Havaianas is a brand for everyone, owing its early success to the working class. But over the decades, Brazil’s biggest fashion export really has delivered on its promise that there’s a pair of flip flops for everyone, upscaling the affordable yet durable traditional pair into a wide range of footwear with broad appeal.

While the brand has achieved icon status in Brazil, Havaianas is a brand with a significant global reach. Circus Marketing, who joined our monastery earlier this year, has greatly supported and enhanced Havaianas’ efforts to accelerate success around the world, helping audiences everywhere come to know the brand like the Brazilians do: a truly democratic brand that stands for the people.

Circus and Havaianas march in perfect sync thanks to their close connection in Havaianas’ internal creative team, Hana. Hana is built for digital, and was established after Havaianas realized the opportunity to increase their digital investment to make creative more effective. While Hana is an internal team, its efforts are accelerated and supercharged by Circus–at home and around the world. Here’s how.

Legitimizing the Brand Story through Collaboration and Activation

A lot of what makes Havaianas such an iconic brand is through its marketing—not just in the messages it puts out, but even in how it produces work internally to live up to the brand image.

Speaking at a Brand Innovators event presented by MediaMonks and Circus centered on multicultural marketing, Havaianas CMO Fernanda Romano said, “By design we’ve made it a rule internally that we need to bring representation to the table. Our partners know…don’t even bother to bring a bid to the table if you haven’t bid with all sorts of people.”

The brand is further transforming itself to support marginalized communities: most recently, Havaianas launched its “All Love is Welcome” platform to celebrate LGBTQ+ pride. This is more than just a campaign: it’s a year-round commitment that demonstrates the brand’s role in supporting the LGBTQ+ community in an impactful way.

In addition to launching a Pride-themed line that will sell year-round, Havaianas is allocating part of product net income to All Out, an organization that operates locally and globally to advocate for the community. Havaianas will also cease categorizing by gender and will increase the size range for designs to make them more inclusive. “We made a point that representation wasn’t a checkmark to tick off,” Romano told the Brand Innovators audience.

To help launch its “All Love is Welcome” platform, Havaianas worked with Circus to host a virtual celebration of love. Three couples—and their guests—virtually came together to marry, renew vows and celebrate the spirit of Pride at home. In addition to real marriage officiating, couples were treated to serenades from Flutua and Johnny Hooker, who belted out an anthem to inspire and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. In addition to the hero video that captures moments from the virtualized event, Havaianas is rolling out documentary-style shorts that dive deeper into the lives and stories of the featured couples for a global audience.

Depicting real stories was key to the campaign’s success and spoke to the challenges that LGBTQ+ people face in lockdown. “One of the creatives who worked on the campaign said that one of her friends had just come out to his mother because they were living so closely together now,” says Luciana Haguiara, Executive Creative Director at Circus. “Some people are arguing but many are becoming much closer with their loved ones, are starting to accept things and being more careful with one another’s feelings.” She notes that Sao Paulo has one of the biggest Pride parades in the world, a claim that the Guinness Book of World Records has confirmed from 2006 to at least 2016, making it incredibly important to still offer that celebratory space virtually.

Making the Pivot to Virtual

The Pride campaign is just one example of how Havaianas has rapidly virtualized to offer the brand’s trademark fun, summery spirit. Its Mother’s Day campaign, which depicts mothers in recognizable situations at home (keeping their kids entertained, being separated from family and more), was built out of insights gained from the brand asking how mothers feel during COVID-19.

Perhaps more excitingly, the Hana team also quickly pivoted its content strategy to host virtual events that provided its audience fun and comfort while at home. Havaianas very much represents the outdoor lifestyle, so the challenge became: how do we activate the brand while the majority of its customers are indoors and at home?

Circus’ idea was to help Brazilians continue to enjoy life through a series of livestreamed, at-home concerts featuring Marília Mendonça, Thiaguinho and Big Brother Brazil star Manu Gavassi. In Mendonça’s performance alone received over 11 thousand likes, three thousand posts from viewers showing off their Havaianas, and three million simultaneous viewers—a YouTube record that hasn’t been beat.

And as Havaianas continues to expand around the globe, the brand is focusing on virtualizing commerce as well. Its “Let’s Summer!” campaign and new Tmall store in China exhibits how the Havaianas really is for everyone, no matter where they are in the world. The store serves as a best-in-class example of how a brand can modernize and optimize its digital storefront by following the full customer journey.

Havaianas was integral to normalizing flip flop use out of the home in its early days in Brazil, and has met a similar challenge in its expansion to APAC and China, where wearing flip flops in public isn’t common. Moving past this is the first test before engaging more deeply with the local culture. “The challenge was to establish a flip-flop culture in China, first and foremost by making people fall in love with the Havaianas brand and what it stood for: the colorful, fun and lively Brazilian summer spirit which is core to their brand DNA,” said Brandon Tucs, Creative Director at MediaMonks.

Achieving this was a truly global effort, connecting talent from Shanghai, Los Angeles and Brazil. “Since this was the first MediaMonks job with the Havaianas, we helped them understand the positioning, the challenges going global and translating their spirit to such a different market like China,” said Caio Del Manto, Managing Director at Circus. “In the end, this is the part of the brand’s main goal: to become a global lifestyle brand that carries this easy-going spirit so famous among Brazilians.”

We established master pages for the Home and product pages, making it easy for the brand to plug in content based on brand guidelines our team had established, ensuring the digital store looks inviting in any scenario.

A writeup in Marketing Interactive noted how useful digital investment was for the brand to emerge successfully through the COVID-19 outbreak. “During COVID-19 when stores were closed in most of the APAC countries, Havaianas invested disproportionally behind digital media to maximize its brand visibility. It also set up stronger social commerce platforms and built a relevant influencer strategy with local brand ambassadors, such as Luna Maya in Indonesia or Nelydia Nik Sen in Malaysia.”

In celebration of the launch of the brand’s new shape–the Japanese-inspired Tradi Zori, signalling Havaianas’ goal to take the streets with an urban audience–the Brazil team at Circus set up a global campaign of unboxing videos from influencers in the streetwear space. These included Leo Mandella (@GullyGuyLeo), Kofi McCalla (@Icykof), Enrico Cardoso (@EnricoCardoso) and Suyane Ynaya (@Suyane_Ynaya), whose content portrays the diverse ways that the Tradi Zori enhances personal style.

From virtualized commerce and events to driving real-world, societal impact, Havaianas has used digital to move the needle in several ways around the world. By establishing partners upstream in the planning process (like Circus’ involvement with the Hana team), the brand is able to quickly pivot campaigns without losing focus of long-term goals and tasks. Through this approach, it’s no surprise that Havaianas has achieved so much success in its march to digital.

In responding to any crisis, brands always run the risk of coming off as exploitative—even when they have good intentions. As ad plans become further disrupted and brands seek to refocus their strategies, there’s one piece of advice that they can take directly from consumers themselves: be helpful and stay true to your purpose.

Ad Age reports that in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, “77 percent of respondents expect their brands to be helpful in what has become ‘the new everyday life.’ Only 8 percent feel they should stop advertising.” This finding drives home just how important customer obsession is in supporting audiences, a theme that’s explored in-depth in our report, (Re)Activate Customer Obsession.

The report notes, “We’ll look back on this moment as a time in which brands have realized the value in living up to their commitment to service, finding ways to build impact and provide comfort to their customers. This is the recipe for customer obsession—in which an organization ‘focuses its strategy and its budget on the technologies, systems and processes that win, serve and retain customers,’ as defined by Forrester.”

The sentiment echoes what MediaMonks’ APAC VP Growth Tobias Wilson wrote over at Campaign Asia: “The psychographic profiles of your consumers … have also changed—so make sure that you’re obsessing over your customers (mindsets and situation) first and foremost, not thinking about how your marketing plans have been disrupted and how much of a pain that is.” But what does that look like? Below, we examine a handful of brands that have answered the call by serving consumers’ needs within a “new normal.”

Google Arts & Culture’s Virtual Museum Tours

Museums have shuttered their doors to support social distancing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t explore some of the world’s best collections from home. Using the same technology that powers Street View on Google Maps, you can take your own personal tour through the hallowed halls of the museums—a refreshingly futuristic way to discover and observe artifacts from across human history. It’s worth noting that Google Arts & Culture has offered such tours for years, though social distancing has prompted a resurgence in interest in the platform.

Digitized collections help reinforce the reason why many of these institutions exist: to help patrons connect with history and culture. This goal powered our redesign and launch of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame website, which collects stories and digitized artifacts related to more than 300 inductees. Focused on content exploration and discovery, the platform demonstrates the museum’s dedication to “to engage, teach and inspire through the power of rock and roll” in a time where digital has proven essential to social connection.

Pernod-Ricard and Other Distilleries Produce Hand Sanitizer

Famed liquor brand Pernod-Ricard has shifted its factories to produce and bottle hand sanitizer for FEMA. The frenzy to buy hand sanitizer had become a meme in the earlier days of the COVID-19 spread across the US, but has become more troubling as governments have faced shortages. The move shows that Pernod-Ricard is willing to pull out all the stops to mobilize at speed and skill to meet important needs, regardless of profitability—sticking true to its values to “live together, better.”

Snapchat Drops its “Here for You” Feature Early

Originally scheduled to release in April, Snapchat dropped its “Hear for You” feature on March 19. The tool surfaces up mental health content for users who search for terms related to anxiety, depression, suicide or bullying—and it’s easy to see how many users’ anxieties have ramped up in the past couple of months.

As a brand, Snap is dedicated to “empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world and have fun together,” a mission that the brand has interpreted in surprising ways. Speaking to The Verge, a Snap spokesperson explained how that sense of connectivity and community informed the tool’s development: “Here For You was informed by studies that show that connecting with friends, whether in person or online is often the best defense against feelings of loneliness and anxiety.” By quickly pushing the feature before its scheduled release, the move follows the advice of Michel de Rijk, APAC CEO of S4Capital, that “in times like this, it’s more about speed than accuracy.”

Facebook Offers Tools for Small Business

Among those hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic are small businesses. In addition to offering a new section of its app that keeps general users informed about COVID-19, Facebook launched its Business Resource Hub, offering tools and resources for brands to keep connected with their customers or facilitate remote working, including a Small Business Resilience Toolkit to prepare—and bounce back from—a crisis. Facebook also unveiled a $100 million grant program to further support small businesses.

In 2017, Facebook changed its mission statement to “bring the world together.” While people are physically distancing themselves, many small businesses continue to operate as essential pillars of their respective communities. By helping them keep the lights on, keep their employees supported and keep the world moving, Facebook continues to serve that mission.

While this moment in time has been difficult for many people in different ways, it’s inspiring to see brands step up to wield their platforms and influence for social good. By placing people first—whether customers or employees—and finding new ways to embody their purpose, brands can instill goodwill and continue to support their consumers when it’s needed the most.

Put your plan in action to better serve customers.

This week, New York welcomed not only foreign leaders and dignitaries at the United Nations headquarters—the city also embraced some of the best and brightest in the world of advertising, marketing and technology. Yes, Advertising Week New York—one of six Advertising Week events held around the world—came to offer thought leadership, workshops and more with 1,216 speakers and over 290 different events.

There was much to ponder and celebrate throughout the week. At the Clio Awards, eight awards were distributed among three projects that we contributed to: the Uncensored Playlist, Mind the Gap and the geolocation-based revamp of the “Runaway Train” music video. We also made placement on Adweek’s 100 Fastest Growing Agencies list, and our VP of Marketing Kate Richling was shortlisted for Advertising Week’s Future is Female platform.

But that’s enough patting ourselves on the back. What were the brands up to in all the fray? Our recap explores three big topics from one of the biggest weeks in advertising—namely what’s driving the in-housing trend, how brands are working creatively with data and the new collaborative partnerships that are helping brands respond to both those opportunities.

Getting Closer to Consumers through In-Housing

One thing that’s become undoubtedly clear across the course of the week is that brands are seeking ways to take back control. For many, this has manifest in a trend to take their creative and media capabilities in-house. Often attributed to goals like lowering cost or time to market, there are in fact many reasons why brands feel they can do creative better on their own terms and turf, as explored at the Brand Innovators summit, which coincided with Advertising Week.

A major goal behind the in-housing trend is a need to get closer to the consumer. As traditional brands grow with widening product lines and more channels to communicate through, they risk losing coherence or consistency within the brand-consumer relationship.

At a panel on in-housing, Spencer Gordon of Anheuser-Busch discussed how going in-house ensured that a dedicated team in the brand would always be thinking about creative. This enabled them to pursue consumers with greater relevance and brand understanding. But Gordon noted that the initiative achieved big results by first starting small; with four employees focused on providing social assets solely for the Michelob Ultra product, the team has since scaled to 63 members that deliver for all of AB InBev’s brands.

In the same panel, Ryan Riess, Director of Social Strategy and Content at the Hershey Company, similarly discussed how supporting such a large variety of brands (15 of them!) drove them to become more consumer-centric. Hershey felt they could do creative better on their own—particularly in creating platform-specific content that would better connect with their customers. That’s a very specific way that brands can better drive relevance by maintaining an always-on relationship with their consumers, requiring brands to have a clear idea not only of themselves, but their consumers as well.

Purposeful Use of Data for Empathy and Impact

How brands can gain that understanding of the consumer was another major topic of discussion throughout the week. But businesses have come up with interesting ways to accomplish this; a notable example is Target’s internal media company Roundel. In the Advertising Week panel “Climbing Over Walls: Real People Data in an Automated World,” Roundel’s VP Dave Peterson noted: “The data is extremely important, but it’s as much on the human side as it is on the data. We call it the IQ side for data and the EQ for the human side of things.”

This purposeful interplay between both the technical and emotional sides of data provides Roundel with learnings they can use to strengthen the relationship between the retailer, their customers and the CPG partners whose products line the shelves. “Going back to our enterprise view at Target about putting our guests at the center of everything we do, our goal really is to enhance the shopping experience,” Peterson said. “Media works best when it’s in everyone’s benefit.”

And that’s a point that resonates well with MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar, who gave a keynote address at the Brand Innovators event on Tuesday afternoon. Exploring the challenge between what he calls “personalized pleasure versus personalized panic”—that delicate balance between consumers’ desire for relevance and concern for privacy—he honed in on the need for empathy to become a driving force in everything you do. “We can never stop prioritizing empathy,” he said. “Empathy and engineering must work hand-in-hand in the future.”

Closing the Creative and Data Divide

While Roundel is an interesting example of bridging together the intelligent and emotional quotients in data, they’re not alone: several brands noted the need for marketing and IT to come together to deliver unforgettable customer experiences that build brand love. On the panel “Rethinking TV: Driving Growth, Relationships and Experience Through Data,” Sir Martin Sorrell joined GM’s Global CMO Deborah Wahl, where the two examined how brands must look beyond the typical TVC approach for more scalable, personal and relevant creative.

Wahl gave her brand’s perspective on how impact and effectiveness are table stakes today, and how she works closely with data to achieve it. “We have a chief data officer at GM. We spend a lot of time together, really understanding: ‘What are you learning, what are the insights, how are we going after it?’” she said. “That helps you form better creative briefs so you get a big idea, and then really make sure we can execute that across different channels.”

It sounds like GM has a good rhythm going, but for many brands, closing that IT and creative gap can feel like a struggle. Showing teamwork in action, the S4 family—Sir Martin, ter Haar and Emily Del Greco (President of the Americas, MightyHive)—came together the following day to join Joana Coles (Founder and CCO, Boudica) in a panel discussion about the S4 Capital model and its place within the future of advertising. Coles set the scene for discussion: if you’re not a holding company, she asked, “What the hell are you then?”

The trio’s responses became a multi-faceted examination of collaboration and partnership. Sir Martin drew a line between how S4 operates versus holding companies that impose constraints around the businesses they contain. Instead, he suggested, S4 took inspiration from tech companies who are disruptive by nature. Ter Haar added: “With traditional work, there’s a conservatism that you can’t marry data with being creative.” It’s precisely that challenge that brands are grappling with now, driving that need for control examined above.

Del Greco noted how aligning data and creative so closely together enables brands to take more risks with confidence. “MediaMonks is about taking the risk, and MightyHive comes quickly with feedback [backed by data],” she said. As iteration and agility have become key to success in today’s always-on environment, this ability to experiment and take learnings will become crucial for future-focused brands.

As Advertising Week draws to a close, we’re energized by the creative wins that brands have have been able to share. Looking at the next year into the future, it will be interesting to see how the landscape further evolves—and how new partnerships will enable brands to achieve a more customer-led focus by closing the gap between data and creative.

In the past couple of years, there’s been a big push for brands to become more purposeful. What may have seemed like a buzzworthy trend has evolved into a consumer expectation that shouldn’t be taken for granted; 57% of consumers will buy or boycott a brand based on its stance on a social issue. While about 76% of brands think their organizations have a defined purpose, only one in 10 have a purpose statement that they’ve put into action, according to ANA.

While brands have embraced a sense of purpose, many miss the opportunity to fully integrate that promise throughout engagements with the consumer. Many digital-born challengers are cropping up, designed with a desire to enact some change. The idea for Dollar Shave Club, for example, came out of the founders’ frustration at the cost of razor blades.

“The purpose inherent in these brands is not just authentic; it is deeply personal,” writes VP, Principal Analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee in his Forrester report “How Direct Brands Are Transforming the Customer/Brand Relationship.” Facing increased pressure to differentiate on purpose, it’s crucial that organizations seek to successfully deliver their brand promise across the full customer experience.

Keep Your Brand Promise and Deliver

Conveying your brand promise effectively can be key to brand differentiation. In fact, your sense of purpose can extend to all branded experiences across customer journeys and the digital ecosystem. Consider the different channels your brand supports and how brand purpose can unify those experiences together. “Never approach a piece of content as a singular object,” says Jouke Vuurmans, Global Executive Creative Director at MediaMonks. Instead, each interaction should work in tandem with one another to achieve the brand promise.

With this in mind, it pays to recognize the different types of moments along the consumer journey at your disposal. At its broadest, there are the moments in which a consumer engages with a channel to fulfill some need or goal. For example, consider the end of the year when a customer might reflect back on the financial decisions they’ve made—like assessing how well their healthcare provider has served them.

This is an excellent moment for a brand to reinforce its promise to consumers. Oscar, the digital-native health insurance company, used its year in review as an opportunity to represent its unique and disruptive approach to healthcare, an industry that doesn’t always have the strongest reputation for consumer friendliness.

Oscar’s year-end review microsite—built in collaboration with MediaMonks—demonstrates key, tangible benefits it provides to its customers delivered in plain language, bright colors and whimsical animations. The overall visual style and human-centered copy were born from a desire to make a review different than the ones that other healthcare providers offer. This is where the brand promise shines through: Oscar strives to eliminate the stress and confusion that many patients feel in getting coverage or finding a medial practitioner near them by handling healthcare differently than everyone else. While the review was designed with customer retention in mind, it drove new signups as well.

Give Oscar’s Year in Review a thorough examination.

A key component to Oscar’s year in review is its series of interactive animations. Designed to be mobile-friendly, these interactions prompt readers to engage directly with what they see on the screen. Every moment is made up of micro-interactions, which are the little design elements that, together, enable a consumer to fulfill their goal or bring delight.  Micro-moments remind us that no engagement is too small or insignificant for the brand promise to manifest itself before the user; in fact, these elements when brought together define the brand’s identity and value.

Tell Your Story Through Experiences

When each interaction presents an opportunity to fulfill brand purpose, it becomes crucial that you recognize users’ goals within key moments and micro-moments, and consider how your brand meets those goals through its brand promise, much like the elements making up the Oscar year-end review as described above. Doing so shifts your focus away from UX-driven content, and instead toward content-driven UX.

This shift in thinking is important because content is crucial to defining a brand’s or product’s identity and value, particularly when it conveys the brand’s sense of purpose. Olga Osminkina-Jones, VP GM Premium Food & Beverages at PepsiCo, remarks in ANA’s Discovering Brand Purpose playbook: “I realize that people are not looking for another water brand. They are not sitting and waiting for us to launch another innovation. What they are looking for is meaning.”

There’s a fine line that brands walk between promoting themselves versus their industries—and when they do the latter, they risk advertising for their competition. Don’t center content around just the challenges faced on the consumer, but on your purpose for existing.

Blue Canyon Technologies, for example, is certainly an intriguing brand with its portfolio of spacecraft and space equipment. While you would expect its website to be dry, corporate and technical, it’s anything but. With spacecraft, planets and moons beautifully rendered by the Monks and integrated with WebGL, browsing the website takes users on a mesmerizing journey through the galaxy, examining spacecraft in their natural habitat from several angles. The experience emphasizes the vastness of the universe—an essential theme for the brand story and the resilience and versatility of Blue Canyon Technologies’ fleet of spacecraft, equipment and components.

Both of the website examples above demonstrate how visual and interactive elements can come together to fulfill your brand promise. Doing this successfully enables consumers to connect with the brand more easily through a shared sense of purpose and achieves a sense of emotional resonance that’s often missing from brands that struggle to differentiate.