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.”

Kids today—amidst intense competition from disruptive challenger brands and direct-to-consumer rivals, businesses may find themselves struggling to compete. In an age of social marketing and the power of word-of-mouth, being liked boils down to being relatable.

Think about it: today, social media has prompted many more of us (not just millennials) to befriend our favorite brands. In fact, it’s one of the few environments where users really want to consume branded and sponsored content. With marketing embedded in environments where customers communicate with friends and family, they naturally gravitate toward those they relate to most.

Now, being relatable doesn’t mean trying to jump on the bandwagon of whatever the popular slang or meme of the moment is. Rather, brands that want to appear more relatable must gain a close understanding of their audience: their interests, their concerns and their sense of humor. If charismatic competition luring your customers away feels #SoRelatable, consider how you deal with these three areas in your marketing.

The Right Place for the Right Audience

A key factor in relatability is knowing your audience and catering to their communities. This is especially necessary for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG’s), a space in which it can be difficult to differentiate from competition beyond price. But one brand with a keen awareness of what makes its audience tick is Old Spice. Once associated with an older audience, the brand has bounced back in the past decade to become one of the top hygiene brands for young men.

Old Spice has hosted several of its recent campaigns through interactive livestreams. Take its Foam Zone event from early fall for example, which placed influencers into a series of football-themed challenges featuring the brand’s foam body wash. Inspired by Japanese game shows like Ninja Warrior, the event offered audience participation by activating challenges through polls, hashtags and emoji-sharing on each broadcast platform. Old Spice is no stranger to niche platforms like Twitch, and this event demonstrated the brand’s ability to embed itself among communities favored by its target audience. Having a clear presence within a community and closely interacting with fans isn’t something that only direct-to-consumer brands should do; for Old Spice, it’s no sweat.

Earning Consumers’ Trust

Relatability is also key to defining tough-to-understand value propositions or garnering trust in the consumer. In terms of defining your value proposition, collaborating with influencers or personalities your audience identifies with provides a sense of familiarity as they learn more about you and your products. For example, teaching consumers how to use the latest technology isn’t always an easy sell; customers who lack confidence in their technical understanding can shut down when given the opportunity to try something new. Using relatability to build trust is also beneficial if you anticipate skepticism or concerns from your audience—for example, how personal data is handled.

Knowing that users might be intimidated by smart appliances, Samsung staged a walkthrough of its ecosystem at the 2018 Berlin FWA innovation show. This wasn’t your ordinary “day in the life” presentation: users were able to step into the Griffin family home—of Family Guy fame—through a mixed-reality experience. There, they were tasked with helping Peter Griffin accomplish an afternoon’s worth of chores using the smart Samsung appliances. Because Peter isn’t the smartest tool in the shed, even tech novices can feel smart while activating the different devices for him and seeing how they interact with one another.

Another example for earning trust is the #GetTheYes campaign for the Amazon Teen program. “The campaign targeted kids on visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat during back-to-school season,” said Chris Byrne, Director of US Parternships and Production at MediaMonks,  “providing tools they could use to create custom artwork to share to their parents persuading them for their own Amazon account.” The campaign spoke directly to the way kids socialize and creatively generate content online—acing our right place, right audience tip above—while paying special care to the feelings of parents who worry about their kids growing up too fast.

Accurately Representing Your Audience

FileMaker, a workplace innovation platform that allows businesses to increase productivity through custom-build applications, faced a similar challenge in making a value proposition to users. Our solution was to poke fun at innovation’s status as a buzzword. As a level-headed businesswoman makes the case for how FileMaker solves common business challenges, a top-knotted, paradigm-shifting employee interrupts her in each scene to present an obviously bad idea.

This brings us to another important consideration in relatability: representation. While it’s not the focus of the series, each video starts with the trope of a man interrupting or mansplaining to the businesswoman. Viewers of any gender might enjoy poking fun at the ridiculous ideas, though women who have dealt with similar personalities in the workplace will especially relate. Representation matters in any campaign, and is essential to how consumers relate to brands. Businesses that see a need in making themselves more relatable might start by looking at their past campaigns and how they do (or don’t) represent the audience they want.

Ideally, customers should be able to see themselves in the scenarios you place before them. In addition to representation, context is key; if you don’t have a sophisticated understanding of how your audience interacts with their favorite platforms, you might consider collaborating with a partner who does. This helps you better tailor your voice and capabilities to specific audiences and platforms. With a message that resonates with audiences and a more relatable brand, organizations can maintain their competitive edge amidst the recent wave of direct-to-consumer marketing and established, charismatic brand voices on social media.