In a post-COVID world where hypergrowth will go from the unicorn story to a key business imperative, the industry will need to redefine digital transformation to a lean, iterative approach that connects the customer decision journey. To succeed in this future, brands must not only pivot their efforts now, but act fast to envision how they will meet the needs of audiences into the future.

Since COVID-19 cases surged globally, we’ve seen several businesses pivot their manufacturing practices at unprecedented speed, from Pernod-Ricard’s hand sanitizer production to Ford’s protective face shields. Both brands’ rapid change in operations demonstrate an urgency to transform with agility. Likewise, many are now realizing the need to transform and adapt digitally—not only in response to the pandemic itself, but also its eventual resolution, with no well-defined window of time between those two moments.

This might sound overwhelming, but the solution is simple if you merely shift your perspective on what digital transformation means during COVID-19: the pandemic doesn’t call for unprecedented change as much as it reinforces and hastens the changes that brands have been trying to implement for the past decade. “Things have not changed as much as they have accelerated,” says Joe Olsen, Chief Growth Officer at MediaMonks. “While other crises reshaped the future, COVID-19 is making the future happen faster,” underscoring the need for digital transformation that had always existed.

Brands can look at Starbucks as an example of this: its app, allowing customers to place an order before visiting stores and make contactless payments allowed the brand to continue enabling pickup orders in the early stages of COVID-19’s spread. On the other end of the pandemic, this contactless, digital infrastructure is likely to provide reassurance to a changed society that aims to limit the spread of germs without sacrificing convenience.

Another brand whose strong digital infrastructure continued to aid consumers’ needs is Nike. Supporting consumers through a digital ecosystem that includes not only ecommerce but also an app dedicated to video workout content led by a network of fitness trainers, Nike experienced lower than expected losses during the worst of COVID-19’s spread in China. In the west, the brand quickly leveraged its expert trainer network to offer weekly livestreamed workouts via YouTube, which MediaMonks helped to produce alongside Wieden+Kennedy in just days before the initial livestreamed event.

Transform at Speed with Lean Strategy and Development

While brands have long understood the need to transform, for many of them the process has seemed lengthy and abstract. Now, brands are quickly understanding the specific actions they must take at speed—compressing the transformation process. “For many brands, digital transformation has been in the back of their minds, and now it’s front and center,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar.

“There will be long-term effects that won’t magically go away once this is ‘over,’” he says. “Think about what this means for your brand, how services are going to change between your products and people, and opportunities to act differently.” Among some of the primary needs are brand ecosystems, access to first party data and truly owning the brand experience.

Brands may be surprised to find that they can make these vast changes faster than they thought possible. “The slowness, overhead, lack of agility the industry is known for has to change much quicker now because you have to play an important part in what’s happening,” says ter Haar. Noticing this need, we’ve eliminated roadblocks to develop a lean strategy and execution process to ensure rapid transformation in just a few weeks.

Here’s how it works. First, brands begin building scenarios and strategizing around the current landscape and where their brand fits within it. “Identify scenarios and changes in social behavior,” says ter Haar, noting how discomfort about flying may persist to further challenge the travel industry, which has been especially hit hard by the pandemic. “Be proactive by thinking about how your brand fits within this new world.”

This helps the brand identify challenges while also approaching their transformation with a sense of purpose. In addition to prioritizing KPIs and identifying requirements and limitations in technology, teams will have to envision how the tech will ultimately be used by audiences.

This feeds into the next steps: collecting design and UX insights while importing available data into a backend architecture. This may be the brunt work in planning a new platform, but this “get ready” phase can be done in just a week with UX and tech teams working concurrently. By having both teams work together from the start, you eliminate time wasted on creative ideas that ultimately aren’t practical in a technical sense.

Finally, the team develops, builds and tests for quality assurance before launching—followed by an ongoing test and learn phase to further improve the product or highlight new audience needs. With the proper planning steps in place, brands can move from idea to market in just a month.

Connect Random Acts of Digital to Build Brand Coherence

It’s possible that you’ve already invested in random acts of digital—also known as the siloed and disconnected digital experiences that consumers may encounter at different touchpoints. A simple way to boost digital maturity and prepare for the future is to connect these random acts of digital into a cohesive customer decision journey.

Taking stock in your existing digital strategy is an important step in finding new opportunities to connect with consumers within an uncertain landscape. Again, don’t forget your sense of purpose, either. To accommodate a sense of wanderlust in travelers whose plans had been canceled, for example, Marriott pivoted its content strategy around staycations—including links to its ecommerce platform featuring products that its hotel rooms serve as showrooms for.

In her report, “Best-In-Class Digital Leaders Embrace These Four Guidelines,” Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali notes that digital leaders “focus on their core products. While innovation is crucial, much of what the best digital disruptors do is continue to focus on their core product, or ‘keep the lights on’ work.” Minor, iterative tweaks and quality-of-life improvements can ladder up into premier digital experiences.

Understanding this, we partner best with brands embarking on digital transformation initiatives that can prioritize speed over perfection. Building on the foundation of your existing digital strategy, look for the simplest (and most effective) changes you can make to carry momentum on the way to larger-term goals. This approach isn’t just about building speed; when prioritizing velocity in the transformation process, rigorously test and measure performance to apply those learnings to successive iterations and phases.

Own the CDJ to Continually Support Audiences

One of the biggest challenges fueling digital transformation is that brands may miss out on the value of engaging with consumers if they rely solely on channels they don’t own, with insights on those interactions lost within walled gardens. Chief to connecting a coherent digital journey is eradicating data silos and building insights driven by first-party data. One need only look at how retail has been affected by COVID-19 to see this in effect.

“If you look at CPG brands who exclusively sell through retail, many of them don’t have a business now,” says ter Haar. “When owning the consumer journey, you have to have a direct relationship with your audience.” He notes that in addition to selling directly to consumers, you also build a more active, ongoing relationship that lays the foundation for when they want to buy further down the road–highlighting the important role that assistive content and digital experiences can take right now while consumers are craving entertainment and connection at home, even if it’s not strictly conversion-based.

While digital transformation has long conjured up the notion of years spent with consultancies that are all talk and no action—and resulting in plans that are obsolete before coming into fruition—it’s easy to see how many brands have viewed the process as a daunting slog. But today, advanced digital maturity is table stakes; and with a need to adapt at speed, brands can act right now on steps that drive fast results.

You can’t achieve hypergrowth without reactivating customer obsession.

If you follow the ad industry at all, you’ve almost certainly seen article after article championing those who’ve leaned into their brand purpose amidst the pandemic. Some go as far to encourage brands to find purpose–and while purpose is certainly important, many brands that claim to be purpose-driven still miss the mark, failing to drive real, visible impact. This can easily backfire, leading to criticism of exploiting societal challenges for their own gain, like accusations of greenwashing.

“During this time, this idea of whether brands helped, how they turned up and whether they’ve done the right thing has taken hold,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “That’s about responsibility: can you take on a role that is more meaningful than a nebulous idea of brand purpose?” That notion of responsibility is key. Brands that have made headlines in their response to COVID-19 didn’t always center their role around their purpose; instead, they’ve shown up in other ways by innovating to fill the societal cracks that the pandemic had exposed.

David Rotman, Editor-at-Large of MIT Technology Review, writes in his assessment of the overall COVID-19 response that, “We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy.”

His point highlights a real problem in brands’ ability to pivot resources and rapidly innovate when new problems arise. While purpose may be important for a brand to have, it’s this ability to step up and support consumers—and broader audiences—when and where it matters most that has become so critical today.

The fundamental disconnect rests between the purpose exhibited in some brands’ everyday messaging versus the way they do business, exposing a difference between brands that have only recently begun to consider a higher purpose versus those that were born from a need to change the world for the better. Ter Haar explains this pitfall succinctly: “Those brands chase after purpose but don’t have it as a real driver of the organization.”

Turning Words into Action

To identify how your brand can identify and fulfill its role, look beyond a vague or broad sense of purpose and instead focus on specific actions that make sense for the brand given its value prop or resources. We saw many brands show up this way, like AB InBev and Ford, who shifted factory production and supply chains to bottle hand sanitizer and make ventilators, respectively.

But brands don’t have to always make such heavy lifting to make impact. Headspace is a smaller brand that has done well by offering a free collection of meditations to everyone: “weathering the storm,” which is tailored specifically for the reality we’re in right now. Even more importantly, it’s offering free access to its entire library for the unemployed and for healthcare professionals. While these are simple maneuvers, they do well to deliver on Headspace’s promise to make guided meditation accessible for everyone.

Ensuring that purpose permeates every part of the organization is critical—not just messaging, but also in the purchase experience (like the “buy one, give one” model popularized by Toms Shoes) and how it treats its employees. As arbiter of the brand-customer relationship, this means CMOs must have a seat at the table to collaborate with other leaders of the organization more closely. But ter Haar notes that founder-led organizations like Airbnb, who had to lay off workers earlier this year in response to the travel industry being brought to its knees, made the best of a difficult situation by connecting laid off employees with new job opportunities.

“It was a great reflection of their marketing purpose. They managed to do it in a way that strengthened the brand,” says ter Haar. “Marketing is such a reflective part of how they position as a brand—and that’s where marking should be. If you have a strong brand perception, it’s in everything you do.”

Lay a Foundation to Build the Brand Role

For many brands, the ability to execute its role is also directly related to its digital maturity and agile capabilities. Having a strong foundation in both allows them to identify opportunities to support consumers in new ways and reallocate resources to execute those initiatives quickly.

A great example of this is the Boost with Facebook content series. Facebook has long hosted events for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and had reached out to our team in Sao Paulo to create the experiential portion of their upcoming events local to the region. When COVID-19 struck, the team had to quickly pivot the programming to a digital setting. “As their partner, we considered how we could quickly pivot to meet their audience where they were online and tailor the content for that new format,” says Carolina Brandao, Senior Film Producer at MediaMonks.

While the original purpose of the event was to train attendees in using Facebook’s marketing tools, the digital version switched gears to also include resources that could help SMBs survive and thrive through the pandemic. Programming takes the form of live panels as well as live-to-tape spots—all directed remotely—that bring together local politicians and leadership from bigger brands, offering broad insights and support to SMBs. Our team in Sao Paulo handled content for all of South America, including programming in both Spanish and Portuguese.

“This project is a perfect example of how MediaMonks was able to change, adapt and help our client create completely new solutions,” says Brandao. “One week before, we weren’t doing remote shoots or livestreams yet, but we were able to pull that off successfully.” Brandao is also proud of the tangible effect that the content has for the SMBs that rely on Facebook for marketing and connecting to consumers. “In the end, this is actually helping someone who is going through a really tough moment to get their feet on the ground and get the right resources.”

For brands that are more siloed, it can be difficult to make such a quick transition. But just like with any initiative to become more agile, a simple solution is to experiment with organizing small, multi-talented teams. By refreshing the existing structure and building urgency around fast solutions—privileging speed over perfection—your teams can rapidly prototype and build new solutions as they arise.

While purpose is important for offering a waypoint or a path for the brand to move toward, it’s this agile response that becomes critical to fulfilling its role. Once a brand is properly prepared, it is better positioned to show up and tangibly build value at speed—and directly support audiences, no matter what form that takes.

From brand role to transforming digital experiences, it’s time to (re)activate customer obsession.

Si bien puede parecer que el mundo se ha paralizado de ciertas formas, en otras las cosas se están moviendo más rápido que nunca. En poco tiempo nuestro equipo de producción y films ha hecho un esfuerzo increíble para desarrollar un espacio de grabación seguro para la producción de contenido, conservando el mismo nivel de calidad que esperarías de una sesión tradicional.

Ubicados en nuestra oficina de Ámsterdam, nuestros estudios de producción internos se han diseñado para cumplir con los estándares de seguridad al mantener a los miembros de un reducido equipo al menos a 1.5 metros de distancia entre ellos. Otros miembros de la producción (como el director o el equipo de la marca) observan desde otra habitación o desde una ubicación remota a través de una transmisión en vivo.

Esto es posible a través de un proceso de filmación automatizado, impulsado por el uso de robocams que se han usado durante mucho tiempo en nuestro contenido enfocado en alimentos y tabletop. Al consolidar cada paso de la producción bajo un mismo techo — incluidos los creativos, la escritura de guiones, los tratamientos, la preproducción, la creación de escenarios para el equipo de estudio y la postproducción — o de forma remota, el proceso reduce el riesgo y coloca a las marcas dentro de un conjunto seguro de manos (lavadas).

Al Considerar Nuevas Soluciones, Crea Estrategias Alrededor De Tu Producción

Si bien es alentador que las marcas aún puedan lograr un estándar de alta calidad para hacer films, este es un buen momento para detenerse y reflexionar sobre estrategias de producción anteriores. ¿Podría alguno de los cambios que hacen hoy llevarse a largo plazo? “Estamos viendo que aún se pueden hacer cosas sin los componentes elaborados, o sin la necesidad de viajar, para diseñar servicios,” dijo Wesley ter Haar, fundador de MediaMonks, al público en el seminario web de APR Virtual Town Square. “Todo es aún un poco más rudimentario, como cultura, probablemente seremos mucho más conscientes de nuestro impacto en el mundo y de cómo logramos superar esto.”

A medida que la cultura continúa moviéndose hacia lo digital a un ritmo sin precedentes, las marcas pueden comenzar a perfeccionar sus estrategias de contenido al considerar primero cuál debería ser el resultado ideal. Por ejemplo, ter Haar señala que las marcas ven el contenido basado en la conversión como una alta prioridad para satisfacer, con la necesidad de desarrollar ese contenido más rápido y con un mayor valor.

Pero las necesidades de los consumidores también están cambiando, ya sean sensibilidades estéticas informadas por memes y creadores de contenido independientes o la aparición de nuevos comportamientos digitales. “Hay numerosas formas de desviar los esfuerzos de la producción tradicional,” dice ter Haar. “En lugar de hacer una grabación tradicional con 80 personas, ¿por qué no hacer que 80 personas hagan su propia grabación?” Este giro en el estilo de rodaje abre nuevas e interesantes oportunidades para el contenido, como asociarse con influencers o explorar un solo tema a través de diferentes puntos de vista.

Encuentra Oportunidades Creativas A Través De Restricciones

A medida que las marcas continúan considerando los cambios que deberían hacer en las estrategias de producción en este momento, también deberían estar atentos al futuro. ¿Cómo pueden las restricciones que existen hoy ayudarnos a todos a lograr formas aún mejores de trabajar mañana? Ter Haar compara las nuevas estrategias de producción con el cambio que las empresas ya han tomado al trabajar desde casa. “Si bien ha sido relativamente fácil para nosotros cambiar a trabajar desde casa porque somos una organización global, también es agradable ver que las cosas que se sentían como si solo pudieran funcionar en persona, funcionan de maravilla al hacerlas de manera digital.”

Esta observación lleva a casa el sentimiento de que, si bien la velocidad a la que ha cambiado el entorno puede haber abrumado a algunos equipos, presenta también una oportunidad para desarrollar nuevas soluciones creativas, por ejemplo, reducir los costos de viaje o volverse menos dependiente de reunir equipos grandes en una sola ubicación. Al trabajar con las marcas para comprender y satisfacer las necesidades a medida que surgen, saldremos de esta situación más fuertes que nunca.

Hay más oportunidades para reevaluar tus estrategias de marketing y producción.

It’s time to acknowledge the elephant in the room: during a time of instability and hardship, should brands halt their advertising and go dark? Data shows that most consumers still want to hear from brands, but their message should be focused on building value. Still, even the idea of what constitutes as an appropriate response varies day-by-day and by location, highlighting the need for brands to invest in truly understanding their audiences and how they can lend support to them at speed.

In fact, brands who continue to invest in advertising spend throughout a recession tend to benefit by experiencing revenue gains that persist beyond its passing. 44% of consumers plan to delay purchases until after the COVID-19 outbreak has ended, and brands must use this time to prepare for the inevitable need to quickly grow following significant revenue loss throughout the pandemic.

Still, brands must consider whether spending makes sense. “Traditional advertising response is spend, spend, spend,” S4Capital Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell told audiences in conversation with Ad Age. “But when companies are facing existential crises in Q2 and not sure if they have enough money to survive, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he recommends that those in tech who planned campaigns and sponsorships for canceled sporting events “should divert that spending to doing good, purpose-driven campaigns. But those campaigns should be highly practical–equipment, vaccine development, therapy–supporting those on the frontline. It shouldn’t be self-seeking. You have to encourage clients to deploy their resources more effectively and divert money into digital because that’s more effective.”

Still how do brand ensure their focus is on providing real, authentic value to audiences in the coming months? The secret lies in redefining the role of the brand in consumers’ lives and being proactive to their shifting needs in a disruptive landscape.

Invest in Insights-Driven Creative

“In the first couple of weeks, data suggested that people didn’t want to hear from brands,” says Andre Rood, Global Advertising Director at MediaMonks. “Afterwards, you saw them slowly get into the mindset, as long as brands were being helpful.” He notes how brands’ initial response to the coronavirus from felt so repetitious, with so many brands reiterating the same message: wash your hands for 20 seconds and stay at home. They weren’t differentiating or cutting through to individuals’ specific needs at the time.

Now more than ever, customer obsession is critical to brand health.

MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar notes that in reacting to COVID-19, it’s more important than ever that brands invest in personalization, or they risk looking insensitive. This prompts brands to consider personalization beyond the typical categories of demographics and user preferences. Instead, they have to dig deep into the nuances of what their audiences are dealing with, and the myriad ways that the brand can help.

“The COVID curve is different everywhere, even affecting people differently who live in the same community,” ter Haar says. “For some that means looking for a cure to boredom—but that messaging is insensitive for a family of six that is homeschooling while working from home, who are too busy to be bored. It’s never been more important to actually understand who you’re talking to.”

Rood echoes this sentiment by cautioning that brands shouldn’t rely on the standard segmentation methods, which currently offer little relevance. “The way you should target individuals should be totally different now,” he says. Mood triggers, for example, can help a brand tailor the most supportive and relevant message to audiences whose experience with the pandemic can wildly differ.

Test New Production Solutions at Speed

The speed at which the COVID-19 situation can change also poses a challenge to brands focused on keeping connected with their audiences throughout the full scope of the pandemic. For example, a brand might be set to launch a campaign, only to find that it’s suddenly no longer relevant. In addition to offering a dynamic campaign as mentioned above, brands must employ rigorous testing to understand how people are responding to creative week by week.

“Due to the fact that this is moving so quickly into unknown areas, brands must be able to galvanize and shift content immediately,” says Patrick Kirby, Digital Strategist at MediaMonks, noting that becoming more agile is essential to success.

Ways to do this include repurposing archival material for legacy brands who have it, turning to quick and versatile animation as a production alternative or encouraging UGC and influencer content to build community engagement. Each of these approaches enable brands to reallocate budgets or refresh existing content, but more importantly, they can do so at speed.

Redefine the Brand’s Role

More than simply continuing to advertise to consumers with conversion-based content, now is a good time for brands to truly focus on building brand value and becoming more purposeful. For example, while brands should tread lightly in approaching the current moment with humor, there is value in using creative to lift spirits and boost morale.

There’s a lot of talk too about how manufacturers have done substantial good by shifting operations to produce much-needed masks, hand sanitizer, ventilators and more. This approach isn’t practical for many—for example, smaller or mid-sized brands. But there are still opportunities to get creative in how you leverage your channels and platforms, like HP and Folding@Home’s initiative that encourages users to donate a fraction of their computing power to aid in the research toward a COVID-19 cure.

Such approaches are rooted in customer obsession, in which brands pool together resources to listen to the customer and deliver upon those needs. Willemijn Jongbloed, Digital Strategist at MediaMonks, notes how Nike was able to adapt well to offer value to consumers under quarantine thanks to its customer obsession strategy. MediaMonks has partnered with the athletic brand and Wieden+Kennedy to host a weekly series of livestreamed workouts that get people active and moving despite staying at home.

“When Nike moved into events, that was a bold move at the time, but now you can clearly see the many sides of the brand. In a time when people have largely stopped buying clothes, they have created the ability to move into online events, and thus can instantly serve their audience in a different way.” What makes the experience powerful isn’t just the product itself, she says, “but the full story around it—including all benefits, use cases, mindset and emotional connection that will set a company up for success.”

That drives home an important point for brands as they seek to engage with and support consumers over the next few months. Wielding brand voice in a global pandemic isn’t a matter of simply keeping your name out there or driving conversions; it’s also about building trust, becoming more purposeful and experimenting with more agile ways of working. As brands hone these skills now, they’ll emerge from the other end of the pandemic stronger than before, and their audiences will come to appreciate those efforts.

It’s fitting that the premier digital experience conference went all-digital this year, as just one of many tech conferences that have rapidly adapted their strategies in light of the COVID-19 pandemic—building the on-demand streaming alternative in just a month. Pictured above, you’ll see MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar speaking at Adobe’s last tentpole event, Adobe MAX.

This urgency for stronger digital experiences served as a key theme for the conference. “We are clearly living in unprecedented times,” said Adobe Chairman, President and CEO Shantanu Narayen. “COVID-19 is changing everything about life and work as we know it. Now more than ever, we must come together as a community to share best practices to digitally engage with customers.”

During the keynote address, Adobe unveiled new tools and updated features that can help brands provide a better customer experience and reach their business goals: most notable is the Digital Economy Index, a tool that analyzes more than a trillion online transactions across 100 million product sales to help brands understand, act on and anticipate digital commerce trends. In addition to that and new updates to Adobe Experience Cloud Manager, Narayen called for a stronger relationship between CMOs and CIOs as brands spend 2020 refocusing their digital strategies and seek new ways to connect all known user data across the customer journey.

Digital is Table Stakes, and Brands Need to Adapt

 “Whether you’re replacing an in-person conference with a digital event, or working to engage with your customers virtually, the theme is the same: digital is revolutionizing how we interact with each other,” said Narayen. This sentiment has become all the more obvious in the past month, in which social distancing policies have shed a spotlight on the gaps that brands must fill in their digital transformation efforts and the need for emotionally resonant creative digital experiences.

Today, customer experiences are much more than just delivering delightful and relevant experiences in real time, it is supporting the users’ needs in an almost completely digital world. From e-commerce services bringing products to our door, to paperless contracts and virtual offices, or digital tools enabling students to continue with their education, “digital isn’t only changing and reshaping our daily lives, it’s driving the economy,” says Narayen.

This change isn’t exactly new, but has become a moment of reckoning for brands. “Everything has been moving remote and online in one way, shape or form over the years,” says Henry Cowling, Managing Director at MediaMonks San Francisco, in our most recent report on reactivating customer obsession. “This is the chance for brands to really look at that, and reinvent how the digital experience looks and feels, because they’ll need to do it eventually.” 

The Moment for Real-Time CX is Here

Prioritizing customer experience management has become fundamental in a world dominated by digital interactions. Users expect more and demand more from brands, and they do not have the patience to wait for it, they want it all right now. Brands need to understand and use their data to craft a personalized and relevant experience that their users will enjoy in real time.

In one breakout session, Adobe Principal Product Manager Trevor Paulson reassured audiences, “Almost everyone is trying to better understand the entire customer journey across all their channels … So, if you think you’re behind your competition, chances are you’re probably not.” Among the top challenges in customer journey analytics he identified are disconnected data, not enough data expertise and inability to action insights—each of which inhibit a brand’s ability to meet its audience’s needs throughout the full, end-to-end brand experience.

Cross-functional collaboration helps brands gather together diverse knowledge and expertise to bridge these gaps. Successfully achieving data-driven creative workstreams is key to building the creatively differentiated experiences that build brand love, assisting consumers wherever and whenever it’s most needed along the CDJ.

Get Ready for a Cookie-less Future

Third-party cookies have been a key part of digital experiences for a long time, but that is coming to an end. With browsers having banned them gradually over the last years, Google announced a few months ago that it will eliminate all third-party cookies in 24 months. We are entering a new era of cross-domain personalization enabled only for known users.

“Cookies aren’t that good for marketing, they overstate how many people brands are actually reaching, they lead to wrong demographic targeting, they miss conversions that are happening, and they overrepresent the individual you are trying to target,” said Justin Merickel, VP of Adobe Advertising Cloud. “They haven’t been great at providing the value that they were set out to do.”

“Delivering personalized experiences at scale requires rethinking the approach to data,” says Pari Sawant, Director of Product Management at Adobe. First, they must remember that personalization should aim to truly help consumers; and to execute on that need, they must realize the power of context over relentless retargeting.

Knowing that brands will soon not be able to use third-party data, which today may make up a good portion of all their data points, they need to rethink how they use it to build truly valuable experiences by owning, operating and maximizing first-party data. Data clean rooms offer one interesting solution; as brands aim to reinvent their CX strategies or digitally transform in a fast-changing digital landscape, brands can lean on their creative partners to highlight new technologies as they emerge and determine which make the best fit.

Customers Expect Control All Across their Journey

For decades consumers were forced to stay static and receive an experience where they had no input whatsoever, but with the emergence of digital and mobile environments, they have become empowered, and they know it. Consumers expect to have a say on everything, from the decisions they make, to the content they consume, at every single touch point. 

For decades, consumers have had little control over how their data was used by brands. But with brands focused on a need for building first-party relationships a cookie-less world, an opportunity emerges for them to empower customers. to become active participants in the creative experiences they consume. There needs to be a clear value exchange for users to part with their data, further driving home the need for content to be assistive. This approach requires brands to take ownership of the customer relationship.

The bar has been raised for consumers and brands alike, particularly when it comes to digital native newcomers who have forged deep relationships with consumers by aligning purpose with data-driven creativity. “The experiences they receive in the applications and services they use online every day have led them to demand the same from every brand they deal with,” said Nick McLachlan, Product Marketing lead for Advertising Cloud in APAC at Adobe. Between 65% and 70% of consumers expect highly contextual, personalized experiences in real time.

Brands face a unique challenge in order to fulfill the customers’ expectations; they need to create strategies that cater to those needs across every channel, taking a user-centered approach to how they do business. These challenges have come to a head in a year where fractures in brands’ existing digital strategies are apparent. Thankfully, the Adobe Summit streaming platform goes live at the perfect time for brands to begin refocusing their strategies for the rest of the year and beyond.

While it might feel as though the world has come to a standstill in some ways, things are moving faster than ever in others. It’s been only a week and a half since our previous post about seamlessly continuing production in a world changed by COVID-19, but in the interim our film and production team has put incredible effort into developing a safe shooting space for content production—retaining the same level of quality you would expect from a traditional shoot.

Housed in our Amsterdam office, our in-house production studios have been set up to comply within safety standards by keeping members of a lean crew team at least 1.5 meters apart. Other members of the production (such as the director or brand team) observe either from another room or from a remote location via livestream.

This is made possible through an automated shooting process, aided by the use of robocams that have long been used in our tabletop and food-focused content. By consolidating every step of production under one roof—including creative, scriptwriting, treatments, pre-production, set builders to studio crew and postproduction—or remote, the process mitigates risk and places brands within a safe set of (washed) hands.

In Considering New Solutions, Strategize Around Your Output

While it’s reassuring that brands can still achieve a high-quality standard of filmmaking, this moment serves as a good time to stop and reflect on previous production strategies. Might any of the changes they make today carry into the long term? “We’re seeing that you can still do things without the elaborate components, or travel, craft services,” MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar told audiences in APR’s Virtual Town Square webinar. “it’s all a bit scrappier—as a culture, we’ll probably be a lot more mindful about our impact on the world and how we manage to get through this.”

As culture continues to shift toward digital at an unprecedented rate, brands can begin honing their content strategies by first considering what the ideal output should be. For example, ter Haar notes that brands view conversion-based content as a high priority to fill, with a need to develop that content faster and at a greater value.

But consumer needs are also shifting, whether it be aesthetic sensibilities informed by memes and independent content creators or the emergence of new digital behaviors. “There are numerous ways to shift efforts from traditional production,” says ter Haar. “Instead of doing a traditional shoot with 80 people, why not have 80 people do their own shoot?” This twist on shooting style opens up interesting, new opportunities for content, like partnering with influencers or exploring a single theme through different viewpoints.

Find Creative Opportunity Through Constraint

As brands continue to consider the changes they should make to production strategies right now, they should also keep an eye on the future. How can constraints that exist today help us all achieve even better ways of working tomorrow? Ter Haar compares new production strategies with the shift that businesses have already taken by working from home. “While it’s been relatively easy for us to switch to working from home because we’re a global organization, it’s also nice to see that things that felt like they could only work in person are perfectly fine to do in a digital manner.”

This observation drives home the sentiment that while the speed at which the landscape has changed may have overwhelmed some teams, it presents an opportunity to develop new creative solutions—for example, cutting travel costs or becoming less reliant on gathering large teams within a single location. By working with brands to understand and delivering on needs as they emerge, we’ll emerge from this situation stronger than ever.

There are more opportunities to reassess your marketing and production strategies.

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.

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.

The spread of COVID-19 in recent weeks is impacting brands in significant ways around the world, challenging both strategies and workstreams across all industries. Frequent cancellations of events one by one served as an initial barometer of the virus’ impact; not just affecting big-name festivals that attract crowds large enough that local economies depend on them, but also smaller activations. The situation begged brands to consider: how can they retain a close connection to key audiences in a time of social distancing?

While the West faces a need to quickly adapt to a new normal prompted by COVID-19, we’re a global creative partner that has serviced clients and areas hit by the virus since its onset in late 2019. Pooling together insights and experiences from teams across the S4Capital family, we’ve put together a report, titled “(Re)Activate Customer Obsession,” that recognizes this moment of upheaval as a profound opportunity for brands to reinvent their strategies and continually reach audiences spread far and wide—perhaps even better than before.

(Re)Define Goals for Customer Obsession

The need for creatively differentiated digital experiences isn’t new; consumer engagement has long migrated toward digital since the rise of ecommerce and social media, with consumers flocking to the convenience and connection enabled by always-on communication and digital personalization.

But for brands that have hesitated to enable these experiences, the trend to social distancing is a wakeup call. “As we come to grips with a world where we can’t shortcut to experience through physical engagement and personal proximity, the challenge is to deliver on the original intent of digital,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar. “Interactive, tactile and personalized moments of magic that create conversation, conversion and commercial opportunities.”

To deliver such experiences, brands must invest in customer obsession. Namely, this means meeting audiences where they are—online—and tailoring resources to better prioritize their needs and enhance the customer experience. For many brands, in-person experiences are critical to cultivating a relationship, building a sense of community and driving emotional connections.

On our blog in the past, we’ve discussed the value of such activations—and the need for a digital layer to connect with audiences faraway. If your brand already has an event plan in place, take this as a moment to consider its goals and how that ladders up into your brand purpose. Our report offers a series of thought-provoking questions to help brands zero in on a digital strategy that aligns with their specific needs.

(Re)Group and Replan

Whether you seek to retain value by pivoting existing plans or are simply struggling to anticipate “what’s next,” our report to reactivating customer obsession offers practical advice on how you can begin to reevaluate and prioritize your goals—and where they fit within digital activations. This is essential not only for brainstorming what new experiences your brand can provide, but makes a critical first step in evolving your operations with the digital skillsets and capabilities needed to deliver them.

Having to face an event’s cancellation is tough, because so much work and preparation had already gone into it. Recognizing this, a move to digital can feel daunting—and you’ll certainly find that strategies must shift, and that what worked for a physical experience may not translate well to a live, digital one. But as we’ve mentioned above, view this unfortunate circumstance as an opportunity to make something even better: a deeper investment in digital, for example, allows brands to build up their data capabilities to better understand which experiences are most impactful, and when.

“One of the things we do is in the data: in social listening and finding the right trigger areas in regions where things are happening,” says Aaron Nava, Director of Digital at Circus, which merged with MediaMonks earlier this year. “From there, we’re able to develop a point of view for brands.” Through increased digital maturity, brands have a greater perspective on how to achieve more meaningful, lasting interaction at different points in the customer decision journey, and become more customer obsessed in the process.

Having a clear sense of purpose is key, too. In-person experiences thrive on inspiring an emotional connection through bringing people together and appealing to the senses, and brands must think carefully about how to inject emotion into digital alternatives.

“Brands shouldn’t aim to think about virtual conferences as replacement of what they had previously scheduled. It’s impossible,” says Kate Richling, CMO at MediaMonks. Still, she notes that you can offer some pretty cool (and in many ways, better) activations that are designed to assist your audience and enrich relationships authentically. Drawing from several example digital activations and scenarios, our report walks readers through what to consider in developing such experiences.

(Re)Imagine What’s Possible

Faced with an immense shift in how they must communicate with consumers over the next few months (and how to pivot back to normal, whatever form that might take), we all stand at a critical moment to reassess strategies. But constraint is beneficial to creativity, and we look forward to tackling more unique brand activations that fundamentally redefine consumer relationships. By taking this moment as an opportunity to hone your digital skills and reimagine what’s possible, your brand will be well-equipped to anticipate consumers’ emerging needs both in the near and distant future.

It’s Time to (Re)Activate Customer Obsession.