We have just released our latest Sound.Monks reel and, if I may say so myself, it’s a true earcatcher. Not just because it showcases our best work of the last few years, but also because it tells a much broader success story: the sound of multiple creative disciplines working together harmoniously. But before we dive into our sound team’s cross-country collaboration, let’s take a moment to spotlight sound itself.

This article was originally published in Campaign Asia @ campaignasia.com

In marketing and advertising, the only thing we know for certain is that things always change. And in today’s world where we’ve learned that everything can change on a moment’s notice, brands are starving for working models that allow them more control of their narrative and the content they create. 

We know that the traditional brand-agency relationships are limited—the growing trend of companies moving to in-house teams is proof of that. In August 2020, a Gartner spend survey of CMOs found that 32% of external agency work had shifted to in-house teams over the previous 12 months. But while in-housing can offer brands major benefits—like cost savings, faster speed to market, and consistency over the brand narrative—purely in-house teams can lack elements of innovation and inspiration that the cross-pollination of diverse business categories and verticals affords agency creatives and marketers. Not to mention that adapting to the discomfort and inconvenience of quickly changing landscapes—something external agencies thrive on—may be difficult for brand teams.

The embedded partnership offers brands the best of both worlds. For some companies that have relied heavily on external agency partners, the embedded partnership allows them to quickly adapt to change while continuing to serve their audiences. For others, an embedded agency partnership serves as a hybrid first step toward full in-housing. And there are many, many brands we work with—large companies and start-ups alike—that maintain embedded agency staffers long term to help manage the ebbs and flows of marketing needs.

Enter the embedded partnership

In the embedded partnership model, brand and agency teams brainstorm together, edit each other’s work, talk daily, and often sit in the same offices. The most common misconception about the embedded model, however, is that simply putting people together in the same space—either virtually or on site—is the solution. “Embedded” means teams are involved in strategic conversations much further upstream than traditional agencies and openly collaborating on assignments to the point that ideas flow more naturally and decisions are made faster. Much more than a model, an embedded partnership is a mindset. This deep engagement based on teamwork and mutual trust yields results that exceed expectations, integrate fully with a brand’s existing infrastructure, and align with the latest go-to-market strategies. 

Keeping it fresh

Once thought appropriate only for content production needs, embedded agency engagements have expanded to cover end-to-end solutions spanning many areas: data, strategy, creative, production, platform development, optimization, and media, among others. And given the recent focus on privacy and preparing for a world without cookies, embedded digital marketing staff would be the ideal resource for managing a brand’s first-party data. 

Why are brands turning to embedded teams? Acquiring and energizing creative talent has historically been a challenge for in-house agencies—a challenge that can intensify when budgets are tight but marketing needs necessitate new skill sets. Plus, there’s always the risk that wholly internal teams turn into echo chambers for internal assumptions and company speak or, even worse, become insulated from emerging trends. An independent contractor or boutique agency can serve as a means of outsourcing small tasks but an embedded partner has immediate and greater access to talent and specialized skills, as well as external ties that can help introduce innovation. And given its proximity internally, the partner agency can become an extension of the company’s marketing team to seamlessly amplify the team’s power. 

Staying nimble

One of the main drawbacks to fully in-housed teams is their limited ability to handle sudden increases of work or reduce costs during periods of lower demand. And one of the key elements of the embedded model is that it provides flexibility in scale and skills sets available on demand as needs dictate. In large companies, for example, internal marketing teams can hum along until an unforeseen opportunity presents itself and a massive program needs to be executed—fast. Hiring full-time employees for a three- to six-month program is hard to justify, but so is signing on with an agency (even for minimum contracts) or hiring and then managing individual contractors. With the embedded model, a middle way emerges—a team of experts from a single agency can be brought in to leverage insights and execute quickly and smoothly. 

Covering all the bases

Building and maintaining a full in-house team is not for the faint of heart. In-housing requires a major commitment of time and money that can be a difficult pill for an organization to swallow—especially when striking the perfect balance between capacity and utilization is nearly impossible in today’s changing marketing environment. In smaller companies—like technology start-ups where most early resources are funneled to engineering and go-to-market timing is a moving target—there may not be the right staff on hand to handle the next phase of growth. But hiring quality employees takes time, and bringing in a full-on agency is costly and time-consuming. With the embedded model, interim senior marketers with the support of a full agency behind them can be quickly enlisted to execute everything from consumer tests to full marketing programs, without a major long-term commitment. This flexibility provides for support in tackling everything from operational problems to pilot testing new ideas and products to full go-to-market strategies—with companies only expending associated costs, rather than ramping overhead.

The many flavors of the embedded model

At its core, the embedded approach blends internal and agency teams working side by side with full transparency and higher accountability. That said, for as many different companies there are in this world, there are likely just as many different embedded combinations possible! Personnel models span fully embedded models with agency individuals and teams on site, hybrid models with some combination of on-site and off-site support, and fully off-site models supported by local or remote staff. And financial models that are retained, based on time and materials, project- or work stream-based, or a combination.  

To best determine whether an embedded partnership is right for your organization, you must consider short-term needs and long-term goals, and then evaluate your capabilities to determine where (and potentially when) you’d need to shore up resources. To put you in the partnership mindset, here are just a few areas where an embedded agency model can help:

• Consultancy to handle strategic work or restructuring, such as developing new operating models or in-house studios
• Plug-and-play project support with individuals or teams delivering part of a project or dropping into an existing workflow on a project
• Ongoing work streams with dedicated individuals or teams for everything from onboarding to in-market delivery
• End-to-end teams and solutions working as an extension of your team to absorb a higher volume of work for an extended period

Bridging the gap

As brands search for a model that provides them more control, a key challenge many of them face is a lack of resources that allow them to meet their fullest potential—whether it’s the need for all hands on deck to produce always-on content, or specialized skill sets for quick and one-off projects. The embedded model is what allows brands to bridge the time, skills, and needs gap to deliver results in an always-on world with speed, quality, and value. In its purest sense, the embedded model boils down to true partnership—a relationship based on shared goals, teamwork, and trust. And at the end of the day, relationships are what make the difference.

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.

Digital transformation isn’t the only process that has accelerated in recent months: so has in-housing. Gradually becoming more popular over the past few years, the trend has suddenly become table stakes for some brands amidst production challenges.

“Whatever creative that you need to develop has come, in a great part, from in-house capabilities,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice told Campaign in an interview about marketing challenges during the pandemic. “So, I think it’s actually been a boom to be able to lean on that infrastructure that has, in many cases, developed quite significantly over the course of time.”

That’s great for brands that have built up in-house capabilities over the past few years—but for those that have relied heavily on external agency partners until now, how can they adapt to continue serving their audiences? “In-house teams will do more of the work that companies would have previously sent to agencies, but that doesn’t mean the internal agency is ready themselves,” says Warren Chase, COO of Firewood, which merged with MediaMonks last year.

The true measure of who will not only survive but thrive in the coming months are brands that are prepared to digitally transform, he says. Simply seeking short-term gains that don’t provide longstanding value won’t cut it. “You have to adapt to the mindset of how to become productive when you can’t have your creative team around you,” says Chase. “But people will adapt—they’ve been forced to catch up.”

Strategic Alignment is Key to Long-Term Success

As many brands embark on their in-housing journey for the first time—or seek to adapt new skillsets and ways of working within an existing in-house team—collaboration and alignment is critical to long-term success. “It’s not just about the marketing department,” says Marco Iannucci, Senior Director of Strategy at Firewood. “What is the CMO’s relationship with the CTO, CIO, CSO and the rest of the C-suite? More than ever, the CMO must be a true partner with the rest of them—and if not, everything fails.”

This heightened need to align marketing’s efforts throughout the organization reflects the nature of marketing today. “Intertwining of marketing and technology is inevitable,” writes Thomas Husson, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, in a recent report. “As the designer and orchestrator of personalized customer experiences, the CMO must increasingly leverage big data, real-time analytics, and a host of technology platforms.”

This means strategic success relies on solving the CMO-CIO paradox, ensuring that tooling and workflows enable collaboration throughout the organization. Iannucci notes that dashboards and new tools have made it easier than ever for teams to take specific capabilities in house, but “everyone loves their specific tools, and whenever something isn’t working, they say, ‘If we only had these tools, I could do my thing.’ But then you end up with tools that aren’t syncing up or talking to one another, making it hard to see things big-picture.”

Prioritize, But Be Open to Shifting Gears

In establishing an in-housing strategy, brands must be committed for the long term. Chase balks at the idea that things will ever go back to normal as we knew it. “We have to create the next normal, and that requires feeling comfortable with being uncomfortable, and recognizing all the opportunities to do things differently right now.”

He notes that this idea of adapting to discomfort or inconvenience is something that external agencies are already used to managing, though in-housing brands can achieve stability by ensuring their priorities are clear and in order. Consider the primary motivators that drive the in-housing trend: cost savings, faster speed to market and consistency over the brand narrative. Brands must carefully prioritize which is most important to them and instill a sense of purpose in the existence of their in-house team.

While that might look different for everyone, Chase advises that enabling faster speed to market should be a top concern for most brands, as it puts a strategy in place to quickly come up with solutions to new, unprecedented challenges. As shifts in the digital and economic landscape continue to reverberate, brands must be ready to act. “When you have clarity on your priorities and need to put one in front of the other, right now it’s time to act quicker, adjust and pivot, and that’s where being in-house gives you an upper hand.”

Embrace the People Factor

Acquiring and energizing creative talent has historically been a challenge for in-house agencies—a challenge that may feel compounded when the need for new skillsets emerge and budgets tighten. This presents a new challenge to in-house teams: how do you keep teams inspired and build space for innovation?

“Bring in the people that know how to do this well, that have gone through this and can speak that language,” says Chase. “We all know we have to accelerate, but the big question is: how? Bring in the folks that are comfortable with that ambiguity.”

In discussing the embedded team model that Firewood is known for, Chase notes, “Across the board our culture is fundamental in making things work. We are zooming along again because our focus is on, ‘How can I help you do better for our client?’ And that attitude really spills over beyond our internal team and permeates into our client culture as well.” Despite the talk of upskilling tech, strategic alignment and agility, don’t overlook instilling a purpose-driven creative culture—a critical factor in long-term in-house success.

From new ways of working come new ways to engage.

Social distancing has radically transformed the way we live and work, forcing teams to collaborate with one another remotely and requiring brands engage with digital audiences in new ways. Despite this unprecedented moment of change, one thing remains constant: customers’ desire for connection, entertainment and content. How can in-house agencies keep up?

Meeting these needs will test the strategies and models driving brands’ in-house agencies. While IHA’s are known for their proximity to the client, cost efficiencies and speed of delivery, they must adapt in navigating the “new normal” we’ve all found ourselves in. Below offers some tips on where to focus your efforts in continuing to meet your audience’s needs without sacrificing quality and efficiency.

Double Down on Customer Obsession

Brand experiences thrive on inspiring an emotional connection by bringing people together and meeting customers’ needs where and when it matters most. With this, in-house agencies have a big advantage: they know the brand better than anyone else, often serving as a conduit between decision-makers and consumers. By aligning an understanding of customers’ needs and the brand’s purpose, in-house agencies are ideally positioned to recognize the new needs of their audience and enhance the customer experience.

“The first thing that brands are faced with is to go back and look at their brand purpose,” says Warren Chase, Chief Operating Officer of Firewood Marketing, which merged with MediaMonks late last year. “How are they anchored in that purpose and keeping their customers interested and engaged?”

At this time, having a clear dedication to purpose means recognizing how customers have been impacted by COVID-19—whether it’s a need for entertainment, managing stressors in their lives, a drive for connection or something else. “How can brands empathize with customers?” asks Chase. “Just be honest, transparent and open. Once you have that openness and transparency, people understand.” And that sentiment isn’t limited to customers alone; Chase mentioned how Uber, just as COVID-19 began spreading significantly in the United States, notified users of proactive steps the brand was taking to protect their drivers.

Next, consider how well set-up your in-house team is at acting fast in response to shifting customer needs. The mass push to staying at home might be only the first big change we see this year; as consumers come together through new ways of interacting and engaging, brands and their internal agencies must keep on their toes to realize opportunities for connection.

“All brands operate differently and say they involve the agency at different stages—some further upstream, some further down. When you’re in house, there’s proximity to leadership, to insights and data, and to decision-makers,” says Chase. “You get alignment super-fast when new needs or opportunities arise.”

Working From Home Doesn’t Sacrifice Quality

Having a brand strategy and to recognize opportunity is one thing, but how do you continue producing content when your in-house team is literally working at their houses? Production at home is still doable; even if mobility and personnel are seriously limited, you can still strategize around offering impactful content with just a single room, a single actor and a smart media plan.

This is an excellent opportunity for your team to heighten its creative efficiency through a fit-for-format approach to producing content. One of the simplest ways to do so is by refreshing or optimizing existing content in a way that quickly results in relevant assets at scale. We’ve taken a similar approach in transforming a handful of existing assets into a social awareness campaign that grew more effective week after week, using performance metrics to continually optimize and drill deeper into audience segments.

This same method could be incredibly useful for brands who must reassess a content strategy, optimizing it to better reach consumers at home via digital channels. When high-quality stock video is added to the mix, you can keep your creative content current by translating the brand narrative to different contexts with the footage available. And through fast, scalable digital animation techniques, you can continue producing fresh, new content without missing a beat.

Proactively Build Digital Maturity

While digital transformation has been slow and incremental over several years, brands have only begun to recognize the imperative to elevate the need for creative, differentiated digital experiences due to COVID-19’s rapid spread around the world. But for in-house teams lacking the digital maturity and skillset required to make such a rapid change, brands can fill in capabilities gaps through partnerships.

Marketing Dive notes that filling these skill gaps can be challenging amidst hiring freezes and cost-cutting in response to the pandemic. “My belief is that marketers and companies will not look to take on full-time employees in lieu of [third-party services providers] during the downturn, the reason being that there is a tremendous amount of costs with doing so,” Forrester Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall told the publication. “Companies will likely want to outsource those to the extent that they can, because in the long-run, that’s a more cost-effective way to deal with it than making significant investments in employee infrastructure.”

This is the time for brands to act boldly, with a need to reach customers like never before. Whether adapting production efficiencies or finding new ways to reach customers within a shifting digital landscape, there are many options available for in-house agencies to better respond to audience needs through customer obsession. Thankfully, in-house agencies are well-equipped to adapt, and despite these rapid changes one thing should remain: a dedication to solving consumers’ needs through creative expertise, a clear sense of purpose and unparalleled brand knowledge.

It’s time for IHA’s to reassess strategies and reactivate customer obsession.

Localization is a key challenge for any brand targeting several geographic markets, whether they be multinational or domestic. The way you’ll talk to a New Yorker about pizza, after all, might resonate differently with an audience in Italy. This gets at the heart of what good localization really is: it’s not just a matter of translation, but of paying special care to include the smaller details and nuances that appeal to a specific market.

Pulling off this level of transcreation can be tough due to the sheer volume of assets needed per market, the knowledge required about what markets respond to, and complex processes that hamper brands’ abilities to push this content out efficiently. For organizations struggling with any of these challenges, an integrated production partnership can help optimize transcreation workflows and implement local to infuse campaigns with a high level of local relevance around the globe.

An integrated production partnership is a team custom-built for your brand and its specific needs. Rather than brief an agency on a project, an integrated partnership focuses on the long-term and can scale up or down according to your need, whether it be through growth in consistent, daily responsibilities or sudden one-off projects. Working partially in-house, an integrated team provides access to a varied talent base across the globe, making the model a practical solution for brands seeking to provide local relevancy to always-on content.

Streamline Production for Growth

Inefficient transcreation isn’t just a matter of audience reach; it can impede growth as well. For example, one of our integrated partners is a digital brand that’s experienced very rapid growth through the acquisition of local businesses. With every new acquisition and market came a new need for assets, burying their in-house studio with an ever-increasing workload. An integrated partnership enabled the brand to offload lower complexity tasks and speed up the production process to match the rate of growth.

For some brands, a social media presence or their chosen industry might require an ever-quickening pace of asset production. This challenge rises exponentially for those catering to different local markets. An entertainment brand, for example, must react to current events across markets with speed, understanding how a given story’s relevance might differ among those markets. Because integrated partnerships thrive on long-term relationships and provide organizations with teams that are dedicated to their brands, they can streamline the production process by enabling daily deliverables rather than use a project-oriented approach. When brands feel increased pressure to develop always-on content ecosystems targeting different markets and cultures, an integrated partnership with access to a global talent base is ideal for offering the right message at the right time.

Improve Consistency Across Markets with New Creative Frameworks

Offloading tasks is simple enough, though the true potential of an integrated partnership is to optimize workflows across levels of the production process. A common challenge for large, global organizations is that they juggle several vendors per market, which can complicate the production process or threaten quality and consistency.

Through the guidance or talent resources provided by an integrated partnership, brands can provide local markets with autonomy to tailor messaging without having to worry about inconsistent style or messaging. While it might seem as though such a partnership is inviting yet another outside vendor into the process, this model is developed for the long term around a sense of shared responsibility. Custom-built and engrained within your organization’s culture, integrated partnerships have deep knowledge of a brand and can therefore serve as a safeguard.

Let’s consider another partner as an example. Its US team controlled asset production in other markets including Asia, which resulted in messaging that wasn’t necessarily relevant to them. This prompted local markets to work with their own vendors to develop assets with more cultural relevance. While they succeeded in that effort, the new materials lacked consistency. As the adage says, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” In this case, inviting several voices and vendors in the mix resulted in an inconsistent brand experience.

Our solution was to find a way to give room for freedom and autonomy to local markets while still allowing for a centralized work stream. At MediaMonks, we’re well-experienced in producing assets at scale through a unique creative framework that allows for several variations with little rework or added cost. We adapted this process for our partner by producing a series of master templates which would ensure a consistent visual style, while also being easy for local markets to adapt. This approach maintained flexibility while also quickening the time to market. “What sets this process apart is that transcreation is kept at front-of-mind and engrained into the process rather than being treated as an afterthought,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks LA.

A Talent Studio That Knows Your Brand—And Your Local Audience

Finally, our integrated partnerships provide brands with access to an always-on, global talent studio that can easily place a brand in any market. When a brand sees an opportunity in a new market, we can tap into a local talent pool with an awareness of what resonates there. “This flexibility in matching organizations to the larger MediaMonks network whenever needed is one of the key capabilities of integrated partnerships,” says Martens, “and is especially helpful for organizations that know no borders.”

Whether your organization is eyeing opportunities in new markets, is dealing with an unmanageable workload or simply needs to ensure a greater level of consistency across markets, an integrated partnership makes for a versatile, scalable model designed to fit those needs. Once in place, your team is equipped to adapt to new opportunities and challenges that can help your organization work faster and more efficiently, resulting in better ways to meet the needs of your audience no matter where they call home.

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