With most in-person, large-scale events struggling to go on given the pandemic, not all hope for summer fun is lost – or evaporated in the heat. We’ve been working with brands around the world to virtualize events for an online audience, so you can still get your groove on (comfortably at home, and hopefully with air conditioning).

We kicked things off with BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, one of New York City’s oldest, and longest-running festivals, by transforming it into a digital destination that brought the spirit of Brooklyn to the global stage for the first time in more than 40 years. The weekend was infused with rhythm and good vibes, including performances from Questlove, Madison McFerrin, Common, The Tallest Man on Earth, Junglepussy and more, and was hosted by actor and comedian Michelle Buteau.

The show did more than translate the existing Celebrate Brooklyn! experience into a livestream; working with MediaMonks, BRIC redeveloped the festival to further break down barriers between audience and performers by bringing the show into artists’ homes and enabling unprecedented interactivity. While there’s no replacement for that IRL experience of being in Prospect Park surrounded by fans and feeling the vibrations of the music, we leveraged the unique opportunities that digital brings to rethink the festival from the ground up—making it bigger than the park itself—with an approach that all brands should take when virtualizing experiences.

In lieu of the traditional festival, the city looked excited in the lead-up to the virtual event: Buteau told the Daily News, “When I heard BRIC was still doing their music festival this year but on a virtual platform, I was so happy. And then they asked me to host? I was over the moon excited!” The digital festival also caught the attention of Variety, the Root and more, and was even covered in the Wall Street Journal, who noted that BRIC “did its best to remind viewers of what they love about live music,” highlighting the challenge and success of evoking the outdoor atmosphere with a livestreamed version enjoyed indoors.

One of the interesting examples of how creative lower-thirds and overlays delivered on the spirit of Celebrate Brooklyn! is the Spotify Code that viewers saw on their screens during performances. Scanning a code lets viewers instantly find the track on Spotify, which they can collect in their library or save to a playlist. This turns the virtual festival into a space for discovery. “BRIC is very much about discovering artists—showcasing those who are established but may not be as well-known by the larger public,” says Brandao. “Features like the Spotify Code deliver on that core tenet of the festival.”

Together, these tech features aim to provide a sense of presence not intended to replace the feeling of watching a performance live; instead, it offers fans the ability to connect and engage with audiences in a new way. It’s in this sweet spot of understanding how virtual experiences can enhance and build off of the brand experience that brands will find success in a new era of virtualized events—so cool off and look forward to what else is in store this summer and beyond.

The music lives on.

Enable Accessibility by Breaking Barriers and Going Beyond Borders

BRIC is a longstanding pillar of the Brooklyn creative community, having supported local creativity, cultural programming, educational resources, advancing artist opportunity and more. The Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival—the one and only free summer-long outdoor concert series in the city—is one of its most popular initiatives.

“BRIC has been providing low-cost and free access to arts, culture and media for over 40 years,” says Anhelo Reyes, SVP, Marketing & Communications at BRIC. But this year, marked by a pandemic and intense protests in Brooklyn and around the country, was different: while social distancing wouldn’t allow it to happen in person, the show must go on. “It became especially important to showcase the spirit and resilience of this incredible community,” says Reyes.

Part of this meant reframing the community. The BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival uniquely captures the spirit of Brooklyn, but the virtualized event offered an opportunity to extend the festival’s focus beyond its typical local boundaries. (In fact, Madison McFerrin delivered a jazzy performance shot in the Arizona desert, showing that the Brooklyn mindset truly knows no bounds.)

Sure, you can do the same by televising an event. But virtualized experiences go further by becoming more interactive, giving fans the opportunity to engage one-on-one with their idols. “The audience can interact on a different level than before,” says Carolina Brandao, Sr. Film Producer at MediaMonks. “When you watch a traditional show, you have admiration for a performer, you want to meet them and get close but they’re intangible. Digital breaks that barrier: they’re following the performances with you.”

Miss the festival? You can still grab the best seat in the house.

Throughout the performances, users engage by answering trivia questions that appear on the screen, answering polls and (of course) participating in the live chat. After performances, Buteau served as a conduit between audience and performer, asking the artists questions from the chat. And with artists engaging from their own homes, viewers got a rare opportunity to intimately peer into their lives—not quite as cool as meeting face-to-face backstage, but pretty close.

Leverage the Best in Tech to Bring Events to Life

Putting on such a show requires creative and technical ingenuity. Latency—the delay in a transfer of data—can be a real concern in any virtualized event involving multiple people, but it’s a key challenge when you have to keep several artists in sync and on-tempo. To ensure a high production value in the performances, the Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival featured pre-recorded content followed by live segments–and because the event is enabled through a cloud-based control room, the show wouldn’t miss a beat regardless of any hardware, connectivity or power issues experienced that individual production team members may have experienced.

Speaking of production tools, don’t forget that each livestreaming platform has its own set of features to help broadcasters bring their events to life: Facebook offers live reactions, Twitch provides interactivity through integrations and YouTube has Super Chats and stickers. These features are certainly useful to broadcasters, but brands might want to go a step further with bespoke tools if they’re hosting a multiplatform event like Celebrate Brooklyn!, which broadcasted to both Facebook and YouTube Live simultaneously.

To fill this need, we used our cloud-based LiveXP software suite, which allows us to scrape chat content and interactions across platforms. With a wide lens view of how viewers are engaging, we can then surface up highlights in a way that is consistent with the brand’s visual identity. This let us give shoutouts to viewers who donated to BRIC during the broadcast, as well as highlight messages from viewers no matter where they were watching. Because the software is cloud-based, our diverse team (spread across New York, São Paulo and Amsterdam) could coordinate in real time to ensure content ran smoothly from their workstations at home.

Cannes has gone virtual this year, and while there’s no rosé to sip on La Croisette in between talks and parties, the reigning Festival of Creativity hasn’t skipped a beat in terms of insightful conversation and thought-provoking creative.

Against a backdrop of a global pandemic and social movements like Black Lives Matter, many of the conversations at Lions Live—Cannes’ (virtual) Festival of Creativity—centered around the importance of digital and its role in creating authentic conversation (and action that backs it up). From marketing effectiveness to fueling creativity with insights and tech, we’ve pulled together some of the biggest ideas of the week.

Tech and Creativity Make Good Bedfellows

We’ve long called for a confluence of tech and creativity to enable creatively differentiated experiences. Speaking to B&T about Cannes this year, S4Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell discussed the role that data and technology play in building effective creative. “You need to look at data as an enabler, it will give you insights that will make creative even more powerful.” In addition to making creative more effective, striking a balance between creativity and technology helps fuel innovation.

And speaking of innovation, Unity Head of AR/VR Ad Innovation Tony Parisi painted a thrilling picture of what the near-future of 3D digital content could look like powered by mixed reality in his Future Gazers segment. Ecommerce took much of his attention in particular. “All products will have a 3D virtual twin,” he said. “Imagine an ecommerce website today that had only text, no pictures. Absurd, right? The same will be said for 3D content.” Parisi noted that customers who interact with 3D models are 2.5 times more likely to complete a purchase, and that 65% are more likely to make a purchase when a platform includes AR features.

These predictions align well with MediaMonks Executive Producer Marie-Céline Merret Wirström, who told AdNews last month about the potential of 3D content and experiential retail. “Not only can you try something on at home, but you can easily assess how well the item matches up with what you already have,” she writes. “The emotional impact of being able to connect with the product personally and envision how it fits within your life (as opposed to flicking through images featuring a model that may look nothing like you) is powerful.”

Forget What You Knew About Effectiveness

In collaboration with WARC, Cannes Lions dropped its Creative Effectiveness Ladder framework (and accompanying 122-page report), which offers a hierarchy of six effects that creative marketing produces, ranked from least to most commercial impact. The need for the framework came from an insight from last year’s festival: there was no clear, shared understanding of effectiveness and what it means for different goals and initiatives.

A key finding from the report is that an overbearing focus on performance can be threatening to brands—a point that Cannes Lions Head of Awards Susie Walker reiterated in her presentation, “Lions Intelligence Presents a Guide to Creative Survival.” A lack of balance between short-term goals and long-term investment can weaken a brand, which is why we advocate for creative experiences that build long-term loyalty.

In discussing the Creative Effectiveness Lions, Ann Mukherjee (Chairman and CEO, North America at Pernod Ricard) discussed the need for “magnet creativity” in addition to “mirror creativity” that reflects culture. “Great brands speak to human conditions,” she said. “Great brands help to elevate what we want to think, differently—the art of that possibility. It is what we call magnet creativity, not just mirror creativity. So, it’s really critical, even more so in this environment, for that human condition to really come to the forefront, as we judge the work.”

Marketing effectiveness can be particularly challenging for small and medium-sized businesses, who are especially reliant on digital platforms. Our just-launched Boost My Business video series, covered in Adweek, aims to help smaller businesses achieve effectiveness through digital creative. Both informative and entertaining, the series follows Tan France as he meets business owners around the United States, teaching them how to use platform features to boost performance and engage their consumers in creative ways.

Authenticity Remains Essential

One of the hottest topics at Lions Live this year—authenticity—intersected with a social platform that’s definitely caught brands’ attention since this time last year: TikTok. In an inspiring CMOs in the Spotlight session, Katie Riccio Puris (Managing Director, Global Head of Business Marketing at TikTok) discussed how the platform is centered on active participation in culture. Offering advice to brands that are interested in marketing on TikTok, she said, “Don’t make ads, make TikToks. It’s not about like, comment and share. It’s like, comment, share and join.”

Puris’ segment came hot off the heels of the TikTok for Business launch. The platform provides brands with useful tools to amplify their efforts. Having partnered with the platform directly in China, UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands since its early days, here’s our advice to first-timers on the platform: first, delegate creative control, whether that means handing the creative reins to influencers or encouraging audiences to augment your core message through UGC. Second, understand that the platform is content-based, not connections-based, which means tapping into cultural trends (or starting new ones) is essential to success.

In discussing cultural trends, Chelsea Clinton (Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation) spoke with Bob Lord (Senior Vice President, Cognitive Applications, Blockchain and Ecosystems at IBM) about how emerging technology can help accelerate change. Clinton spoke about the importance of brand role: “Consumers want to see what narrative you are helping to put out into the world, how you believe yourself to be, and is that backed up by what you’re doing?”

It’s an important question for businesses to ask themselves. As brands aim to inspire audiences to shift their worldview, offer a unique perspective on society or integrate themselves authentically within digital communities and culture, they must take the opportunity to listen and understand their audiences—and bring about new solutions through creativity and emerging technologies. It’s fitting that these conversations should happen while Cannes takes a break from its regular programming; after taking learnings from a year that has challenged old ways of working from all angles, it will be fascinating to see what wins next year.