In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant future but a tangible present, the creative industry is riding a transformative wave. The recent SoDA Series Live panel at South by Southwest—led by Brooke Hopper, Principal Designer in AI/ML, Adobe—brought together industry pioneers to share their experiences and insights on integrating AI into their creative workflows. Hopper’s thought-provoking questions teased out stories that reflect not just adaptation but a wholehearted embrace of AI technologies, signaling a new chapter in creative expression and efficiency.

Driving consumers indoors and online, it goes without stating that the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly changed the way that brands connect with their audiences. Now is the time for brands to catch up to the digital needs of their audiences and strategically prepare for the future so they bounce back stronger than ever.

Until now, many brands have already made some sort of investment in digital, whether it’s super-charging their social media feeds, building personalization into their content delivery or more. But there is always opportunity for brands to raise their digital maturity—something that’s become especially clear today.

As CTO Solutions at MediaMonks, Tim Goodman has helped brands adapt at every stage of the digital transformation journey. Despite the different approaches taken, the first step is always the same: “We really look closely at the business goals,” he says. “Are they looking to reach their clients more quickly? Improve their message? Streamline their processes?” By aligning business goals with market changes, here is how Goodman and his team help brands focus their efforts and transform at speed.

Fill the Capability Gap Between Tech and Creativity

In his keynote address at this year’s (digitized) Adobe Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen noted the importance of aligning creative teams and IT to unite such disparate experiences and the data that powers each, with both sides ultimately focused on the customer experience. “In the past, the CMO brought marketing and communications expertise, while CIOs knew how to architect systems and unite data,” he said. “But IT is becoming more customer-centric and marketing is becoming more data driven. They are working together more than ever. Your C-suite must be aligned around this customer-centricity.”

At MediaMonks, we’ve always believed in a confluence between creativity and technology, and how both work in tandem to deliver the experiences that customers need. Right now, there is a strong desire for emotionally resonant, relevant experiences in digital—and if brands aren’t prepared to offer them, then they must find a partner who can fill in those capability gaps.

Strategic Partnerships Keep Brands Current to Market Shifts

As an Adobe Platinum Partner and having won the Adobe Partner of the Year award nearly every year since its existence, the MediaMonks Solutions team is ideally situated to support brands as they aim to adapt and transform. It’s led by Goodman, who holds the record of most individual certifications (ten) and is the only individual in the Adobe Partner network globally to hold four Architect certifications (Adobe Experience Manager Forms, Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Analytics, and Campaign).

“In working with Adobe, I’m most proud of the trust we have built up together,” says Goodman. “We’ve built trust in their products, in their teams, in their understanding of the needs of the market. They’ve built trust in us to understand their technology, to implement it the way it’s meant to be implemented, and to make sure we give our clients the best advice that’s right for them.”

This close partnership and expertise has led the team to often break new ground, implementing new features from Adobe before anyone else. For example, we were the first organization in the world to implement the Adobe Experience Manager Asset Share module for a major Australian brand. This is just one of the benefits of how we keep a continuous process of learning to help brands adapt to rapidly changing market needs.

Making these adaptations can be challenging for brands, which is why it’s important to put them at ease through testing and clear communication. “Before we implement a new feature, we make sure that we’ve tried and tested it in labs before we let it loose in the wild,” says Goodman. “We also ensure that key Adobe engineers are engaged directly, because they want to see the success of these features as well.” Crucial to this process is communicating core software disciplines, including proper quality control, to marketing teams in plain English.

Translate Random Acts of Digital into a Consistent Ecosystem

Online behaviors have rapidly changed since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, but many brands have an initial foundation to build off of for digital transformation and a more connected customer decision journey. Right now, your digital experiences may primarily function as “random acts of digital”: individual experiences that build brand love or fulfill a specific business goal, but are ultimately self-contained and disconnected from other touchpoints along the customer decision journey.

Brands looking to accelerate their digital transformation in lockstep with emerging user behaviors can save time and efforts by connecting these already-existing digital experiences together—either serving the right content for the right context or carrying user data from one touchpoint to another.  Tools like Adobe Experience Manager are critical for synchronizing data to and enabling this level of contextual relevance, resulting in unique, personalized experiences.

“A unified message is critical, and this often means unifying the silos within the organization,” says Goodman. “Whether it’s moving to cross-channel communications, or multi-tenant solutions, or a Data Management platform that streamlines the audiences for the right messages, Adobe has the answer.” Goodman suggests that brands first start with the quick wins rather than boil the ocean. “We help build a strategy for organizations to move through their digital transformation in the stages that are right for their business.”

Quick access to MediaMonks’ vast, global team of creative expertise enables brands to identify opportunities to embark on overarching transformation initiatives. “Not only do we have Tim, the most-certified Adobe expert,” says Tom Nelms, Head of Partner Growth at MediaMonks. “In total, we have 188 certifications across our network. When we combine that tech ability with our creative, front-end approach, we can help brands transform at speed and scale across their ecosystems.”

Focused on system, people and process, the MediaMonks Solutions team is well versed in helping brands overcome the creative challenge of integrating experiences along a single coherent journey. Critical to the process is that creativity and technology work together to enable the experiences that consumers crave throughout the total brand experiences. And when brands are better equipped to optimize and transform at speed, they’re able to build lasting customer connections and adapt to future changes in the market.

Ready to take digital transformation to the next level?

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.

Having joined the Monks in December 2019, we’ve fully initiated BizTech into our monastery, where they continue their commitment to delivering digital transformation expertise and customer experience management to brands worldwide.

The move comes at a critical moment when brands seek to deliver personalization and content at speed and scale, across channels both owned and earned—and made headlines at publications such as Yahoo Finance, Campaign and Little Black Book.

“Nowadays, everyone is making experience their business,” says Vera Cvetkovic, VP Solutions for the Americas and MediaMonks. “We’re helping them by delivering end-to-end solutions that enable those omnichannel experiences.”

“What everyone is going through is building an ecosystem to manage the whole [marketing] funnel,” Victor Knaap, CEO at MediaMonks, told Campaign. “We can add value throughout the process–from the discovery of what a platform should be to the defining and implementation for the best customer experience,” he added.

Adobe plays a crucial role in these efforts: a study described in the report “The Total Economic Impact of Adobe Experience Cloud,” cowritten by Forrester, found that organizations using Adobe Experience Manager achieved 14% year-over-year growth in new, unique visitor traffic and a 10% increase in average order value. Furthermore, marketing teams equipped Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target were able “to build campaigns in half the time it took with their legacy tools.”

An Unprecedented Partnership

Since its inception, BizTech has served brands big and small, including enterprise-level clients spanning industries that include banking, telecommunications, education, government and more. They’re the leading experts in Adobe’s online infrastructure and ecosystem, being one of the small few companies to achieve Platinum partnership. Our adept Solutions team is led by Tim Goodman (CTO Solutions at MediaMonks), who’s recognized as the most-awarded Adobe buff in the world.

With many of their clients juggling several workstreams and vendors, BizTech has gained trust by tackling the full, end-to-end experience on behalf of their clients. Specialized in Adobe Analytics, Campaign, Experience Manager and Experience Manager Run & Operate, BizTech has won an Adobe Partner of the Year award nearly every year since the award has existed.

Closing the Gap Between Creativity and Engineering

Now fully integrated with MediaMonks, the Solutions team is uniquely poised to marry together creative and engineering. “In order to bring complete solutions to clients, we must bring technology and creativity together at the outset,” says Cvetkovic. “Making that integration complete, we have a working process to implement and support creative solutions via Growth’s ongoing conversations with clients or Operations’ planning and execution of projects.”

This balance of flexibility, innovation and technical expertise enables brands to better meet their consumers with insights-driven creative delivered through personalized, omnichannel paths. “Every large enterprise has challenges with siloed data, legacy systems and joining teams,” says Michael Patishman, SVP Solutions at MediaMonks. “We help overcome them through considered efforts around system, people and process—removing the walls, connecting the dots.”

Enabling a Smoother, More Impactful Digital Transformation Process

When it comes to digital transformation, we believe in an agile, phased approach that prioritizes the most practical and impactful changes first. This approach simplifies the process and delivers faster results. Our unmatched Adobe expertise gives our clients the opportunity to quickly build experience-led solutions that drive customer obsession and impact, whether they’re just starting their digital transformation journey or want to quickly implement the newest technology.”

“It’s one thing when you are growing a business to get to the top, and another to stay there once you’ve made it,” says Cvetkovic. “We’re a leader in innovative solutions for our clients, and we go through a whole maturity model assessment to determine where they are and what they need to do next to move from one stage to another.”

This added knowledge and expertise helps us scale up our efforts to meet that growing demand of brands that seek to incite and sustain digital transformation efforts. Working with clients such as AkzoNobel, McLaren, HP and others to rapidly transform and elevate the customer experience, BizTech and MediaMonks are a natural fit—and we’re delighted to have fully integrated BizTech into the fold.

There’s more to explore in the Monk monastery.