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?

A new Forrester report by Jay Pattisall, unveiled at the start of Cannes Lions, highlights how the pursuit of customer experience (CX) as a go-to strategy has in fact inhibited growth for many brands. Instead, brands must invest in creativity (and identify the right partners to help them do so) to achieve higher returns. It’s welcome news at Cannes, which celebrates creative excellence and serves as a benchmark for best-in-class communications—and MediaMonks is proud to have been interviewed alongside other agencies for the report.

Pattisall relates CMOs’ focus on CX to a diminishing prioritization of creativity; one   finding in his Forrester report is that “Every brand offers the same digital experience because they all address the same customer needs, use the same technology platforms, and design for the same mobile use case.” Brands shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket by focusing purely on function, but place greater attention on offering creative experiences.

A recent article published by Marketing Week agrees that brand creativity is on an overall decline, yet is a key indicator of success: 67% of companies with top ratings on McKinsey’s Award Creativity Score—measuring quantity, variety and consistency of Cannes Lions awards won—have above-average growth, according to the article.

Learn more about the cost of losing creativity.

What does this mean? Creativity might not be immediately quantifiable, but it can go a long way in increasing enterprise value. MediaMonks Global Executive Creative Director Jouke Vuurmans has long spoken out against brands failing to take advantage of the creative opportunities available to them. He has noticed a “suburbanization” of design where bold brand identity has taken a back stage to sanitized interfaces that tick off the same boxes. Because digital interfaces are often the most common—or even first—settings in which users will engage with a brand, this results in a lot of wasted potential for brands to differentiate themselves and deliver on the brand promise.

Building content and experiences requires input from many people across the organization, each perhaps pursuing their own goals—but they must collaborate to ensure their efforts are on the same page. “Just because so much focus is on digital doesn’t mean we should ignore brand within this relentless creation and distribution of content,” says ter Haar as quoted in the Forrester report, “The Cost of Losing Creativity,” highlighting the importance in remembering that even the most solutions-oriented approach shouldn’t dismiss the brand-building opportunities of creativity.

The Interface is the Brand

At MediaMonks, we believe every engagement that users have with a brand is an opportunity to represent its core products and services. Most apps that exist to fulfill a specific function essentially look and feel identical, lost in a sea of sameness where differentiating factors are slight, if they exist at all. This is especially true in travel brands, for example: any airline app will let you book a flight or check in with a digital boarding pass. But brands can stand out by fusing creativity and technology to fulfill a wider purpose. The Aeroméxico app is a great example of this by offering smart content based on users’ itineraries, helping them easily find offers most relevant to their trips.

The use of highly relevant and targeted personalized content shows how even the smallest interactions can make a big impact on the user experience—and those interactions directly translate into brand loyalty. “Creative experiences that embed the brand’s purpose and values within a tech-fueled solution connect the uniqueness of the brand, the emotional needs of its customers, and the convenience of technology,” writes Pattisall in the Forrester report.

We agree. While brands have come under great pressure to engage their consumers through always-on content, it’s become easy to view small pieces of content as disposable or having limited impact on the overall consumer experience. “People underestimate the creative value of always-on communication,” cautions ter Haar. “Just because it’s 6 seconds on Facebook doesn’t mean you can’t think about distinction.”

Drive Purpose Across the Ecosystem

A remedy for unlocking the creative potential in any touchpoint or piece of content is to begin thinking in terms of ecosystems. The user journey extends beyond individual channels and platforms. Likewise, brands should take a more holistic approach at the creative experiences they provide. “We spend a lot of time thinking about creativity as a broader term—something as part of UX, digital design, flow—across anything that’s building people into an ecosystem,” says ter Haar. “How does the work we do for brands lock people into an ecosystem?”

Take grilling brand Weber, who also realized audiences were beginning to care less about objects—like grills—and gravitate more towards experience. This shift in consumer focus provided Weber with an untapped opportunity: how could they use creativity through content and experience to position grilling (and by extension, their brand) at the center of social experiences that consumers crave?

The result is an all-encompassing digital ecosystem that serves not only as a place to learn about grilling products, but to seek out and discover inspiration about grilling as a lifestyle. By infusing this promise across an ecosystem that encompasses personalized web content, connected apps, interactive demos, in-person experiences and more, Weber has achieved a compelling digital ecosystem that accounts for a griller’s every need, infusing emotion and aspiration into every step of the experience.

In his Forrester report, Pattisall highlights the importance of infusing creative problem solving at the beginning of every creative process: “Rather than bolting creative on at the end of the process as an established look or defined list of deliverables, initiate the project with creative problem solving to help define the problem and craft a solution at the start,” he writes.

It all boils down to instilling your work with a sense of purpose. When working with clients to narrow their efforts and align those goals with moving the business forward, we enjoy quoting the NASA janitor who proudly told President Kennedy that he was helping to put a man on the moon. A similar sense of purpose should manifest from every step of the creative process, at every level of an organization and at every touchpoint at which users engage. Such an approach ensures customer experiences differentiate a brand and uniquely affect consumers to strike a stronger, longer-lasting connection.