The imperative to keep up digitally is felt by many, though the challenge is especially felt by museums under pressure to infuse their collections with cultural relevance for their patrons. In aiming to make a historic event more tangible or a culture more understood, digital media offers museums and cultural institutions an excellent opportunity to reconsider how they will continue to inspire the visitors of tomorrow.

Few institutions have the built-in relevance to contemporary pop culture than the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which honors the music genre’s most iconic and influential artists, both past and present (and just recently announced its inductees for 2020). Just in time for its new honorees, the Hall of Fame unveiled the fruit of its own reimagined efforts, made in collaboration with MediaMonks: a complete overhaul of its website, which now offers a bold, impactful visual style that complements the forward-thinking acts and artists to whom the museum pays tribute.

Drive Innovation with Purpose

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s mission is “to engage, teach and inspire through the power of rock & roll.” The new website delivers on this promise through a content-heavy theme that brings artifacts from the museum’s collection to life through scans and images. This way, users can preview what the museum has to offer before they visit—or can enjoy bits from the collection even if they’re unable to make a trip.

“The artifacts enhance the discovery phase and tease the collection,” says Brook Downton, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. Users find this content strung across more than 300 Hall of Fame Inductee biography pages, which lend each artifact context and meaning. The biographies are also linked contextually; for example, each page invites you to explore other artists inducted in the same year or that are particularly relevant or influential.

On one hand, this encourages users to explore and browse through the Hall of Fame’s website much like they would wander around the museum itself—balancing a sense of aimless browsing with meaningful curation. “We bring the user into rabbit holes from one artist to another,” says Downton. “It’s a website where you can spend an hour, rather than just five minutes.”

This web of interconnected artists also enables a more personalized experience by making it easier for visitors to find and discover items they’d most like to see. Museums can be overwhelming, after all, but a data-driven user journey can help users not only find the most relevant exhibits, but also discover something entirely new. “Museums are a reflection of humanity and society, of art and movements,” says Downton. “With digital, museums can make the experience for patrons much more accessible and personalized.”

Build Efficiency to Build Momentum

So, how does one not only embark on such a transformation, but actually sustain it from concept to market? One of the biggest pain points that hinders a project of this scale is time, making it difficult for brands to continue their efforts to achieve long-term goals.

Noting that CMOs historically don’t last more than a few years in their role, Forrester Senior Analyst Tina Moffett writes in her report “Marketers, Stop Sacrificing Long-Term Goals for Short-Term Wins” that “This revolving door makes it difficult to execute long-term marketing strategies, especially ones that depend on data-driven insights that take six months to a year to measure.”

A digital revolution is a lengthy process—so much so that it’s ever-evolving and never complete. There’s the need to transition away from legacy systems, invest in new skillsets and measure whether the transformation has even been effective. To meet success in these efforts, brands must carry momentum throughout a multi-phase process on the path to success.

That’s why we begin with a laser focus on delivering fast results that fuel investment in long-term goals. For the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, for example, we began by transforming the look of microsite that allows fans to cast their vote for new Inductees—an important, annual activation that drives fan participation and renews public interest in the museum year after year. This smaller-scale transformation gives us (and brands) the chance to take our learnings and apply them to the main project once completed.

Honoring the Past, Looking to the Future

As you develop a project, continually look for new opportunities to improve the total brand experience. For museums, this means extending focus beyond the website and what role it plays in ultimately getting visitors through the door. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame achieved this by offering a series of curated, self-guided tours on its website, though future plans include a feature that will let users build unique, personalized tours based on their favorite artists. Such features not only inform patrons of what they will see before they visit, but also functions as a tool to help them truly connect with what the museum has to offer.

Best-in-class digital design offers incredible opportunities for any brand to build impactful experiences, whether it be through social media-inspired navigation as described above or simply a remarkably designed website. This is especially true for cultural institutions with a mission to educate patrons and provide access to cultural artifacts—offering new ways to infuse relevance in a shared cultural heritage.

Discover new ways to engage audiences digitally.

Muchas marcas se preocupan sobre cómo producir contenido escalable y de calidad a un ritmo cada vez más rápido. El reto para alcanzar esto es doble. Primero, las marcas requieren la habilidad de producir un enorme volumen de contenido para ajustar sus mensajes a segmentos específicos de su audiencia. Segundo, producir este contenido generalmente requiere navegar por varios actores y proveedores en diferentes mercados, cada uno con sus propios requerimientos o una comprensión diferente de su audiencia.

En mi tiempo en MediaMonks, hemos ayudado a clientes a conectarse a los recursos y el talento que necesitan para mantenerse relevantes. Pero de vez en cuando se presenta una situación única que reta a todos los involucrados, llevándonos a ir más allá para encontrar formas para lograr una mayor creatividad, más rápido.

Identificando una Oportunidad para la Eficiencia

Recientemente, trabajamos con una marca automotriz global y su agencia especializada para desarrollar y animar anuncios de banner dinámicos con 15 variaciones, que se escalarían con cada fase sucesiva de la campaña. Nos esforzamos al máximo y enviamos los entregables para su revisión.

Pero había un problema: uno de los mercados requería un descargo de responsabilidad legal en los banners, cosa que no se había mencionado antes. Ésta es una situación común para las marcas globales en especial, cuyas oficinas regionales tienen sus propias regulaciones y requerimiento legales únicos. Aún así, deben alcanzar estándares globales de marca. Este cuidadoso balance entre la relevancia del mercado local y la consistencia global de la marca a veces hace difícil poner a todos en la misma página, como fue en el caso de este proyecto.

Con éxito, trabajamos de nuevo los entregables, pero la falla de comunicación dio como resultado un mayor tiempo de entrega, lo que no fue una solución ideal para la agencia o el cliente. ¡Y esta situación salió de sólo 15 variaciones! Viendo el potencial de la creatividad dinámica, el cliente decidió aumentar a… más de 65,000 variaciones, en 8 mercados e idiomas. Se volvió claro que necesitábamos hacer un cambio para ajustarnos a este enorme salto.

Este escenario le resultará muy familiar a muchas marcas, especialmente teniendo en cuenta el panorama de socios cada vez más fracturado. En este caso, el principal problema no eran nuestros clientes, sino la comunicación y los métodos de entrega con los que colaboró cada interesado. Esto nos inspiró para desarrollar una plataforma CMS dedicada que que empoderaría al cliente para crear, revisar y aprobar banners ellos mismos, trabajando más eficientemente en el proceso. 

Equilibrando los objetivos de las partes interesadas para una colaboración más saludable

¿Hizo este movimiento que nuestro papel en el proyecto se volviera obsoleto? No realmente, incluso como proveedores, la promesa de una asociación no es un servicio del que les contamos a los clientes en las juntas de ventas; es un concepto que nos ayuda a producir mejor trabajo de mejor calidad, más rápido. Al implementar el CMS, lo logramos al cambiar de manera efectiva nuestro sombrero de creador de banners por uno de construcción de plataformas, devolviendo el control de la producción a nuestros clientes.

Al desarrollar esta nueva plataforma, nuestro gran equipo de medios continuó apoyando las continuas peticiones del cliente, mientras que el equipo de plataformas trabajó en los requerimientos de activos y diseñando el mejor flujo para la entrega. A lo largo de nuestra participación en sus campañas, logramos un claro entendimiento de cómo trabajaba el cliente, y cómo podríamos aplicar esos conocimientos para construir una experiencia de usuario fluida en la plataforma. El proceso tradicional de producción requería colaboración cercana entre los participantes: los creadores de banner, revisión del cliente y de la agencia de medios. Nuestra plataforma buscó optimizar estos pasos en una serie de tareas de baja complejidad que no eran sólo más rápidas, sino más económicas.

Un nuevo panorama de socios permite mejores métodos de producción

Para satisfacer la necesidad crítica para contenido permanente y diverso, el socio correcto debe adaptarse a problemas de producción al momento en que se presentan al implementar soluciones creativas. Sin poder recurrir a una amplia experiencia en el diseño y la ejecución de plataformas, probablemente no hubiéramos tenido tanto éxito en hacer ese giro.

Es importante que las marcas tengan las herramientas y los recursos que necesiten para retener mayor control sobre la producción creativa, especialmente cuando tantas marcas buscan tener su creatividad internamente de la forma más eficiente posible. El viejo adagio de “Si le enseñas a un hombre a pescar…” aplica aquí, y esta plataforma sirve como un pequeño paso dentro de una iniciativa más grande para que nuestro cliente construya sus habilidades de forma interna.

Nuestra plataforma, que creció de forma orgánica de la necesidad específica de un cliente, está hecha a la medida para apoyar el flujo de trabajo particular del cliente. Por ejemplo, estamos trabajando para añadir la opción de comentarios y etiquetado para aumentar la forma en que nos comunicamos con el equipo de creación de banners. Esto muestra cómo un socio ágil puede proporcionar a las marcas las herramientas que necesitan para cambiar de marcha y obtener su red de proveedores en la misma página. Tropezar con una necesidad inesperada que desafía las formas habituales de trabajo puede convertirse en una tarea desalentadora, pero con el talento y las herramientas adecuadas, las marcas pueden activar nuevas soluciones con facilidad.

¿Interesado en saber cómo se asocia MediaMonks con nuestros clientes de LatAm o de México?

Many brands worry about how to produce top-quality, scalable content at an ever-quickening pace. The challenge in achieving this is two-fold. First, brands require the ability to produce a staggering volume of content to tailor their messaging to specific segments of their audience. Second, producing this content often requires navigating through several parties and vendors across markets—each with their own particular requirements or nuanced understanding of their audience.

In my time at MediaMonks, we’ve helped clients plug into the resources and talent they need to remain relevant. But every so often a unique situation comes along that challenges all stakeholders involved, pushing us to go further in finding ways to achieve better creative, faster.

Identifying an Opportunity for Efficiency

Recently, we worked with a global automotive brand and their dedicated agency to develop and animate dynamic banner ads across three of their markets. The brief was simple enough on paper: animate banners with 15 variations, which would scale up with each successive phase of the campaign. We put our nose to the grind and sent the deliverables off for review.

But there was a snag: one market required a legal disclaimer on the banners, which hadn’t been mentioned beforehand. This is a common situation for global brands in particular, whose regional offices have their own guidelines and unique legal requirements. Still, they must meet global brand standards. This careful balancing act between local market relevance and global brand consistency often makes it difficult to gather everyone on the same page, just as it had with this project.

We successfully reworked the deliverables, but the miscommunication resulted in a longer time to delivery—not an ideal solution for the agency or their client. And this situation arose just from 15 variations! Seeing the potential of dynamic creative, the client decided to ramp up to… over 65,000 variations, across 8 markets and languages. It became obvious that we needed to make a change to accommodate such a massive jump.

This scenario may sound all too familiar to many brands, especially given the increasingly fractured partner landscape. In this case, the primary problem wasn’t our clients, but the communication and delivery methods through which each stakeholder collaborated. This inspired us to instead develop a dedicated CMS platform that would empower the client to create, review and approve banners by themselves, working more efficiently in the process.

Balancing Stakeholder Goals for Healthier Collaboration

Didn’t this move make our role in the project obsolete? Not really—even as vendors, the promise of partnership isn’t lip service that we tell clients in sales meetings; it’s a concept that helps us produce work better quality of work, faster. In implementing the CMS, we achieved this by effectively trading in our banner-builder hat for a platform-building one, giving control of production back to our clients.

In developing the new platform, our rich media team continued supporting the client’s ongoing requests, while the platforms team worked out the asset requirements and designing the best flow for their delivery. Throughout our involvement with their campaigns, we gained a clear understanding of how the client worked, and could apply those insights to build a frictionless user experience on the platform. The traditional production process involved close collaboration among all stakeholders: the banner creators, review from the client and the media agency. Our platform sought to streamline these steps into a series of low-complexity tasks that were not only faster, but cost-effective.

A New Partner Landscape Enables Better Production Methods

To meet the critical need for diverse and always-on content, the right partner must be able to adapt to production problems the moment they arise by implementing creative solutions. Without being able to draw upon extensive experience in designing and executing platforms, we likely wouldn’t have been as successful in making such a pivot.

It’s important that brands have the tools and resources they need to retain greater control over creative production—especially when so many brands seek to take their creative in-house as efficiently as possible. The old adage of “If you teach a man to fish…” certainly applies here, and this platform serves as one small step within a greater initiative for our client to build up their  capabilities in-house.

Grown organically from a specific client need, our platform is tailor-made to support the client’s unique workflow. For example, we’re working toward adding commenting and tagging features to augment the way we communicate to the team in banner creation. It goes to show how a nimble partner can provide brands with the tools they need to shift gears and get their network of vendors on the same page.  Stumbling upon an unexpected need that challenges habitual ways of working can become a daunting task—but with the right talent and tools, brands can activate new solutions with ease.