In the past year, we’ve had the chance to partner with brands and help them show up for audiences in meaningful and creative new ways. Now, we’re carrying that momentum into 2021 by announcing a new member of the S4Capital family: Decoded Advertising, a truly integrated creative, technology and media agency that bridges the gap between meaningful storytelling, data-led optimization and commerce.

With Decoded joining S4Capital just before MediaMonks celebrates its 20th anniversary, we stand at a pivotal moment to integrate our unitary offering with new efficiency. The move accelerates our pursuit to deliver more impactful creative across the customer decision journey (CDJ)—driving brand relevance beyond advertising to evoke emotion and entertainment wherever people look.

 Maximizing the Integrated Approach

In building S4Capital, Sir Martin Sorrell set out on a bold vision to align the “holy trinity” of first-party data, content and programmatic media under one unitary structure. The benefit to this end-to-end model is data informs content, which is then distributed through programmatic media for greater effectiveness. Combine this with an integrated strategy that spans across the full CDJ—commerce, social media, OOH, virtual events and more—and brands have a content engine that fuels insight-driven, fit-for-purpose creative across the digital landscape. 

While S4Capital has scaled up its content, creative and media capabilities over the years, Decoded has delivered on the integrated promise since its inception. Among Decoded’s first clients was Dollar Shave Club, a visionary DTC brand that changed the retail landscape forever. But while it’s easy to be a small disruptor, true success comes with a partner who can help you scale and grow. By aligning its data and creative practice, Decoded’s multidisciplinary team helped scale the DTC mindset and catapult Dollar Shave Club and its many other recognizable brands to great success.

While Decoded began in the advertising environment, combining with MediaMonks offers an opportunity to extend beyond that and add a fresh perspective to creative experiences of all kinds. “Since day one it’s been our goal to explore every strategic, creative and media lever at our disposal to build better brands and deliver better performance results,” says Matt Rednor, Decoded’s Founder and CEO. “In S4Capital, we’ve found a group of like-minded collaborators that immediately expand our ability to disrupt the industry with a more modern approach to creativity.”

Creative and Media Align to Deliver Performance at Speed

Decoded has grown deliberately to deliver performance across the entire customer experience. The foundation of its strategy is an understanding that creativity and media are two reciprocal forces that define advertising effectiveness. Often, a brand will rely on multiple vendors for each, but aligning both together at the outset results in stronger deliverables. For example, conceiving creative around the media plan is essential to building fit-for-format creative. 

MediaMonks has long operated at the intersection of technology and creativity, translating data and insights into culturally relevant content that moves the needle. But Decoded isn’t just data-driven; everything the team sets out to do is designed to create data that further inform design paths in a never-ending feedback loop. This flywheel of data and creative content working in tandem results in smarter, more effective creative throughout the CDJ, and showcases what brands can achieve when the holy trinity of data, content and programmatic media truly work in concert with one another. 

A New Partner Model for a New Era

Beyond offering greater relevance, a stronger end-to-end structure also breaks down the silos that inhibit a brand’s ability to pivot and overcome challenges at speed—an all-too-common scenario for brands over the past year. At MediaMonks, we take a people-first approach to marketing that we call “feeding the feeds,” in which brands drive cultural relevance by inspiring people to act and engage with brands through activations and creative content.

But succeeding in that strategy requires maintaining a wide-angle view of the customer, understanding the way they behave across different channels and touchpoints, both online and off. Brands must also feel confident in giving some of the narrative control to consumers, in which reacting to audience input at speed becomes essential to protecting the brand. In this respect, meaningful storytelling that fuels earned media and social proof for a new era demands that brands join content, data and the media plan together for maximum effectiveness. 

“The past two years have seen us increasingly working for clients across our data, creative and digital media practices,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “The expertise and experience Matt and his colleagues bring us will heighten our ability to deliver a truly unified offer.” At the start of a new year and decade, the possibilities for creative excellence are endless—and with Decoded helping guide S4’s integration we’re accelerating our unitary promise to brands around the world.

“Innovation begins with strong creative ideas, then supporting those ideas with a careful balance between tech and craft,” says Geert Eichhorn, Innovation Director at MediaMonks. Having a great creative idea is one thing—and essential for differentiating oneself—but supporting it with the best possible execution is another matter.

However you choose to engage with consumers on an emotional or empathetic level, executing that narrative requires every aspect of the project to serve the story as best as possible. “It takes someone that can marry these three in service of telling the best story and that is an inherently creative process,” says Eichhorn.

Many brands like to leverage cutting-edge technology to make a splash while making a point. But when the technology fails to adequately support the idea, they end up missing the mark. MediaMonks Creative Technologist Samuel Snider-Held has discussed in the past how brands have used flashy, experimental interfaces like AR and VR to these ends, only to fail in the process.

But when provided with a task that might seem impossible, like translating the inherently intangible struggles of another’s disease into symbolic objects that give those experiences shape and weight, we knew we’d have to do something that’s never been done before: affect a machine with a human disease. Through a process that mixes innovative fabrication with fine art, a unique 3D printing approach wasn’t the star here; instead, we sought to highlight real-life stories through objects that couldn’t have existed through any other means.

Affecting the Machine

Made in collaboration between MediaMonks and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, one of the largest university hospitals in Europe, Printed by Parkinson’s is a unique art project that aims to raise awareness of Parkinson’s disease as well as funds to research a cure. It includes a series of six objects constructed by a machine affected by the disease.

You might wonder how that’s possible. After recording kinetic and neurological data from real-life patients living with the disease through EEG systems and accelerometers, we used it to influence the movement of a 3D printer as it constructed an object that for each patient had become unusable, demonstrating how the disease has impacted their everyday lives. One patient named Heinz enjoyed crafting handmade goods before acquiring the disease, for example. For him, the printer constructed a nutcracker—based on the ones Heinz used to make—whose distorted shape, informed by Heinz’s movement data, symbolizes its lack of usability.

Through documenting the stories behind the objects—and the lives of those who used them—the campaign seeks to dispel stereotypes about the disease. “Parkinson’s doesn’t manifest with only a tremor,” says Eichhorn. “There’s a lot of different ways it can affect someone, like muscle stiffness.” Eichhorn noted how the patients depicted in the campaign presently aren’t afflicted with the well-known tremor thanks to a treatment called deep brain stimulation.

In this respect, the stories behind each object provides an opportunity for patients to explain symptoms and experiences that aren’t always visible—but executed in a way that viewers can’t turn away from. The objects themselves are arresting in their erratic, distorted shapes, beautifully rendering each subject’s story in a tangible way. “For some, these objects were a diary, or a means of having a legacy—a physical thing that tells your story and is documented for future generations,” said Eichhorn.

Roan Laenen, a Jr. Creative at MediaMonks who worked intimately on the project, echoes the sentiment: “The patients could share their own personal stories, which meant a lot to them and their families,” he said. The two noted how one patient’s grandchildren were present at the gallery opening where the objects were displayed. Perhaps too young to understand Parkinson’s disease when explained through words alone, they could clearly understand the message conveyed by each sculpture. “They tell such a powerful story,” says Eichhorn. “You don’t have to explain anything—you see immediately that something is off. In just a glance, it all clicks.”

Celebrating Imperfection without Sacrificing Quality

Finding the best technique to print the objects was no simple matter; there’s many techniques for 3D printing, not just one. Finding the right technique to construct each artwork was essential for doing the patients’ stories justice. “Our goal was to really justify how good the idea was—to print them in a way where it feels like an art-object,” says Eichhorn. “It needed to feel like a premium item, whereas standard 3D printing often looks and feels cheap.”

Experience the unique collection of objects and stories yourself.

The team collaborated with 3D printing artist Joris van Tubergen, also known as RooieJoris, whose techniques in 3D printing are used in several international galleries and museums. In their experimentations with different printing methods, the team settled on one called fuse deposition modeling, one of the most common 3D printing techniques, in which the printer builds an object layer by layer.

While other techniques—like extracting the object from a liquid—could heighten visual or textural quality, using them would weaken the narrative potential of each object. “It was still important that we have those print lines, since that’s part of the story,” said Eichhorn, explaining how powerful it is to see how the Parkinson’s-affected printing arm built each object layer by layer. In this case, the imperfections inherent in the technique—a rougher and more jagged surface—helped to bring the story above each sculpture’s surface. “The lines of the object and the data used to build it shine through in a nice way, contained in a premium object,” says Eichhorn.

In addition to printing technique, proper choice in material was essential to the quality. Originally, the team considered replicating each object so its 3D-printed version would have the same material as the original that inspired it. Thinking that it would be better to keep the series uniform, the team settled on bronze filament—a material that isn’t just good to look at, but nice to hold. “It presented a nice effect in that it looks and feels a bit old, tying it a bit to more historic sculptural pieces,” says Laenen. “Yet it’s made with a very modern technology and innovative technique.”

Telling the Story Creatively with Data

Translating patients’ neurological data into a machine-led printing technique isn’t a cut-and-dry task, despite its technical nature. “There’s a creative process there, too,” says Eichhorn. The patients’ movement data came in the form of line graphs, whose mountains and valleys determined whether the printing arm would be offset in one direction to another. This technique enabled each object’s distinct wavy shape. “We had to consider things like: how does this data look? What does it do to the object? How printable is it?” says Eichhorn.

Laenen experimented with devising how to best apply the data graphs for each sculpture. A long, slender kayak paddle, for example, has a subtler distortion that compliments its shape well. The boxy chainsaw, meanwhile, takes a much more jagged look to make its distortion immediately clear to viewers. “Based on the principles of printability, and how the data impacts the object’s construction, we chose what we thought told the story in the strongest, most visually clear way,” says Laenen.

The strength of the project lies in how different elements and people came together to tell an emotionally resonant story that clearly conveys patients’ everyday lived experiences. This included not only the fabrication of the artworks on display, but also supporting elements like video, photography, animation and even the website’s typeface.

“It was interesting to see how many people were involved in this process,” says Laenen. “I think with something like this, in which you instantly understand and feel passionate about it, you see the power of a strong, emotional idea executed to perfection.” Technology best serves these ideas when it becomes unobtrusive, if not unnoticeable. Eichhorn says only half-jokingly: “It should win the Oscar for best supporting role, not starring, so to speak.”

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 brands face an incredible pressure to do more with less: there’s a need for always-on content spread across a vast number of channels to support. While this isn’t new, many traditional agencies still aren’t equipped to deliver that level of efficiency; many of them build businesses around a model based on tracking time spent rather than on success and attribution, stunting their ability to build long-term, collaborative relationships with clients.

The tailspin of the industry is well-documented. It’s the new-age, new-era advertising companies where industry action and growth is. In their “Predictions 2020: Agencies” report, Forrester Research urges that agencies finally disassemble what remains of their outmoded model and reassemble centralized structures and new capabilities strengthened by scaled data, technology and creativity.

This includes “[leveraging] in-house production capabilities, networks of creators, and dynamic creative engines to begin building the capacity to develop hundreds of assets that yield thousands of dynamically built creative iterations” and “[using] partnerships and white-labeled tech stacks to power just about every media type to enhance their scaled production capacity.” Forrester’s proposed model demonstrates that future-forward agencies have the potential to become the content engine uniquely equipped to power any channel supported by the brand.

The days of eschewing digital-first content for the traditional “big idea” are over. But don’t take it from me, take it from the largest advertiser on the planet, Mark Pritchard, Global Chief Brand Officer, P&G. “We’re breaking down the boundaries of functions, and operating in a fast-cycle, integrated, multi-skilled way, where speed matters and where every aspect of the consumer experience is created from the start.”

Don’t get Mark (or me) wrong, a (high quality) TVC can still be useful for broad reach for some audiences. It is, though, ill-equipped to achieve the relevancy required by today’s consumers, who are trained to tune out information that doesn’t immediately purport to serve them. One need only look at a widescreen TVC awkwardly cut-down into a vertically consumed, 6-second social ad to see why it doesn’t work.

What brands need to do instead is connect data and media strategy with creative ahead of moving into production. This enables a strategy for producing content that’s fit for format, fit for purpose and fit for moment. While that might sound overwhelming for brands that aren’t fluent in the nuances of different channels and how users interact on them, this approach is often cheaper and more efficient.

Efficiency isn’t just a matter of getting things done quickly. It’s about optimizing your media budgets at the same time. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. Brands that take a more strategic approach to their channel strategy and integrate it into the earliest phases of the creative process can likewise optimize their production to drive results. Fit-for-format blows traditional creative out of the water in terms of results. To quantify that: on average it’s typically above 30% – which is significant.

According to Dynamic Logic and Google, studies show on average that media placements only account for about 30% of a brand campaign’s success while the creative drives 70%. While creative freedom is important, an impactful campaign comes from testing out the channel strategy before putting the media spend behind it.

One might think that when it comes to speed, quality and value, you can only have two of the three. But new partnership models empower brands to achieve all three—precisely when close collaboration is valued by both brand and digital partner, they can both enjoy a seat at the table during strategic planning, resulting in better quality work.  For example, when both a media and agency partner join together early-on, that media plan serves as a starting point to strategize assets at scale, because your production team is equipped with knowledge needed to economically produce content for each of the formats you already know you need, rather than cut things down as an afterthought.

We’re in a new era where consumers demand a lot from today’s brands, who have a constant need to offer relevant content without cutting corners. As digital penetration continues to grow in the APAC region (with an appetite for content growing with it), it becomes all the more critical that brands select agency partners that are better equipped to pay them the care and willingness to collaborate that they need to succeed.

This post was originally published on CIO Advisor.

Having served as our first Creative Monk in the MySpace days to building a team of more than 2,300 over the past 15 years, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the immense evolution of digital culture and its effect on creativity. Now, as MediaMonks’ new (and first-ever) Chief Creative Officer, I aim to wield that experience by challenging the one-size-fits-all model that continues to remain popular with creatives today—even though it falls flat against consumers’ needs.

In a time when online experiences are paramount, our ambition to harness the power of technology and creativity is more important than ever. No stranger to adapting to our current realities, this moment offers an opportunity for us to look at the current state of creativity and the vision that sets true innovation from the rest.

Still in the infancy of a new decade, I find myself dismayed at how our industry still struggles to push itself forward. This year especially, brands find themselves with an unequivocal imperative to reassess the strategies they’ve relied on as digital behaviors have quickly evolved. In this age of hyperadoption — in which new behaviors are continually adopted and dropped — we as creatives must raise the bar and reimagine what’s possible.

Consider this: much of the most recently celebrated work may have been placed on digital and social media, but was designed specifically for TVC or print. So many social and digital ads are simple 15 or 8-second cut downs for the toolkit, but different rules and behavior apply to these channels than TV; for example, people on average only watch social ads for about 1.7 seconds, which already makes cut downs incongruent to the format.

The industry stunts itself by limiting its recognition of ads—what I would call all the paid media-related creative work that the industry makes—to include only the traditional formats of one-size-fits-all print and linear, 30-second TV scripts. Being so set in our ways risks our own irrelevance to modern-day consumers, whose customer decision journey (and attention) increasingly extends across digital platforms and channels, often simultaneously.

Rather Than Celebrate Innovation, We Repeat Our Mistakes

Feeling secure in sticking to established success parameters isn’t new for our industry—in fact, it’s not that far off from how we moved from radio into TV ads back in the days. Rather than take advantage of what film had to offer, the first TV ads were basically radio scripts with an image or two. Take the famous Bulova ad, which wasn’t filmed at all; while novel, it failed to take advantage of the creative impact that TV made in storytelling.

Frustratingly, the industry once again finds itself impeded in its ability to develop and recognize creative that takes full advantage of the abundance of opportunities afforded by today’s technology; the most-celebrated digital ads of 2019, for example, might as well be the best ads of 2009. In fact, Ad Age’s Top Campaigns of the 21st Century—which chronicles its first 15 years, ostensibly tracing the direction that advertising has taken in lockstep with gains in digital tech—offers little real distinguishing factor from year to year. Don’t get me wrong, these campaigns are great, culturally relevant ideas, but execution must be better aligned with current user behavior on the appropriate channels best-suited to drive engagement, connection and emotion.

Mind the Creative Gap

Creative teams drop the ball when they fail to mind the (creative) gap between the big idea and the media toolkit. What the industry needs to do is go even broader on the big idea, allowing integration across several channels or sources of data, rather than retrofitting it to one-size-fits-all toolkits that ultimately diminish its creative potential. What gets at the heart of this challenge is the need to recognize context, whether it be through media placement, user behavior, technology or with data.

To this end, Forrester Research advises, “As experiences traverse digital, physical, and communication moments, each point of intersection should be inspired by the creative articulation of the brand and leave an indelible impression on customers.” Brands will struggle to achieve such an effect if their digital creative isn’t fit for both format and purpose toward the specific moments and places where consumers find it.

And if there’s anything digital isn’t, it’s static: through responsiveness to consumer interaction and data, digital creative enables brands to truly build a connection in a more personalized context. Essentially, the big idea must function as a two-way conversation that anticipates, responds to and builds upon user context and interaction—and as creatives, we must use all the technical tools at our disposal to make sure we not only reach consumers at the right place and time, but truly meet their needs at the contexts in which they engage.

Let’s Build Awareness for Contextual Awareness

One of the most clever examples of a brand [leaning on user behavior/strategy] was Wendy’s “Keeping Fortnite Fresh” campaign, in which a character with a striking likeness to the fast food chain’s mascot infiltrated the popular third-person shooter. Not interested in killing fellow players (which is the object of the game), this virtual Wendy sought to destroy the game world’s in-game freezers as a homage to Wendy’s pledge to never freeze its beef. Livestreamed on Twitch, the stunt represented how brands could skillfully participate in new social spaces online and is a modern, relevant take on the brand’s big idea: the “home of fresh.”

We’re at a time where technology is deeply intertwined not only with the way people consume content, but also how they communicate and form deep relationships with one another. Given the abundance of data available through these myriad interactions, not to mention the many opportunities to act upon them, we as an industry face unprecedented opportunity to make better, more assistive and unique work—and when that work is produced, we must celebrate it rather than cling to the safe, established yet increasingly irrelevant success parameters of the past.

With all of this discussion about how advertising must change, and in a moment when we’re challenged once again to adapt to a new reality, I look ahead to a future where our industry rises to the creative challenge by building experiences that drive impact throughout ecosystems, resonating with consumers’ needs no matter where they are. This has always been our dedication; and as MediaMonks’ newly appointed CCO, I hope my voice resonates and serves as a catalyst for change.

Las políticas del distanciamiento social y quedarse en casa han impulsado una migración en masa de empleados que trabajan en oficinas a trabajar en casa. Mientras que trabajar en casa no es algo nuevo, el cambio tan rápido y repentino ha sido difícil para algunos negocios y empleados. 

Siendo un equipo móvil repartido en todo el mundo, somos expertos en conectarnos a video llamadas o estar al tanto de proyectos de forma digital; incluso en una oficina de MediaMonks, podrás ver a varios de nuestros Monks metidos en una junta con alguien en otro huso horario. Si tu o tu equipo son nuevos en trabajar de esta forma, no te preocupes; tenemos algunos sabios consejos. 

Lleva tu oficina a casa—literalmente. 

En tu transición a trabajar en casa, asegúrate de tener todas las herramientas y equipos que necesitará para mantenerte productivo. ¿Necesitas el segundo monitor de tu escritorio en la oficina? ¿Discos duros escondidos en el cajón? ¿O tal vez necesitas el escritorio en sí? Consulta con tu gerente o administrador de oficina para ver qué se puede transportar a tu hogar.

Esto no es una molestia; las empresas que tienen los medios y la capacidad deberían ofrecer soluciones prácticas más allá de las digitales cuando sus empleados trabajan desde casa. “Es fácil dejarse atrapar por palabras de moda como “primero digital” o “digital por defecto”, señala el Foro Económico Mundial. “Pero trabajar en los espacios digitales es más que solo aplicar herramientas y tecnología digital. Se trata de pensar en nuevos comportamientos y asegurarse de que todos tengan la capacidad de usar cualquier herramienta tecnológica sin problemas.”

Ponte cómodo (pero tampoco tanto).

Si ya estás acomodado en casa, comprende que si bien es importante encontrar el lugar ideal para “establecerte”, no tienes que permanecer en el mismo lugar todo el día. Intenta moverte por tu casa a diferentes horas del día, siempre y cuando el telón de fondo sea el adecuado para las videollamadas, y siempre que tengas acceso a una toma de corriente (o una batería portátil para respaldo, como Lewis Smithingham, nuestro Director de Soluciones Creativas, le dijo a Fast Company).

Sin embargo, te damos un consejo: no trabajes en la cama y evita quedarte en tu pijama. Estas son cosas que tu cerebro asocia con la relajación, y pueden afectar tu productividad y la calidad del sueño.

Aprovecha al máximo las herramientas colaborativas y de productividad.

Si tu empresa utiliza una plataforma de comunicación en tiempo real como Slack, aprovecha al máximo las aplicaciones e integraciones para mantenerte conectado cuando estás (o no estás) disponible. Por ejemplo, Slack ofrece un modo ‘No Molestar’ para los momentos en que necesitas enfocarte. También puedes sincronizar tu estado con tu calendario de trabajo para que otros puedan ver si en ese momento estás en una reunión. Es la siguiente mejor alternativa a caminar a escritorio de alguien para ver si está libre.

Toma descansos y encuentra un balance trabajo/vida.

Puede ser difícil alejarte del trabajo cuando tu espacio habitable también funciona como un espacio de trabajo. ¡Haz un horario diario que incluya descansos y un momento para detenerte durante el día, y síguelo! Las herramientas de administración del tiempo, como el calendario de tu oficina, a menudo tienen opciones para establecer horarios de trabajo que desalientan la organización de reuniones fuera de ellos.

Y hablando de la vida fuera del trabajo, no te estreses demasiado si tu vida personal se filtra inesperadamente en una videollamada. Si bien deseas minimizar las interrupciones, la ocasional aparición de niños o de mascotas que se pasean en el fondo de una llamada, a menudo son entrañables y brindan la oportunidad para que tus colegas te conozcan mejor.

En algo relacionado, verifica con tus compañeros de trabajo antes de entrar a una llamada o reunión. La pandemia actual está afectando a todos de diferentes maneras, y vale la pena tomarte un tiempo para mostrar empatía, relacionarte con ellos y alejarte de la tensión del mundo.

Mantén la apariencia y mantén viva la cultura de la oficina.

Tener el equipo de la oficina separado no tiene que significar un aislamiento total. Para replicar nuestras reuniones regulares en la oficina y las reuniones de pie, nuestros Monks se encargaron de organizar reuniones a través de videoconferencia, ya sea para que los equipos se relajen o para una celebración de fin de semana con toda la oficina.

Si realmente necesitas algo de diversión, intenta organizar una hora feliz virtual una tarde, o incluso una noche de juegos. Poco después de que MediaMonks comenzara a exigir el distanciamiento social en sus oficinas, nuestros Monks construyeron una hoja de cálculo para recopilar gamertags y nombres de usuario en las plataformas de juego para que pudieran reunirse en línea durante un tiempo de descanso (uno de ellos incluso reconstruyó nuestra oficina de Nueva York en Minecraft).

El último punto es clave: trabajar desde casa no se trata solo de herramientas digitales o un enfoque estricto en la productividad. También debe haber espacio para la diversión, el antojo y la retención de los lazos sociales dentro o entre los equipos. Tal es el secreto para una fuerza laboral feliz (después de todo, este movimiento masivo de trabajo a distancia es extraño para muchos de nosotros). Por lo tanto, toma una taza de café, vístete y vuelve a revisar el fondo para tu video antes de que lo vean tus compañeros o los clientes: tu puedes hacerlo.

Social distancing and shelter-in-place policies have prompted a mass migration of employees from working in offices to working at home. While working from home isn’t new, the sudden and rapid shift has been difficult for some businesses and employees to navigate.

As a mobile team spread across the globe, we’re pros at connecting via video call or keeping tabs on projects digitally; even in a MediaMonks office, you’re likely to see several of our Monks engaged in a meeting with someone in another time zone. If you or your team is new to working this way, don’t sweat it; we’ve got some sage advice.

Bring your office home—literally.

In your transition to working at home, make sure you have all the tools and equipment you’ll need to stay productive. Do you need your second monitor from your desk in the office? Hard drives stashed away in the drawer? Or maybe you need the desk itself? Check with your manager or office administrator to see what can be transported to your home.

This isn’t an imposition; businesses that have the means and ability should offer practical solutions beyond simply digital ones when working from home. “It’s easy to be caught up by buzzwords like ‘digital first’ or ‘digital by default,’” notes the World Economic Forum. “But working in the digital spaces is about more than just applying digital tools and technology. It is about thinking about new behaviors and making sure everyone has the ability to use any tech tools seamlessly.”

Get comfy (but not too comfy).

If you’re already setup at home, understand that while finding the optimal place to “set up shop” is important, you don’t have to stay in the same spot all day. Try moving throughout your home at different times of day—so long as your backdrop is on-point for video calls, and as long as you have access to a charging outlet (or a power bank for backup, as Lewis Smithingham, our Director of Creative Solutions, told Fast Company).

One piece of advice, though: don’t work in bed, and avoid staying in your PJ’s. These are things that your brain associates with relaxation—and can mess with your productivity and sleep quality.

Make the most of collaborative and productivity tools.

If your business uses a real-time communications platform like Slack, make the most of apps and integrations to keep connected or telegraph when you are (or aren’t) available. For example, Slack offers a Do Not Disturb mode for moments when you need to focus. You can also sync your status with your work calendar so others can see if you’re currently in a meeting. It’s the next best alternative to walking by someone’s desk to see if they’re free.

Take breaks and manage a work/life balance.

It can be difficult walking away from work when your living space doubles as a workspace. Make a daily schedule that includes breaks and a time to stop for the day, and stick to it! Time management tools, like your office calendar, often have options to set working hours that discourage setting meetings outside of them.

And speaking of life outside of work, don’t get too stressed if your personal life unexpectedly seeps into video call. While you certainly want to minimize disruption, the occasional child or pet sauntering into the background of a call is often endearing and provides an opportunity for your colleagues to get to know you better.

On that note, check in on your coworkers before getting down to brass tacks in a call or meeting. The ongoing pandemic is affecting everyone in different ways, and it’s worth taking some time away to empathize, relate to one another and break away from some of the tension in the world.

Keep up appearances and keep the office culture alive.

Having the office team spread apart doesn’t have to mean total isolation. To replicate our regular in-office gatherings and standup meetings, our Monks have taken it upon themselves to set up get-togethers via video conference, whether it’s for teams to kick back or an office-wide celebration of the week’s end.

If you’re really in need of some fun, try setting up a virtual happy hour one evening, or even a game night. Shortly after MediaMonks began mandating social distancing at its offices, our Monks built a spreadsheet to collect gamertags and usernames across gaming platforms so they could meet online for some downtime (one of them even rebuilt our New York office in Minecraft).

That last point is key: working from home isn’t just about digital tools or a strict focus on productivity. There should also be some room for fun, whimsey and retaining social bonds within or across teams. Such is the secret for a happy work force (this mass move to telecommuting is weird for many of us, after all). So, put on a cup of coffee, get dressed and double-check your video back drop before you go live—you got this.

In today’s landscape where personalization and relevance are critical, marketers are increasingly asked to understand both the creative and technical sides of the equation when it comes to delivering digital experiences to customers. S4Capital, a new-era model offering end-to-end advertising services to brands and organizations around the world, bridges that gap: “Data is at the center of what we do,” Sir Martin Sorrell, Founder and Executive Chairman of S4Capital, told IBC365 in a recent interview. “People that claim data destroys creativity or hinders it are talking nonsense. Good data and good insights inform creativity and makes it more effective.”

Achieving this requires close collaboration between MediaMonks, whose forte lies in creativity and enabling efficient production at scale, and MightyHive, who provides consulting and services in the areas of media operations and training, data strategy, and analytics. Emily Del Greco, President of the Americas at MightyHive, puts it succinctly: “MediaMonks is about taking the risk, and MightyHive comes quickly with feedback [backed by data.]”

We sat down with Myles Younger, Senior Director of Marketing at MightyHive, to discuss one of the biggest challenges that brands face when it comes to measuring performance and developing insights-driven content: privacy. From GDPR to the new California Consumer Privacy Act, privacy is going to become more challenging through 2020. For brands that struggle to look beyond the walled gardens of partner and platform data to gain a fuller view of their customers, Younger offers some advice: consider investing in a data clean room, which enables partners to develop new insights without compromising their audiences’ privacy. Younger walks us through what data clean rooms are, what you might consider before setting one up and more.

How would you explain data clean rooms?

Myles Younger: My analogy for how I would explain it is: imagine you have two data owners, ColorCo and FoodCo. ColorCo has data on its audience, including everyone’s favorite color. FoodCo has a similar audience to ColorCo, and knows their favorite food. ColorCo would like to know what the overlap is between their audiences, maybe identifying what the most popular combinations are in favorite color versus food—but neither wants to reveal to the other any personally identifiable information that could compromise the value of their data or the privacy of their audience.

A data clean room allows them to bring their data together in a neutral environment to figure out where the overlap is, meaning they might find that 300 people in their audience favor yellow and hotdogs—but neither ColorCo nor FoodCo know who those 300 people are, they just get the overlaps. That’s the special thing: you build new insights while protecting individual privacy.

Speaking of privacy, that’s a major concern for brands and their audiences. How do data clean rooms ensure brands still get a high quality of insights?

MY: Traditional methods of understanding the user are beginning to erode and brands are embracing first-party data that gives them a truer sense of who their audience is and what they need. What’s important to remember about data clean rooms is that they offer you access to insights gained from the first-party data of others.

As cookie-driven campaign measurement continues to become less reliable, brands are going to have to start looking elsewhere for insights on creative performance, reach and frequency, and attribution. Because data clean rooms generate insights from first-party data, they should be towards the top of every marketer’s list to at least become familiar with, if not start tinkering with.

At MediaMonks, we often discuss with clients the importance of delivering a total brand experience, applying insights and user data across a customer decision journey that extends beyond a single platform. Could data clean rooms aid in this process?

MY: Absolutely! Data clean rooms could aid in delivering the total brand experience in more meaningful ways than we’ve ever seen before. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it’s justified.

Up until now, digital ad targeting, personalization, measurement and optimization have been based on what you might call the “total cookie experience.” Cookies and ad tech tracking IDs form a big universe, but it’s an isolated place. Even before things like GDPR and Safari ITP, it was very difficult to connect millions of ephemeral (and often fraudulent) browser cookies and third-party tracking IDs back to genuine business data (customers, products, transactions, loyalty and preference data, stores, apps, strategic partner data, etc). Given that clean rooms run on first-party databases and not cookies, brands gain the opportunity to tap into the totality of CX data sets when making analyses or optimizations. For marketers who have been used to making fuzzy inferences from nebulous, siloed cookie pools, I think working from actual business data is going to seem like a revelation.

What else would excite brands about data clean rooms?

MY: Data clean rooms are a big win for measuring performance and ROI. Let’s say you’re a CPG brand, meaning you’re likely selling your product through distributors and retailers. Traditionally, you might have to wait months for reportage on transaction data. But we have a CPG client who uses data clean rooms to interrogate or query a retailer’s POS data in almost real time.

Given the rapid access to insights that data clean rooms offer, what are some other ways that working with one would change my day-to-day as a marketer or strategist?

MY: There really is a promise for far more rapid access to data. Previously, many marketers’ approaches were cookie-driven, which adds latency and degrades fidelity of the data. Data clean rooms let you act on a more instantaneous basis.

And while data clean rooms inhibit ownership or direct access to others’ data, it really can bring you closer to it. That might sound counter-intuitive, but data clean rooms prompt you to shift your perspective a bit. We always ask our clients: what do you want, the data or the insights? You probably want the latter, and while data clean rooms might keep you an arm’s length from the data itself, they bring you closer to the insights.

How easy is it to partner with another brand or company to join data in a clean room? Do you think data clean rooms will usher in greater collaboration as brands discover overlaps between their audiences?

MY: This is clearly an area for early adopters right now, but MightyHive is seeing early success and we’re onboarding advertisers into clean rooms left and right. The momentum is clearly there.

A smart place to start with respect to inter-brand collaboration is with existing strategic brand partnerships. For example: whenever consumers travel, they’re inundated with sophisticated partner marketing programs across airlines, booking sites, hotels, loyalty programs and credit cards. These brand and audience partnerships already exist, and clean rooms are probably going to come into play more and more as a means to share audiences, CX touchpoints, measurement data and insights.

Get your hands dirty with data clean rooms.