Consumer buying habits have significantly shifted to digital over recent months. Ecommerce giant Amazon, achieved record growth in Q1 2020, seeing its largest increase ever in revenue for its online stores, with 24.3% growth in online store revenue alone. Now is the time for brands to change their consumer approach by building digital marketplace strategies that recognize and meet consumer needs across the entire customer decision journey, not just when they visit a marketplace to make a purchase.

One need only look at the rise in online grocery shopping to understand the increasing importance of ecommerce today: online grocery penetration is expected to meet (or exceed) 10% in the US, beating previous industry forecasts. While buying a mattress online may have felt strange and novel five years ago, today’s consumers don’t bat an eye by turning to digital marketplaces to discover, research and ultimately purchase products of all types.

Digital Marketplaces Double as Important Media Channels

This shift in user behavior has elevated the role online marketplaces as media channels that are important to telling the brand story to shoppers. “By serving ads to their customers at relevant moments, digital business professionals and commerce companies deliver a superior customer experience while also cultivating a rapidly growing new revenue stream with healthy margins,” writes Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali in the Forrester report, “Retailers: You’re The Next Media Moguls.”

One reason why advertising is so effective on these channels is because consumers are already in the shopping mindset when visiting a digital marketplace. “Mercado Libre has millions of users and visits each day, among different advertising formats,” says Pablo Tajer, Creative Director at MediaMonks Buenos Aires, discussing the most popular ecommerce giants in LatAm. “People that see these ads are already in shopping mode, which makes it much more powerful than seeing it on another channel where you’re not thinking about buying anything.” By connecting technology and creative, brands can lend greater value to an audience that is more receptive to learning about products and their features.

Identify Brand Opportunities Across the Full Digital Retail Ecosystem

Tajer leads our newly announced BrandLab partnership with Mercado Libre Publicidad. BrandLab serves as a team that highlights advertising opportunities for the biggest brands on the platform. Previously, Tajer fulfilled a similar role within Facebook’s Creative Shop. After receiving a brief from a brand, the BrandLab team helps build bespoke creative ideas that fit Mercado Libre’s formats and ecosystem, fulfilling a real need for brands that strive to differentiate and stand out in the user experience.

“The cool part is that we have an opportunity to create an idea that goes throughout the whole customer journey across Mercado Libre’s ecosystem,” says Tajer. “It can start with the branding on a product description page, then move to the payment step with the platform’s digital wallet (MercadoPago), and finally when you get the product itself through Mercado Libre’s shipping service.”

In this respect, to succeed in digital marketplaces brands must look beyond simply converting at a point of sale. Global ecommerce giants like Amazon in the US, Mercado Libre in LatAm or Alibaba in China are more than just marketplaces; they provide total ecosystems that include digital payment systems and delivery logistics networks. By managing each step of the customer journey—from awareness to purchase or even receiving the package itself—these ecommerce platforms offer several opportunities for brands to engage with their customers.

Inject the Brand Story into Your Ecommerce Efforts

The opportunity to embrace the total brand experience on ecommerce highlights a common misstep for brands selling and advertising on online marketplaces: the brand story is often missing from the equation. “It’s a platform that people view as purely performance based,” says Tajer. “It’s not just about performance, but also branding. Between searching for products and comparing which is better than another, there’s a lot more happening on an ecommerce platform than just clicking ‘buy.’”

For many consumers, a digital marketplaces is often the first place they visit for product searches. As important spaces for product discovery, it’s important that marketers don’t assume consumers are visiting with a specific product already in mid—or are even aware of the brand before seeing its product listed. This highlights a need for brands to view ecommerce as an important space to build brand love and awareness through impactful creative storytelling. “We want to be a lighthouse that shows brands and their partners the way.” says Tajer, “Together, we can grow stronger, platform-specific campaigns that drive consumer value.”

Support your audiences across the creative experience journey.

Having served as our first Creative Monk in the MySpace days to building a team of more than 2,300 over the past 15 years, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the immense evolution of digital culture and its effect on creativity. Now, as MediaMonks’ new (and first-ever) Chief Creative Officer, I aim to wield that experience by challenging the one-size-fits-all model that continues to remain popular with creatives today—even though it falls flat against consumers’ needs.

In a time when online experiences are paramount, our ambition to harness the power of technology and creativity is more important than ever. No stranger to adapting to our current realities, this moment offers an opportunity for us to look at the current state of creativity and the vision that sets true innovation from the rest.

Still in the infancy of a new decade, I find myself dismayed at how our industry still struggles to push itself forward. This year especially, brands find themselves with an unequivocal imperative to reassess the strategies they’ve relied on as digital behaviors have quickly evolved. In this age of hyperadoption — in which new behaviors are continually adopted and dropped — we as creatives must raise the bar and reimagine what’s possible.

Consider this: much of the most recently celebrated work may have been placed on digital and social media, but was designed specifically for TVC or print. So many social and digital ads are simple 15 or 8-second cut downs for the toolkit, but different rules and behavior apply to these channels than TV; for example, people on average only watch social ads for about 1.7 seconds, which already makes cut downs incongruent to the format.

The industry stunts itself by limiting its recognition of ads—what I would call all the paid media-related creative work that the industry makes—to include only the traditional formats of one-size-fits-all print and linear, 30-second TV scripts. Being so set in our ways risks our own irrelevance to modern-day consumers, whose customer decision journey (and attention) increasingly extends across digital platforms and channels, often simultaneously.

Rather Than Celebrate Innovation, We Repeat Our Mistakes

Feeling secure in sticking to established success parameters isn’t new for our industry—in fact, it’s not that far off from how we moved from radio into TV ads back in the days. Rather than take advantage of what film had to offer, the first TV ads were basically radio scripts with an image or two. Take the famous Bulova ad, which wasn’t filmed at all; while novel, it failed to take advantage of the creative impact that TV made in storytelling.

Frustratingly, the industry once again finds itself impeded in its ability to develop and recognize creative that takes full advantage of the abundance of opportunities afforded by today’s technology; the most-celebrated digital ads of 2019, for example, might as well be the best ads of 2009. In fact, Ad Age’s Top Campaigns of the 21st Century—which chronicles its first 15 years, ostensibly tracing the direction that advertising has taken in lockstep with gains in digital tech—offers little real distinguishing factor from year to year. Don’t get me wrong, these campaigns are great, culturally relevant ideas, but execution must be better aligned with current user behavior on the appropriate channels best-suited to drive engagement, connection and emotion.

Mind the Creative Gap

Creative teams drop the ball when they fail to mind the (creative) gap between the big idea and the media toolkit. What the industry needs to do is go even broader on the big idea, allowing integration across several channels or sources of data, rather than retrofitting it to one-size-fits-all toolkits that ultimately diminish its creative potential. What gets at the heart of this challenge is the need to recognize context, whether it be through media placement, user behavior, technology or with data.

To this end, Forrester Research advises, “As experiences traverse digital, physical, and communication moments, each point of intersection should be inspired by the creative articulation of the brand and leave an indelible impression on customers.” Brands will struggle to achieve such an effect if their digital creative isn’t fit for both format and purpose toward the specific moments and places where consumers find it.

And if there’s anything digital isn’t, it’s static: through responsiveness to consumer interaction and data, digital creative enables brands to truly build a connection in a more personalized context. Essentially, the big idea must function as a two-way conversation that anticipates, responds to and builds upon user context and interaction—and as creatives, we must use all the technical tools at our disposal to make sure we not only reach consumers at the right place and time, but truly meet their needs at the contexts in which they engage.

Let’s Build Awareness for Contextual Awareness

One of the most clever examples of a brand [leaning on user behavior/strategy] was Wendy’s “Keeping Fortnite Fresh” campaign, in which a character with a striking likeness to the fast food chain’s mascot infiltrated the popular third-person shooter. Not interested in killing fellow players (which is the object of the game), this virtual Wendy sought to destroy the game world’s in-game freezers as a homage to Wendy’s pledge to never freeze its beef. Livestreamed on Twitch, the stunt represented how brands could skillfully participate in new social spaces online and is a modern, relevant take on the brand’s big idea: the “home of fresh.”

We’re at a time where technology is deeply intertwined not only with the way people consume content, but also how they communicate and form deep relationships with one another. Given the abundance of data available through these myriad interactions, not to mention the many opportunities to act upon them, we as an industry face unprecedented opportunity to make better, more assistive and unique work—and when that work is produced, we must celebrate it rather than cling to the safe, established yet increasingly irrelevant success parameters of the past.

With all of this discussion about how advertising must change, and in a moment when we’re challenged once again to adapt to a new reality, I look ahead to a future where our industry rises to the creative challenge by building experiences that drive impact throughout ecosystems, resonating with consumers’ needs no matter where they are. This has always been our dedication; and as MediaMonks’ newly appointed CCO, I hope my voice resonates and serves as a catalyst for change.

In building assistive experiences across the customer decision journey, effective channel strategy is key. Tobias Wilson, VP of Growth, recently made this point clear to Campaign, where he advised brands whose strategies were affected by COVID-19 to “pivot in a way that makes sense. If the channels you’d invested effort in were no longer viable (such as out of home or in-person experiential, in this case), the worst thing you can do is just try to haphazardly replicate that activity online.”

This requires brands to not only look at digital channels they may know, like owned social feeds, but beyond what may have been previously thought possible, reaching audiences where they’re at in this moment. This need led MediaMonks, Reporters Without Borders and DDB to collaborate in building the Uncensored Library, a Minecraft map that users can explore to discover stories written by journalists who have been jailed, exiled or even killed for their work, even if censorship stops them from accessing such stories through other channels. Recognizing Minecraft as an increasingly important space for global youth to gather, socialize and exchange ideas, the virtual library demonstrates how far brands can go to actually connect audiences like never before.

We’ve long advocated for digital, user-centered strategies, which are even more critical as brands look for ways to connect with socially-isolated consumers. We find that customer obsessed organizations (which we explore in-depth in our latest report) are better set up to reimagine what these connections can look like and execute them swiftly.

“Astute brands seize the power of digital and flex it to their categories’ unique need profiles to build experiences of irreplaceable value,” according to Dipanjan Chatterjee, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester, et al., in the report, “Generate Brand Energy With Digital Experiences: Engage, Excite, And Entangle Your Customer.” Focusing on user needs is vital for brands that want to maintain and improve their connection with consumers. By reinforcing native user behaviors and aligning them with brand values in a creative way, brands can offer relevant solutions that build an emotional impact.

Improve Connections by Fostering Interactions

In today’s changed landscape, brands can no longer rely on face-to-face interactions with their customers. “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.”

Spotify has exhibited these moments of magic since its start, by receiving, connecting, and interacting diverse social and cultural inputs from thousands of channels and content. One such event is Spotify’s recent digital-native take on musical award ceremonies, including a livestream around the world and via TV broadcast, awarding winners across 57 different categories chosen by user-driven data.

In the months leading up to the ceremony, fans were encouraged to promote their favorite artists and music on social media to boost their chances of winning. “Knowing that their behavior could have a real impact became an incentive for fans to help their favorite artist win by consuming their music on Spotify, whether it was by listening to their tracks, adding them to playlists or following them on the platform,” explains Alejandro Ortiz-Izquierdo, Creative Director at Circus, which merged with MediaMonks in January 2020. 

Tasked by Spotify to build the visual identity surrounding the show, the creative team led by Ortiz-Izquierdo and Alberto Guerra, used a data-driven approach as inspiration. Its main motif was the polygon, designed by connecting the top five streaming cities in Mexico, the regional focus of the show, together. Other polygons took shape by connecting the top streaming cities for different artists, resulting in a series of unique shapes used to develop graphic materials for all communications. “After this, we launched a personalized campaign that focused on celebrating the power of the fans through the data that they generated on Spotify,” says Ortiz-Izquierdo. “From the get-go, there was a great response from the users, with a lot of excitement, engagement and involvement. When we launched the awards, people actually campaigned for their artists.”

Users’ excitement to engage highlights an important part of meeting consumers’ needs in impactful, new ways: operating with transparency. With a focus on user-generated data at every level of the award show’s planning and visual design, listeners understood how their actions made impact. And it drove results, too: “With the event, the number of conversions to premium users grew; new users, streams, and general behavior on the platform increased from the moment we launched the list of finalists,” says Daniela González, Head of Digital Strategy at Circus.

There Are No Borders, Your Playground is Digital

In a world defined by globalization, digital platforms allow users to connect, engage and share with people all over the world, irrespective of nationalities, languages, or cultures––and this, in turn, helps them define their own identities and the communities with which they seek to connect. 

If brands want to connect with their target audience, especially with Gen Z, it’s vital for them to remain aware of how communities are built and redefined. This includes understating the new ways that younger consumers reshape the ways they gather, build identity and engage with brands, which is the focus of a recent whitepaper from IMA, our influencer activation team.

Social channels, in particular, have allowed people from different backgrounds and across the world to connect in virtual spaces, where they can congregate with others who share their interests, beliefs and values. But to recognize these interests and what truly resonates with audiences spread across the CDJ, brands must improve their digital maturity through smarter investments in personalization.

“Social media has become a true melting pot, where everyone and everything fits; interests, similarities and differences in culture, ethnicity or gender, as well as attitudes, personalities and values. Making room for all users to feel at home within a massively globalized world,” says Bruno Lambertini, Founder and CEO of Circus. 

The rate of hyperadoption, in which consumers quickly develop new behaviors, has picked up at a critical time when meeting consumers’ needs across the customer decision journey has become table stakes for brands. By recognizing and rewarding such behaviors through relevant channel strategies, brands better position themselves to bring diverse audiences together online ––and across the world.

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.

It can be tough to adapt to the relentless pace of change in digital. From a need to meet and engage with customers on new channels to the rise of digitally native competitors, there are many ways that established, legacy brands can improve their digital maturity—and they might begin that process by taking inspiration from what’s worked with DTC brands in particular, whose close connection with consumers is arguably unmatched.

The secret? Adopt a challenger mindset. DTC brands have honed their digital prowess by necessity. Newer and lacking the big marketing budgets of legacy brands, they’ve shifted focus away from broad-reaching TV spots to instead focus on digital marketing. Through this practice, they’ve developed measurable marketing strategies that aid in discovery and are backed by data.

Shift Toward Data-Driven Messaging

“DTCs opt for targeted appeal over mass appeal (at least initially),” write Ryan Skinner and Sarah Dawson in the Forrester report, “Lessons In Customer Acquisition: Learn From DTC Disruptors’ Awareness Strategies.” “Only when DTC brands more firmly establish themselves do we see them branching out into more expensive channels like broadcast TV.”

Remco Vroom, Head of Business Growth and Platforms Solutions at MediaMonks, notes the role that experimentation has played in getting to know what resonates with their customers, helping them increase the effectiveness of communication through fresh content. “Brands can learn from them by getting to know their audiences better, getting a feel for them how they operate,” he says. “In this area, these smaller, digital-native companies aren’t afraid to try things out, producing hundreds of pieces of content to see what sticks, then taking those things that were successful and building more content.”

It’s a strategy that we’ve used with skincare brand Gladskin, enhancing the creative of their awareness campaign by mixing (and remixing) an initial set of assets, seeing how they performed with different segments. Depending on the performance, we tweaked the creative even further while also reassessing the media spend for those segments, incrementally zeroing in on the most effective and interested groups per each channel. The tactic provides a dependable way for budget- or resource-strapped brands to optimize creative and better understand their audience while avoiding the strain that even digital native brands may feel in a need to refresh branding and content at an increased rate.

Elevate Social’s Role in Your Marketing Strategy

The focus on the role of data above should drive one point home for brands that aim to take a page out of the DTC handbook: they must not treat social media as an afterthought. Instead, they must elevate the role of social media earlier in the planning cycle.

With a leaner and more agile approach, brands can strike close, one-to-one connections with consumers through smart use of data that leaves their audiences feeling heard. Yet bigger brands limit themselves by focusing their investment on traditional formats that focus on broadcast rather than the interactive elements of newer social channels like TikTok.

“Traditional formats like TVC or OOH are safe bets for the larger companies, because it’s something they’ve done for the past 20 years,” says Vroom. “They tend to put millions into these channels and pennies in social media, but that’s not substantial enough if one of your goals is to connect with your audience.”

There are a couple ways that brands can adopt a challenger mindset by upping their social strategy. One way brands can adopt a challenger mindset is by helping consumers see themselves in the brand by breaking down barriers between audience and what goes on behind the scenes. For example, our influencer activation team IMA worked with womenswear brand Noisy May to help the brand partner connect with six regional influencers, who each designed a series of products for a capsule collection titled #NoisyMayInfluenced. The influencers documented and shared every step of the design process, reaching their target audience in an authentic and community-driven way.

Consider Building Brand Passion by In-Housing

Not every brand is going to be so radical in breaking down the barriers between product development and their audience. But they can take initial steps to a greater strategic investment in social by building a task team dedicated to seeking the potential benefits of tapping into novel, new formats and user behaviors on social platforms, which Vroom compares to the trend of brands taking their creative in-house.

“If you want to be successful, you have to bring the message really close to you—which is key for new channels like that,” Vroom says. When brands give creative freedom to passionate teams like this, they can break free from tradition while still remaining true to their core values.

And that gets at the heart of what legacy brands must do to keep up with digitally mature brands: connect authentically with consumers where and when it matters most. Through adopting data practices that inform the creation and delivery of content to elevating social media within the marketing mix, brands can do more than just weather disruption from competition—they can cut become challengers in their own right.

If there’s ever a place that teaches you how decision-making requires careful planning and data, it might as well be Vegas—no one wants to press their luck with a blind bet. This week, marketers and leadership from brands both big and small descended upon the city for Adobe Summit 2019, a three-day conference dedicated to providing best-in-class customer experiences by leveraging consumer data.

The summit kicked off with a slew of new features announced for the Adobe Experience Cloud that allow brands to better understand their customers and make decisions backed by user data. In Adobe Analytics Cloud, for example, organizations will now receive real-time customer data—both known and anonymous—to activate profiles across channels throughout the customer journey (including offline). Unveiling the integration of its Magento and Marketo acquisitions, another major theme touted at the conference was a focus on “business to everyone” (B2E) marketing, a trend in which personalization and customer experience will be critical to success.

Ask anyone at the conference what the prevailing, over-arching theme of the sessions has been and they’ll likely say that it’s customer obsession. The focus on customer experience has been so strong as of late that Adobe’s Senior & Strategic Editor for Enterprise Thought Leadership calls it “Digital Transformation 2.0,” and key leadership from Fortune 500 shared how they use data to cultivate strong relationships with their customers (find out what some of them had to say below). The message is clear: with front-end customer experience as a key differentiator, organizations of all sizes must use data smartly and responsibly to maintain relevancy with consumers.

Brands Must Rethink How They Engage with Customers

The brands that lead in customer experience set their sights beyond just product; instead, they seek to provide services that enhance users’ relationships with the brand or its products. When Best Buy faced intense competition with Amazon, for example, the electronics retailer shifted its focus. “We are not in the business of selling products or doing transactions with you,” Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly told the conference audience. “Our purpose is to enrich lives with the help of technology.”

Best Buy now offers several services to help customers along the user journey both in and out of brick-and-mortar stores, but perhaps most interesting is its Tech Advisors service, which provides free, in-home consultations to prospective customers. In a visit, Best Buy’s tech experts hear out customers’ needs and provide advice, whether it be product recommendations or even entire home media setup plans. There’s no commitment to purchase, providing real value to customers without pressure to buy.

This focus doesn’t just help build a relationship with customers; it also anticipates how emerging tech will further prompt brands to seek out new opportunities informed by data. Internet of Things devices, for example, are growing in popularity—and may rapidly proliferate after mass adoption of 5G connections. As the digital ecosystems in consumers’ homes become more complex, so will customers’ questions about them. Such a service will certainly prove useful for helping homeowners get connected and understand how the technology available can improve their lives; likewise, brands should continually seek out the potential of emerging tech to provide new, personalized experiences that build equity and help connect to consumer need.

Provide Value by Using Data Responsibly

Providing this level of personalized service digitally requires a sophisticated understanding of user preferences on an individual level—and that requires smart use of data. Unfortunately, a big challenge that brands face in producing insights-driven content is that their data is often siloed, or there’s simply too much of it to organize or draw conclusions from. “Overcoming organizational and data silos is key to putting customers at the center of your digital business and delivering a leading experience,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the summit. By breaking down internal barriers and pulling together stakeholders across an organization, a more holistic view of customers’ engagement with a brand across the customer journey emerges.

Another key takeaway from the conference is that the use of data must come from a place of empathy and transparency. While explaining his vision for innovation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posed an important question for brand leaders: “What is the real source of inspiration, the necessary conditions to get your strategy and products? One is a sense of purpose and the other is culture.”

Taking those words to heart, businesses seeking to retain and unlock user data must do so with a sense of purpose and a desire to improve lives. “People want to be heard, not overheard,” said MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar. There’s a lot of consumer unease around collection of data, “which stems from approaching data without empathy,” says ter Haar. “If organizations implemented solutions informed by the empathetic use of data, they’d be far more successful and not creep people out.”

The sky’s the limit with insights-driven content.

Here’s what that level of transparency looks like: when we worked with creative agency GSD&M to redesign the US Air Force website, the platform simply asked readers their gender, education/professional level and goals. The page informs users that their experience with the site is be custom-built from this information, explaining the up-front use and value of the data. The website is powered by Adobe Creative Cloud and dynamically surfaces up content based on readers’ activity, helping them envision what to expect from a military career and how it can help them achieve their professional goals. The result is a website that provides a highly personalized experience populated with relevant content—without asking readers to blindly hand over sensitive or personal data.

It all boils down to trust: “While personalization cannot happen without data and intelligence,” Narayen told his audience, “it should not happen without trust and transparency.” As brands seek to build deeper relationships with their consumers, brands must not only leverage data smarter, but also more responsibly. Used in this way, organizations have the tools in place they need to connect with consumers through value-based, personalized and insight-driven content.