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.

As consumer needs change, so do business strategies. Realizing the importance of purposeful, personalized digital experiences to their audiences, future-thinking B2B brands have seek to engage their audiences in new ways, humanizing their brand stories in the process.

In essence, this means adopting a “business to human” approach through customer-driven digital experiences. Today’s B2B customers expect an experience that is similar to the shopping they do in their personal lives. “The B2H model involves maintaining coherence while extending your offering across context and environments, and being able to break down your brand’s message into personalized variations that are relevant to a myriad of customer interests,” explains Remco Vroom (Global Head of Business, Platforms and Ecommerce, MediaMonks) and Tobias Wilson (VP Growth APAC, MediaMonks) over at Marketing Interactive.

Even with traditional production hampered by social distancing, brands can still achieve the above through more personalized, customer-driven digital experiences. Powered by CGI content, virtual demos and influencer validation, these small experiences are relatively easy for brands to begin building and offer the opportunity to plug into larger content strategies—here’s how.

Build Tactile Brand Stories Through Interactive Experiences

In B2B services, there exists a gap in delivering interactive, branded digital content that provides potential customers with the information they need to make informed purchases. According to data from Bizfeel, more than half of consumers say that the biggest drawback to shopping online is the inability to touch, feel or try a product. Without being able to try a product themselves, they turn to other avenues: 80% of business decision-makers look toward articles rather than ads for brand information.

These findings highlight a big need for brands to own their brand storytelling through interactive content that provides a good “feel experience”—a tactile experience that immerses the audience—and differentiates the brand by showcasing product features and stories. A gorgeous example is the Blue Canyon Technologies website, which features 3D graphics developed by MediaMonks. Each 3D model portrays a product in the company’s fleet of spacecraft as well as the specific components that set them apart. Visitors are invited to click on these features to learn more about them in depth, demystifying the technology against the backdrop of deep space.

CGI Content Enables Scale

B2B brand stories are powerful because they help customers better understand processes that might seem complex and abstract. To help build awareness and understanding of the HP Indigo Digital Press—an industrial printer differentiated by a unique component that allows for shorter runs—we used an existing set of CAD designs to develop a fluidly animated CGI walkthrough of its inner workings.

“When you’re looking at presses this big and complicated, you can’t move around them or look inside very easily,” says Chris Bryne, Global Program Director at MediaMonks. “It’s a way of letting people see under the hood.”

The use of renderings to produce the video also came out of a particular constraint: the product wasn’t yet manufactured, which meant there was no physical product yet to film. Today, as so many brands are experimenting with new ways to produce content while social distancing, CGI serves as an excellent example of how to tell a compelling brand story through video without a traditional shoot.

“CG assets are easy to update if features change or things are replaced,” says Byrne, noting that the technology is economical for scaling up and retailoring to other formats, too. “Experiences like these result in extra assets you can use to power different experiences across platforms.”

For example, following a video walkthrough, brands might want to add greater tangibility and intuitiveness by crafting an interactive demo with those assets, tying it into a larger customer obsession strategy. For HP, we built on the video offering by adding a WebGL demo that lets users get up close and personal with the LEPx technology that powers the Indigo printer. This way, users gain a tangible understanding of the product specifications through discovery.

Validate Your Brand Story Through Influencers

When you consider tailoring a B2H story to other platforms, don’t forget another strategy that’s risen to much fanfare in the B2C world: influencer marketing. Yes, influencer marketing does have a place in the professional world, too; in fact, 91% of B2B transactions are influenced by word of mouth.

Influencer strategies can plug into customer advocacy (lending legitimacy through success stories), employee advocacy (adding relatability through employees’ experiences) and expert advocacy. The latter includes the thought leaders and industry experts who lend credence and validation to a product or service.

Each of those strategies fit within different channels, whether you intend to raise awareness or support audiences in the consideration stage—for example, validating the decisions that customers have made. On this note, Byrne cautions that before brands get too far into establishing what kind of content their audiences need, they must first consider where those audiences fit within the customer decision journey. “Focusing on awareness or conversion gives your content a very different purpose.”

Purpose is key to delivering on the needs of your B2B audience. Whether it’s authentically relating with your audience via influencers or scaling up virtual product demoes through CGI content, seek ways to humanize your brand story by injecting interactivity through unique, personalized digital experiences.

It’s time to go Business to Human.

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.

As the world’s largest and arguably most influential tech trade show, you know we wouldn’t pass up the chance to visit CES this year—and this time we brought the whole family along, including our programmatic sister company MightyHive and parent company S4Capital. At the dawn of a new decade, this year’s CES placed industries at a crossroads, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that stand before them.

CES has become so big in recent years that it’s also sparked its fair share of side events, including C Space: Marketing and Advertising (devoted to disruptive trends that shape consumer behavior and advertising media) and the Brand Innovators’ Mega-Trends summit. MediaMonks had a presence at both events throughout the week, with S4Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell calling Brand Innovators “a CES within CES,” noting its more intimate feel. Below, let’s dive into some of the insights that surfaced across these events.

The Rise of the Challenger Mindset

At the start of the new year, MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar gave Brand Innovators some choice advice: “Adapt quickly, or you risk being left behind. Marketers need to stay constantly curious, take thoughtful risks and scale fast, as the pace of technology and innovation will not slow down anytime soon.”

Speaking of marketers’ role in envisioning the tech-infused brand experience, Silke Meixner (Partner, Digital Business Strategy at IBM Global Business Services) noted how “As MediaMonks thinks about putting emotion into the brand as a partner, marketers need to, too,” mentioning how AR presents an opportunity to achieve that.

Whether being more purposeful in adopting a challenger mindset, raising relevance with the aid of new partner models, or building value in emotion-driven experiences, this year’s CES offered ample opportunities for brands to build stronger connections with consumers through tech. As they embark on a new decade, the discussions at CES look optimistic for brands—and we can’t wait to help refine their big ideas and bring them to life.

It’s a mentality shared by Mitsubishi’s VP and CMO Kimberly Gardiner, who looks outside of her industry for learnings and inspiration. In conversation with Nick Fuller (SVP, Growth at MediaMonks) in a fireside chat at the Brand Innovators summit, she said, “We don’t look at auto competitors for inspiration—we look at DTC companies. We want to be a brand that challenges convention.”

This challenger approach has helped Mitsubishi—which enjoyed its second year in a row as the fastest Asian-owned auto brand—zero in on a dedicated audience. “We can’t outspend our competition, so we focus on a narrow, focused audience,” Gardiner said. “We want to target people that aren’t like everyone else.”

In his own fireside chat shared with MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar, Sir Martin also embraced the disruptive, challenger mindset by building a connection between S4Capital’s mission and Burning Man. “Burning Man reflects creative disruption—it’s about creating something and destroying it every year,” he said.

Achieving Growth and Personalization at Speed and Scale

For brands to successfully challenge conventions and adapt to the quickening pace of technological innovation, they must have the capabilities in place to scale up or pivot with speed. This is especially important given the rise of consumer hyperadoption, or the speed at which consumer behaviors shift, and further challenges traditional metrics of success.

At the S4Capital Storytelling Session at C Space, moderated by Marta Martinez (Director of Google Marketing Platforms), S4 leadership met to discuss some of the reigning challenges and opportunities that brands face while moving into the new decade. Louise Martens, Global Head of Embedded Production at MediaMonks, mentioned how the uptick in social conversation and tech adoption has quickened the pace at which brands must deliver.

“In the past, you may have had four big moments in the year, but now marketers have to turn around thousands of thousands of assets across formats and channels.” The solution? New partner models that satiate brands’ need for speed and scale: “That pressure on organizations has sparked new models like co-location, in housing and embedding.”

And as digital platforms become increasingly saturated, ownership and implementation of data become critical to success. “To win, brands must look at their ecosystem: measure it, test it and feed that data back inside to the creative,” says Martens.

Noting that personalization is table stakes in 2020, MightyHive CEO Pete Kim also mentioned the battle for first-party data and integrating it more closely with a brand’s creative strategy. “I hope to see continued progress as we forge the processes of the future—putting the right message and the right creative in front of the right person at scale.”

Recognizing Value in Emerging Tech

The showroom floor at CES offers its fair share of hits and misses, which presents brands with a sober reminder to ensure their investment in new and emerging tech provides real value, both to the business and consumers alike. Olivier Koelemij, Managing Director of MediaMonks LA, participated in a panel as part of the Digital Hollywood track at CES that sought to highlight the value that one such technology—augmented reality—can offer to brands. Titled “The Augmented/Mixed Reality Experience,” the panel included industry experts such as Magic Leap, Microsoft, IBM Global Business Services and more.

One of the key challenges to mixed reality that the group highlighted, perhaps counter-intuitively, is its fast-growing maturity. While tech leaps have made it easier to design and implement impressive digital experiences—take Depth API’s addition to ARCore, for example—they also raise the bar on what a truly assistive, value-added experience looks like. For brands at a lower digital maturity, the panel highlighted the role that partnerships can play in homing in on that value factor and bringing ideas into reality.

“There are many ways to define value,” says Koelemij. He discussed the Dark Knight Dive, a 4D VR experience that lets users “fly” through a virtual Gotham City while suspended in a skydiving wind tunnel, as a best-in-class example of what brands can achieve when going big on extended reality. “With this project, we were able to connect AT&T with the Batman IP that they’d recently acquired, and the press was all over it. Marketers must think about how they measure and define success.”

Adobe MAX came and went this week in LA, bringing creative professionals together with hundreds of sessions, workshops and talks. Aiming to inspire the current and next generation of creatives, the event offered rousing insights into the state of creativity today—and opportunities that artists, entertainers and brands alike can look forward to in the near future, including the next stage in storytelling defined by MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar, who presented at the event.

The conference began with Adobe unveiling a slew of new product updates and features, each bringing the company closer to its vision of enabling “Creativity for all,” which served as a bit of a rallying cry at the event. These announcements included Photoshop Camera, which uses machine learning to offer advanced photo filters and quick, intuitive editing; Premiere Rush, which notably lets users create and share out content to creative social platform TikTok; Adobe Aero, which lets anyone develop AR experiences without coding knowledge; and much more.

One of the biggest conferences on creativity, this year’s Adobe MAX offered much to think about in terms of identity, voice and emotionally resonant experiences. As Adobe aims to unlock creativity for everyone, it will become even more essential that brands differentiate by building emotional resonance through the experiences they offer.

At the heart of software like Photoshop Camera is Adobe Sensei, the company’s decidedly not-very-humanlike assistant. At a time when many have concerns over how AI will influence professional (and creative) life, Adobe markets Sensei as simply a tool that helps humans focus on what only they can do: be creative, with Sensei handling the manual processes that function as a barrier to that. But when everyone has advanced creative tools at their fingertips, what does it take to stand out? We’ve extracted a handful of key creative insights from the course of the event.

Know Your Message and What You Stand For

Of course, being a conference centered on creativity, Adobe MAX featured several voices from the world of arts and entertainment. While their insights were delivered to an audience of creatives and designers, a lot of what they had to say serves as good advice for business, too—after all, being an artist in the modern world requires a bit of an entrepreneurial edge.

Visual artist Shantell Martin opened day two’s keynote segment with an inspiring talk about stylistic voice and identity. “You have to make people care for you by caring for yourself first,” she told the audience. Further in her talk, she noted that “You don’t discover your style, you extract it.”

The advice applies well to brands still defining a sense of purpose. For anyone to adopt your brand—and to truly differentiate it—you must first have a good hold on what its purpose is and what you stand for. This also makes it useful to consider how that purpose might resonate differently with different audiences. Digital-native brands in particular have succeeded in this by defining themselves out of a specific need or white space, then leveraging digital channels to align with consumers through that shared sense of purpose.

Take Comfort in Discomfort

Earlier in the conference, illustrator Lisa Congdon offered her own excellent advice on artist voice: “[Finding your voice is] both an exercise in discipline and process of discovery that allows for—and requires—loads of experimentation and failure.” While that’s certainly true for brand voice, it also applies to the innovation imperative.

Innovation requires you not only understand what your brand aims to achieve, but also have an intimate understanding of your audience and how they interact. In an age of hyperadoption, real innovation comes from evolving your brand experience in lockstep with user behaviors and continual experimentation. Congdon recommends that creatives adopt a learner’s mindset that’s open to risks and embraces discomfort—an attitude that not only fosters a creative environment but can also kickstart more agile ways of working.

Open a New Chapter in the Story of Storytelling

All of the above boils down to ensuring your message truly resonates with your audience. Throughout history, humans have used the power of narrative and storytelling to achieve this, but interactive digital culture has upended the storytelling norms that had traditionally prevailed. In an on-stage interview with Jason Levine, Principal Worldwide Evangelist for Adobe Creative Cloud, famed director M. Night Shyamalan remarked that “Everything in today’s society goes back to storytelling. Right now, we’re split between fighting for the old story, and fighting for the new story. It’s time to bring in the new story.”

What does that new story look like? That’s what Wesley ter Haar aimed to define in his talk, “Augmented Creativity: Emerging Platforms that Drive the Next Generation of Storytelling.” Ter Haar railed against the variations of storytelling that frequently pop up at conferences—like “storydoing” or “storymaking”—by noting that each still relies on the same form of linear narrative that today’s marketeers should break away from. “We’ve taken what is this amazing medium for creativity and innovation—the web, the internet or what we now call digital—but we’ve made it about traditional linear formats,” he says.

Netflix’s Bandersnatch might have brought interactive film to the masses last year, for instance, but it was hardly groundbreaking or immersive compared to what’s come before it; video games had already explored what ter Haar calls the “interrupt to interact” narrative model for decades, and we’ve moved away from truly personalized experiences enabled by an API-driven open web. And when it comes to personalization as it’s commonly used, says ter Haar, “There’s a lot of engineering, but very little empathy.”

In a new era of ecosystems and total brand experience, ter Haar calls for a new definition of storytelling: “A journey focused on the user that creates a personal path, driven by design and distinction, powered by innovation.” And these stories should show no end, either: “Digital storytelling is more input-based, trying to get the next ‘yes, and…’ moment,” says ter Haar, noting how each piece of content ideally leads into the next step within a content ecosystem. To offer stories that truly resonate, brands must use storytelling to bridge together creative and media. This requires breaking away from big ideas that function like film, and instead drive impact by recognizing user behaviors and shifting toward an insight-driven focus on the customer experience.

This week, we’re celebrating the birthday of the banner ad, which just turned 25 on October 27. Love them or hate them, banner ads have become a mainstay of the web browsing experience, lining web pages across devices and even showing up within mobile games—but they didn’t always have the ubiquitous digital presence that they enjoy today.

25 years ago, AT&T bought space on HotWired (which became the Wired magazine we know today), to offer a cheeky—if not a bit threatening, in hindsight—banner ad asking, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? YOU WILL.” It’s unlikely that a modern, internet-savvy consumer would be tempted to follow through on the message it pushed, but its novelty at the time resulted in an impressive click-through rate of 44%.

Now, we know that today’s users may not be as excited about banner ads as us (we are Google’s first Global Certified Marketing Partner for DoubleClick, after all). To us, banner ads are a bit misunderstood, their image tainted by annoying banners and low-quality work when they were treated largely as an afterthought by creatives. So, what is the state of the banner ad today, and where do its opportunities lie in its maturity? Grab a glass of champagne while we extol our love for the internet’s most ubiquitous format.

Diving Deep into Data

The banner ads of yore may have felt invasive and interrupting, but technology today enables banner ads to better blend in or add value to the user through personalization. The role of programmatic and data have catapulted the simple format into a cog within complex marketing engines that enable brands to learn more about their audiences and tailor content effectively.

“These days, everything is bought in a programmatic way, where ads are serviced to specific users on many different sites,” says Andre Rood, Global Advertising Director at MediaMonks. “That’s why banners have gotten progressively more interesting: the ability to target specific users has improved tremendously, and the metrics—with the ability to measure response and effectivity—have as well.”

In essence, a programmatic landscape has encouraged marketers to look beyond just a click-through rate to measure ad performance and effectiveness, allowing new opportunities to make their content more contextual and useful to consumers. Through continuous optimization of their display ads, brands can achieve a greater value on their ad spend, not to mention a closer understanding of their audience as metrics roll in. Whether employing dynamic assets or manually tweaking assets to respond to data, brands can pinpoint the perfect permutations of imagery, layout and copy in their assets to appeal to audiences through personalization.

Banners Become Truly Interactive

The historic conception of the banner ad—a strip or box of pixels demanding users to view and click—might not seem so exciting today, but today’s banner ads are no longer limited to that definition. Take Google Swirl ads, for example: this innovative, mobile-exclusive ad format features an interactive 3D model that users can touch and rotate to inspect a featured product from any angle—and opening up new moments for storytelling in the process.

Swirl ads are emblematic of the new modes of interaction made possible by mobile. “People are spending less and less time on their computers and more on their phones, so while traditional banners aren’t going anywhere, there’s also new avenues to explore in the mobile space,” says Tommy Lacoste, Senior Project Manager at MediaMonks. Lacoste, whose expertise is in assets that extend beyond the typical banner ad, has worked closely on developing these 3D, interactive banners. “While they’re technically still banner ads, consider them to be the next step,” he says.

What’s impressive about Swirl ads aren’t just their interactivity, but also their mobile friendliness by being so lightweight compared to the rich media that has come before it. “Improvements in cell phone processing power as well as network speed have been imperative in making this a possibility,” says Lacoste, “And by using our and Google’s proprietary tech, we’ve been able to make the 3D files actually smaller than videos.” By comparison, video banner ads hadn’t caught on at the introduction of HTML5 because they were too heavy to provide a comfortable user experience for many.

Facing the Future of the Banner Ad

As we celebrate the history of the humble banner ad and explore recent innovations in the format, what can we look forward to on the horizon? It might be an even more immersive iteration of how users can learn about products and services, much like Swirl. “Imagine the following: you see an ad for, let’s say a coffee maker, on your phone,” says Rood. “You press it, and suddenly you can place the coffee maker in your own home using advanced augmented reality, seeing how it would look on your kitchen counter. I think that’s the next step.”

In fact, even that might soon be a reality. Facebook recently opened new interactive formats for all advertisers, including ads that allow users to try on products through AR. The display ads are a natural fit for products worn on the face (glasses, makeup) thanks to the selfie focus of Facebook’s Camera Effects lenses, but invite users to imagine what could be done with more advanced augmented reality.

“Within the framework of a banner ad being ‘a visual advertisement on the internet that you can click on’–which includes pre-roll video ads, ads on social, etc.–there’s just a world of possibilities nowadays, and it continues to grow,” says Rood. He’s right: as banner ads become more advanced, users may begin to think of them as desirable digital experiences and content in their own right. In this respect, the future of the banner ad looks good.

Take your banners to the next level with data.

Hosted this week in Cologne, Germany, the DMEXCO conference examined the challenges in advertising through its theme, “Trust in You.” This subject is multilayered and holistic, focused on instilling trust between consumers and brands, between brands and their partners and regaining trust in digital technology’s benefits to society overall.

Trust is earned, and brands know they can’t take it for granted—what’s built up over months or even years can vanish overnight. With consumers’ scrutinizing how data is handled more now than ever before, these growing tensions highlight an imperative for brands and agencies alike in a new era of advertising: establish new partnerships that are equipped to recognize and react to shifting consumer priorities at speed in a way that provides value to consumers.

Responding to Shifts in Consumer Expectations

One of the greatest paradoxes in advertising is that consumers expect and desire highly relevant, tailored creative that fits within the context of their lives and everyday activities—but at the same time, there’s a mistrust around the use of data that powers these experiences. Earlier this year, MediaMonks founder and COO Wesley ter Haar spoke to Ad Age about where data falters and where it thrives. “Personalization that makes sense and adds value is super powerful: think a handwritten card, knowing my name or my order at a restaurant,” he said. “In the digital space we’ve become resistant to it, perhaps because it needs to show some empathy instead of this relentless data mining.”

Instilling trust in consumers amounts to making a clear value exchange, often playing off contextual triggers that infer what a user is trying to achieve. In their talk “Making the Web Work for Everyone in a Privacy First World” at DMEXCO, Googlers Matt Brittin (President EMEA Business and Operations) and Emily Henderson (Head of Media) gave an insightful look at how Google hopes to build trust through offering personalized experiences by using as little data as possible. 

In fact, their example used no personalized data: by working with the Guardian to tag the newspaper’s recipes with contextual information, including what ingredients they call for, what time of day they’re most likely to be made and eaten, and frustration level based on how long it takes to make each dish. Knowing that cooking is a key use case for Google Home users, the team was able to offer Google Home ads that fit the context of recipes when users visit them on the web, with copy like “Hey Google, add ginger to my shopping list” for making lemon and ginger friands.

The presentation demonstrates a key point: that a shift to interactions over simple demographics is needed, and brands should instead adopt a more consumer-led approach that is capable of understanding the interactions and intents that customers have in the moment. 

Differentiating Beyond Convenience

Part of that idea above on becoming consumer-led involves aligning your brand with the values that are important to your audience. As consumers look toward brands to represent their values, brands find a great opportunity to instill meaning in themselves and build trust through shared interest.

Speaking at the conference, Julian Blessin, co-founder of Tier Scooters, noted that “People used to want what was easy and safe, but now mobility also has to be conscious” of things like environmental impact and territorial inequalities. In essence, the convenience alone no longer cuts it; with consumer values and priorities in mind, brands must deliver on brand promise in the experiences they offer to consumers. 

In our activation celebrating International Women’s Day with BVG and ServicePlan, we installed facial recognition capabilities into ticket machines to determine whether a purchaser was a man or woman. Women received a discount that reflected the gender wage gap, demonstrating a small effort to balance the scales and acknowledge a problem that the brand recognized in society. 

Facial recognition is a technology with a bit of unease for some; it conjures up worry about deepfakes at worst, and is wrapped up in conversations about surveillance and catching criminals at best. But this project, which won an FWA award and Bronze Direct Lion at this year’s Cannes International Festival of Creativity, provided a delightful surprise for women commuters and an obvious benefit of the technology by highlighting the real value it can have toward everyday life.

Another example of how a brand has looked beyond convenience to make a difference in users’ lives is Lyft’s Grocery Access Program, which offers families living in food deserts round-trip rides to and from a grocery store for just $2.50. The program directly applies the promise of the brand—convenience in mobility—to a real-world problem felt by a vulnerable community, and instills a deep sense of brand trust in the process.

Establishing Stronger, Trusted Collaboration

DMEXCO didn’t focus just on trust between brand and consumers; there was talk around trust and transparency between partnerships as well. Accuracy of data, for example, has been a contentious issue of late, as has a lack of transparency, which have both led to the rising trend in in-house agencies. In an interview with Sir Martin Sorrell at DMEXCO, the S4 Capital founder and CEO put it simply: “What is happening now is clients are taking back control.”

But even in-house brands require partners, and entrusting a partner that can help propel them into the future is an important decision for these organizations. Citing a need to deliver faster with diminished budgets, these brands are drawn toward forward integration: cutting out the middleman to retain a stronger control of production, scale up and achieve faster delivery themselves. Agencies must pivot their offerings to conform to these new market priorities, like with the dedicated teams we implement to directly augment brands’ capabilities and production over the long term.

“They’re starting to see in digital transformation: what are the things they can do in 24/7 always-on content?” Sir Martin noted in his interview. With much at stake and a constant craving for conversation from consumers, brands require teams that can iterate quickly and without indecision—highlighting the need for partnerships built around a clear understanding of what the brand stands for. 

With all the talk around shifts in trust and privacy at DMEXCO, it’s clear that these challenges are resonant with brands, agencies and the marketers who bring them both together. Key to building trust across them in the age of the consumer are new partnerships that allow brands to take back control through a flexible, agile process. This way, they can future-proof by recognizing and reacting to changing consumer priorities in a way that builds trust, respect and empathy.

Header photo ©Koelnmesse

With the increasingly personalized nature and delivery of digital content, it feels like everyone is in crunch mode. According to the latest SoDA Global Digital Outlook Report, of which MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar served as editor-in-chief, 63% of client-side marketing leaders say producing and publishing targeted digital content is a major priority for their business—and so is producing that content more quickly.

While producing timely, always-on content is a critical need for organizations, a significant portion of them face challenges in meeting that output. In the 2018 Digital Trends for Creative and Design Leaders Survey, over a third of organizations working to design creative experiences internally indicated facing particular challenges in finding and retaining the right people with the right skills, while 40% cited outdated workflows as slowing their progress. These problems together make a one-two punch that makes it difficult for organizations to successfully develop the stream of targeted content they know they need, keeping it tantalizingly out of reach.

In addition to taking up time, the cyclical nature of the old-agency model isn’t as effective as it used to be. Rather than focus a big idea on traditional media and spoke out from that, standing out in today’s media landscape requires an always-on flow of targeted content across platforms, which altogether builds toward your creative direction. In essence, the new era requires highly relevant content that continues to deliver a consistent message—something that 59% of marketers say they have difficulty with. This requires organizations to seek out new organizational and executional methods.

Learn more ways to achieve more from less.

An emerging solution to this change is the integrated team model. In this structure, we set up organizations with a team custom-built for achieving their specific needs, whether that be access to a dedicated, decorated talent pool; locally relevant content across the globe; fresh content triggers or alleviating the brand studio’s bandwidth. “Organizations are bringing more capabilities in-house at a time where there’s an increased need for content at-scale,” says MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar. “With integrated production partnerships, we’re able to provide the resources needed to meet the demand for always-on content and relevancy to their audiences.”

An integrated team makes for a simple, scalable way to produce content on the day-to-day while allowing some space for the bigger projects or needs that crop up from time to time. With an in-house setup that collaborates with top talent across the globe, an integrated team functions as an always-on talent studio capable of delivering an unprecedented amount of flexibility and production with a rapid turnaround time not seen before.

Benefits to working with an integrated team include:

• A team of world-class talent custom-built to your organization’s needs
• Direct, immediate access to an agency’s capabilities—even those outside of your pre-defined, day-to-day operations
• A streamlined, efficient workflow with fast turnaround times
• An outside perspective capable of safeguarding your brand

Dive into the Deep End of the Talent Pool

A key benefit to the integrated team model is total access to a diverse talent pool, which encompasses both the skills you need for day-to-day operations as well as more niche talent that you might need for one-off projects or last-minute asks. We house all modern digital trades, which give us the ability to look at client needs holistically before tapping into a varied set of available skills available to accomplish them. “This process goes beyond pure production,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks LA. “We can really impact customer journeys as developers, strategists and content creators can work together in a fast and flexible manner.” Whether the team is on-site or operating elsewhere, you might think of an integrated team as stripping away the wall of an agency for unrestricted access to its toolset.

For example, we have one partner whose primary need is to create print-based materials and assets. To meet this need, we set them up with a team of dedicated designers that can easily deliver those materials in a fast turnaround time.  But when the same partner needed an animation done as a one-off project, a team of graphic designers wouldn’t do—which is why we quickly augmented the team with a set of animators who could deliver on that need with the same, rapid turnaround time expected, without the trouble of sending out an RFP to bidders or field resumes from freelancers.

Integrated teams aren’t the same as your typical production partnership, nor is it the same as simply outsourcing work to a body shop. In our integrated partnerships, we’ve seen how easy it is for teams to introduce new capabilities on top of projects after discovering some need—for example, providing copy options after noticing that in-house copy didn’t exactly fit with the visual design. “What’s unique about this kind of partnership is that it’s focused on the long-term,” says Martens. “You see this in the optimization of workflows, but it’s also a matter of deeper brand understanding, which allows us to proactively add to creative ideas.” On the organization’s side, it lets them tackle new and existing problems more flexibly.

Keep it Fresh with Relevant, Timely Content Triggers

Content triggers are the pillar of real-time marketing, ranging anywhere from planned and proactive content to reactive communication. While brands have typically kept to the planned, proactive approach (like brand events or planned campaigns), social media has driven brands to build up their in-house capabilities, as they require a fast pace of production and brand knowledge.

An approach that requires collaboration between several parties can sometimes slow production down, which is why we try to take a leaner approach to everything we do, including project-oriented tasks. Integrated teams serve as one alternative designed to eliminate bottlenecks and allow for the rapid design of timely content triggers, which is critical for how organizations must engage with consumers today.

“Brands are moving from short-term campaigns into programs and ecosystems that are built around always-on content,” says Martens. Because the team works partially in-house and is dedicated to the brand, organizations don’t have to jump through hoops to deliver on the ask. Using the same creative framework for producing assets at scale—beginning with a master template and identifying the variables in terms of content or platform fit—the integrated team model optimizes workflows to deliver relevant content triggers at unprecedented speed.

This speed is thanks in part to an always-on, global talent studio. When necessary, integrated teams can tap into talent from other offices around the world, which means work continues to get done elsewhere even after you’ve closed up shop for the day. “This interaction between an internal MediaMonks Brand Ambassador and our global support network is a powerful mechanic,” says Martens. “These Monks understand the brand experience in-depth and can thus represent its values, aesthetic and tone of voice in our wider teams.” If a team gets a brief at end of day from the partner, they can deliver up to sixteen hours of work spread across time zones to be delivered the following morning, providing quality work within timelines that were once viewed as unrealistic. Say goodbye to feeling like there aren’t enough hours in a day.

The integrated team model is a reaction to the unique challenges facing the advertising industry today. Organizations no longer have to put their brands in the hands of an outside agency to deliver on the ever-increasing demand for relevant content. With dedicated, open access to a diverse pool of talent, they become better prepared to meet industry challenges while retaining complete ownership of their work. “Our experiences have shown us that MediaMonks is used as a lever for the brand to further build their own studio or spend more time on the work that matters most,” says Martens. “Brands are taking back control.”

These days, there’s a lot that inhibits brands from standing out: there’s an onslaught of competing content, user attention spans are shortening and budgets (not to mention time) are tight, making it difficult to rapidly produce and experiment with content that truly sticks.

That latter point is perhaps the most significant, because the biggest indicator of whether or not a user will engage with your content is whether it’s relevant to them. This desire of relevance elevates personalization beyond just a simple business need—in today’s market, it’s expected by users and required from brands.

This results in an imperative for efficient, cost-effective production that cuts through the noise and lands directly in front of the right consumer at the right time. A report recently released by SoDA showed that brands understand the need for personalization, with 83% of global business leaders increasing their investments in it for 2019, and nearly a third increasing their personalization budgets significantly.

People who touch an item feel an increased sense of ownership toward it—and personalized experiences are poised to persuade and push them over the edge of purchasing. Coca-Cola’s 2014 “Share a Coke” campaign was massively popular simply by creating a situation for customers to engage with the brand in a personal and social way. Marmite has taken a similar approach with its personalized jars, which provide a point of identification for the user.

But making strategic use of personalization remains a key challenge, particularly with production of content that benefits from personalization. In the same report, 55% of business leaders cited a clear focus on producing content quicker, and 47% sought greater cost-efficiency in content production.

But producing personalization at scale doesn’t have to be burdensome for brands. Through an integrated production process and technologies that enable dynamic delivery of content, organizations can produce a staggering volume of hyper-targeted content with ease—though it may require them to rethink their creative approach.

Levels of Personalization

Personalization in marketing certainly isn’t new, though most organizations operate on a relatively low level of personalization maturity. Rather than relying on basic data metrics like greeting a user by their name or using rules-based segmentation, brands can achieve best-in-class, highly relevant creative by optimizing content for omnichannel journeys (remembering the user along the way), integrating behavioral recommendations and applying AI to predictive personalization.

Now, don’t get too scared—all of the above likely sounds complicated, especially if you don’t yet have a distinct personalization or data strategy in place. But the good news is that personalization is less about the amount of data that you have, and more about what you do with the data. Minimal personalization can make a big impact.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a great example of an omnichannel campaign that reacts to user behaviors in a way that’s surprising to users, grabbing their attention by speaking directly to them. When Danish gum brand Stimorol decided to branch out into a new form of candy, they needed an awareness campaign that would challenge consumers to likewise extend outside their comfort zones. But how can you challenge someone to try something new without knowing what they habitually do? That’s where the creative opportunity behind personalization emerges.

We solved this problem by producing an integrated campaign that responds to user behaviors. Key to the campaign are YouTube bumper ads that respond to the types of videos that individual consumers are watching. While watching sports videos, for example, users may be treated to an ad that prompts them to try playing sports instead of just watching them.

These bumpers make use of one key data point—the type of content that users are watching—but does so in a clever way that immediately grabs viewer attention and prompts them to identify with the message in a personal way. While they might not be willing to change their own habits, trying a new Stimorol candy sounds like a sweet deal in comparison.

Personalization that Enhances, not Inhibits, Production Quality

Isn’t it unsustainable to produce several variations of content like the kind mentioned above? Not if you have already outlined the variables that differentiate individual pieces of content, or have clearly mapped out the touch points to be supported by an omnichannel campaign. We optimized production for the Stimoroll campaign by limiting it to a single-day shoot at a single location, resulting in over 150 format-ready deliverables capable of greeting the right consumers at the right place and time.

According to Salesforce, 57% of customers are happy to provide personal data in exchange for personalized marketing—which means data can inform awesome content and vice-versa. The key is that the data exchange should provide consumers with obvious value.

With the technology available today, brands can achieve an even greater level of relevance with their content, dynamically stitching together personalized content reactive to several data points. With Google Vogon, for example, brands can automatically translate a single base video into dozens of personalized variations on the fly, resulting in a high volume of unique videos that don’t push film crews to their limits or sacrifice quality.

Our dynamic video content for Booking.com was designed from two base videos: one featuring a giraffe browsing for travel destinations while another focused on a dog doing the same. But the type of animal featured is just one of several variables that enable 54 permutations tailored to hyper-specific segments and interests. These include the target market, different destinations found within those markets and a key passion (like shopping, dining or sightseeing) that provides added inspiration.

Both campaigns discussed above demonstrate how brands can efficiently target key segments of their audiences through personalization. Whether employing just one data point or many, personalization at scale can grab user attention and leave an indelible mark on them, and the right creative and production strategy enables brands to take advantage of these benefits without wearing themselves thin.