lies in learning how to start matching your products and services to evolve with user behavior.” It’s through this desire to constantly iterate that brands like Domino’s and New Balance can adopt a challenger mindset.

You Can’t Beat a Good Story

In her talk “Target: Innovation Driven by the Basics,” Kristi Argyilan—President of Target’s in-house media company Roundel—gave a peek at how the retailer generates results for its partners and itself: relevance. Mentioning shuttered retailers like Toys ‘R’ Us, The Limited and Circuit City, Argilyan noted that “what every failure has in common is that it was preceded by a loss of relevance.” (It’s worth noting that Toys ‘R’ Us may have learned its lesson, with plans to return just in time for the holidays with a renewed focus on experience.)

Retailers—and brands in general—are at a crossroads on delivering more relevant messages and experiences to their consumers, who are spread across many different channels along the path to purchase. Target’s Roundel media company exists to hit a bullseye on consumer needs by pushing relevant content tailor-made for Target guests.

From applying the retailer’s own insights to crafting creative and picking the most relevant channels, Roundel, quite simply, is dedicated to giving people what they want. “People don’t like online ads,” says Argyilan. “They like good stories.”

With user journeys becoming increasingly fragmented, these stories will need to fit within a larger strategic narrative that can be easily reconfigured to different segments and channels. In the conference’s first kickoff session, “From Alligator to Zebra: Digital Storytelling at the San Diego Zoo,” the zoo’s Director of Marketing Debra Erickson discussed how “a great story is great, and it’s platform-agnostic.”

But how do brands envision a platform-agnostic story? Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell noted later during the conference that the “big idea” approach is outdated, and that brands must leverage data to address end-to-end customer journeys. Along these means, Argyilan noted the importance of leveraging partnerships—even for in-house media companies like Roundel—to expand a brand’s capabilities for maintaining relevance across channels and from all directions in the decision-making process.

First and Foremost, Social is About People

If anyone understands applying data to achieve relevance, it’s MGM Resorts. Their VP of Social Portfolio Strategy, Beverly Jackson, spoke about how data is key to meeting customers’ expectations. But just as important is authenticity, which the brand maintains through social-first, fit-for-format content.  Some of Jackson’s most interesting ideas were about social: “Selling FOMO is becoming just as important as selling a ticket,” she said.

According to Jackson, “social marketing is on the frontlines of bringing the brand promise to life.” By applying data-driven insights to content that in turn drives experiences, the brand has adopted a lean, nimble approach to social marketing that helps it better deliver upon consumers’ shifting expectations.

One of the key ways that MGM inspires consumers is through strategic influencer partnerships—and they weren’t alone. In her talk “Creating Digital Content That Sparks Engagement,” Emeline Berlind, VP of Content Strategy at Sephora, mentioned that “social was created for people, not brands,” highlighting the unique points of view that influencers offer to brands and their audience. As for how to remain authentic in these partnerships, she said that “It’s a balancing act … We can’t be too prescriptive with the brief. We create guidelines, but are not prescriptive.”