Since opening our Mexico City office last year, we take immense pride in the work we’ve done to bring regional brands’ digital efforts to a global stage. In such a short amount of time, we managed to pull off a big win not just for a client, but for the country itself: a Gold Cannes Lion awarded to Aeroméxico’s “People are the Places” website at this year’s Cannes Festival for Creativity. The victory recognizes the region’s leaps in providing premier digital experiences, as well as the power in marrying global expertise with a local team’s insights and understanding of the market.

If anyone could pull it off, it would be Aeroméxico: airlines and other travel brands in particular must understand what kind of experiences and messages resonate not just with their primary domestic market, but with international travelers as well. And as an industry leader, engaging and unique digital experiences aren’t uncommon for Aeroméxico: the airline’s app topped the download charts in the first week since its launch. 

For Aeroméxico this was new, unexplored terrain, so it was fundamental that MediaMonks provided them with all the tools, capabilities and talent to face this exciting challenge. “What we did was build a bridge between creativity and technology,” said Carlos Rivera, Consulting and Platforms Lead at MediaMonks. One of the key elements of this process was a UX expert to guide the brand’s process with the new platform. 

In creating the platform for “People are the Places”, we wanted to craft a website experience that conveyed emotion and humanity, design a story-driven interface that fostered relatability, and build a frictionless platform where users feel invited into a seamless experience. In the end, the campaign succeeded, because users truly feel as if they are traveling to someone in the process of creating their destination. 

“Our Mexico City office served as the main partner guiding Aeroméxico through the creative steps required for this campaign,” said Marcelo Planchart, MediaMonks Head of Latam Expansion. “This meant not only providing new technologies, but focusing on solutions that would directly benefit customers and make their experience rewarding in every way.” Taking home a Gold Cannes Lion, the airline has certainly taken the country to new heights–what more could an airline hope to achieve?

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But “People are the Places”–made in collaboration between Aeroméxico’s in-house team, MediaMonks and our partners at Google–is a wholly new experience. “With ‘People are the Places,’ we want to go from being a company that transports people to a brand that builds personal relationships,” said Andrés Castañeda, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Customer Experience at Aeroméxico. “It is a huge satisfaction for Aeroméxico’s marketing team to win a Golden Lion with a campaign developed 100% at home in collaboration with Google.”

Born from the belief that traveling is about people more so than the destination, “People are the Places” lets travelers experience locales like never before–through the people actually living there. Through a savvy site, users can select a person as a destination, resulting in a personalized e-ticket with the name of the user and their selected person, as well as a dynamic video that stitches together social media content. This information then becomes the basis for creating an actual ticket, transforming individual people into destinations themselves. With 60% of leisure and 41% of business travelers arranging their trips online, according to Smart Insights, it becomes essential for travel industry players to accurately measure customer experience and improve their services and products, enhancing the experience itself and directly impacting their business.

It’s a unique spin that prompts people to change the way they think about destinations. An airline can’t change the geography that divides or connects people, but it can provide novel new perspectives that change the logic of how people conceptualize places. Whether seeing the world for the first time from seven miles above ground or discovering a place through a person, Aeroméxico accomplishes such a feat in more ways than one.

To help accomplish this, we worked with Aeroméxico to build a web platform that integrates Google technologies and social media tools with Aeroméxico’s ecommerce backend. Instead of choosing a geographic destination, users can instead directly choose the person they want to fly to, wherever they are in the world.

Interested in learning how MediaMonks partners with our LatAm or Mexican clients?

Bridging Together Creativity and Technology

As brands have designed digital experiences that accomplish the same KPIs and goals, most digital experiences across industries—including travel—have begun to feel the same. There is little differentiating factor in travel destination search engines, for example, resulting in a proliferation of search aggregates with which price alone becomes the deciding factor in purchasing decisions. This trend highlights the importance of digital experiences that provide an emotional value to consumers’ interactions with the brand.

At MediaMonks, we often argue that the interface is the brand, and that no interaction is too small or insignificant to reflect a brand’s product or services. MediaMonks helped Aeroméxico take advantage of high-end technology to create a user experience never seen before for selling plane tickets, offering a truly unique and human-centered process for discovering and selecting a travel destination. And it’s not just a flashy customer experience: with this, Aeroméxico now offers a new, scalable way of selling tickets, offering a 100% data-centered and personalized solution to make each flight unique and human-driven. Marrying together a delightful engagement with clear business impact demonstrates the brand’s role as a major digital player in the industry.

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While an exciting game and sports-stars-turned-celebrities alone were once enough to raise an audience for broadcast sports, today’s leading brands strive to provide premier, engaging digital experiences that reach users through personalization and emerging tech. And we know, because MediaMonks recently went for the gold and made it onto the Hashtag Sports Engage 150 list, which features the top partners engaging consumers through sports and fan culture today.

Through our sports-related work—encompassing platforms, creative content and technical innovation—we’ve formulated a game plan for brands to better engage and deliver upon the needs of fans through sports. This includes more effective utilization of user data and investing in emerging tech solutions, allowing brands to bring their A-game to enhance spectatorship for fans both near and far away from the game.

Transform Spectators into Active Participants with Emerging Tech

We all know the joke of those who buy the biggest TV screen available before an important game, only to return it after hosting a viewing party. But today’s digital media allows brands to do more than just provide a larger-than-life picture; through emerging tech, they can provide entirely new experiences that significantly improve spectatorship through heightened immersion.

A premier platform achieving this is the 2018 Webby Award-winning Red Bull Air Race for Google Daydream, which takes users on a thrilling ride aboard a virtual airplane that follows actual flight paths from real races. Giving users full control to look wherever they please, the experience makes them feel as if they’re really there.

But VR lets you do more than let users feel present in the moment. “The benefit something like AR has over 360-degree video is that it’s a platform,” says Robert-Jan Blonk, Senior Interactive Producer at MediaMonks, noting the amount of on-screen data present to the user. “In this case, we built a platform with pilot info, race standings and different locations where races are held, which users can go back and replay.”

This added level of autonomy is powerful for fans who want to be part of the action. “Sports fans want to feel like they have a role in the game and aren’t just bystanders,” says Emily Veraart, Senior Digital Strategist at MediaMonks. While Red Bull Air Race users don’t influence the race directly, interactive toggling of the camera lets them experience the event in their preferred way—whether it be the middle of the fray or at a safe, omniscient distance.

For MediaMonks Operations Manager Donny Hofman, this level of interactivity is integral to the experience.  “The most interesting thing about an experience like this is the freedom you can give to users,” he says. “You can potentially get anywhere in the action that you want—and where you can’t place a camera in real life, you can in VR.” That latter point describes how emerging tech can enhance sports spectatorship through entirely new perspectives: “It’s a rediscovery of something you’re familiar with,” says Hofman.

Reach Fans with Targeted Content and Personalization

The sports industry encompasses several different parties, each of whom has their own fans and content: teams, federations, individual players and industry-adjacent influencers. This makes the industry ripe for producing always-on content.

During the Rio Olympics, we produced with Google Zoo a platform to deliver content to sports fans throughout the Games. Designed for both online fans and those visiting Rio de Janeiro to attend in-person, the platform integrated various forms of content (like timely updates and summaries from some of the region’s most influential YouTube content creators, the Castro brothers) onto a map of the city. In addition to providing relevant spatial information in this way, the platform surfaces up personalized content responsive to how they interact with the platform, like recommending content based off behavioral habits and viewing preferences.

The benefits to better understand fans are measurable. According to MightyHive’s Data Confident Marketer report, data-confident marketers’ success “is attributed to becoming more customer-centric: they’re able to apply first-party data in ways that help them understand who their customers are, what motivates them, and how digital advertising plays a role in their purchasing decisions.” Such confidence in their data allows brands to identify which information fans seek, where and when—and which partners make the best sense for engaging with fans through supplementary content.

This level of personalization, paired with forging partnerships with content creators and influencers, is ideal for delivering upon changing user expectations for how to consume sports. “With sports, there’s a bigger generational divide in user behavior,” says Veraart. “Baby boomers and millennials are used to watching sports with their family, but Gen Z doesn’t have that relationship with how they watch sports.” According to Veraart, much of this shift is informed by the constant discussion happening on social media, as well as an abundance of statistics and data available for the most avid fans to track. Brands can meet this need with a content strategy that offers a sliding scale of data and content tailored to fans’ individual preferences.

Engage User Needs through Contextual Design

When developing a digital platform for sports consumption, carefully consider the context in which users will interact. Consider micro-moments that prompt users to engage in the first place: the sports tourist attending a big gaming event in town, the stats-obsessed fan, the user who simply wants to see what games are playing at the height of the season. “How you guide the user through a schedule is a key example of the types of challenges a sporting federation may face,” says Joeri Lambert, Business Monk at MediaMonks. “Another is how you apply the data that you have to alert the user of games or information that they want to see.”

One crucial consideration in how to best support user context is whether the platform is accessed via mobile or desktop. With the All of Brazil Plays platform, for example, the mobile experience was tailored more toward location-based information for those attending the Games who needed to know where to go, and when. On desktop, meanwhile, users were treated to their personalized newsfeed of recap content, perfect for those catching up on a day’s many events.

Marrying data with digital creative—whether it be a digital content platform or emerging tech—is a smart strategy for brands to reach sports-obsessed and average fans alike. From helping users keep up with their favorite team to placing them right into the action with immersive tech, digital content transforms spectatorship from a passive experience to an active one, letting everyone revel in a good sporting victory.

A new year is upon us, and with it comes the potential to find new opportunities for engaging with audiences and providing them fun, engaging experiences. In fact, according to a consumer trends report from Attest, customers have a large appetite for content that brands seek to satiate. As you settle into the year by gauging how to realize your goals with tactical planning, a couple Monks weigh in on steps to take.

When planning for the new year, it’s good to begin by stepping back and reflecting on the past. 2018 has prompted consumers and brands alike to consider the role data plays in our lives, highlighting a need to use it responsibly to add real value to users’ lives. With a proliferation of voices constantly vying for our attention, it’s in this spirit that we ask brands to keep things simple moving into the new year. Why? Because simplicity allows you to better provide a consistent, relevant experience for your audience wherever they are.

Jouke Vuurmans, Global Executive Creative Director at MediaMonks puts it plainly: “People are blind to what’s not relevant to them, which makes it easy for them to tune it out.” But simplicity is key to leveraging data in smart ways, which in turn “leads to higher likelihood that people will like and do something—that interactivity makes it stick.”

This Year, Less is More

By now you’ve likely set your budget and strategic goals for the year and are developing a tactical plan to successfully meet them. Easier said than done, right? Let this be your first step: take a deep breath and adopt a simplified approach in how you distribute information to your audience. Whether it be the information that helps customers make a purchase or content that demonstrates the value and relevancy of a product to customers’ lives, simplicity is the key to unlocking sticky, memorable and delightful experiences that have impact and drive conversions.

First, what do we mean by simple? Designing simpler experiences means providing users with greater clarity of information that they can act on immediately. For example, we built a car scanner for Uber in 2017 that would immediately and automatically alert drives if their car qualified for one of Uber’s services as they pulled up to a gas pump. The scanner provides users with a clear message and, by offering a link to signup if cars qualify, a CTA whose value becomes obvious—all without requiring any input from the user. The goal is to meet the user at the right place and the right time with the right information.

Gain Trust Through Transparency

In the past year, data collection and personalization have gotten a bit of a bad rap. Anticipating this unease makes it all the more important that brands rethink the way they collect and use data to benefit the user. The problem, according to Jason Prohaska, Managing Director at MediaMonks NY, is that access and understanding of this data has become over-complicated for both brands and users alike.

Take media buy, for example: the promise to users is that handing over data will result in more useful and valuable content for them—but it’s hard for brands to access that data in planning their media buys, providing less-than-stellar results for everyone. “What we do well is help brands navigate this challenge through programmatic solutions to provide small moments,” says Prohaska, “little bits of info applied properly to provide tremendous value.”

A new year means new challenges and opportunities.

Let’s look at one such moment. Taking inspiration from the trend of using smartphone cameras as mirrors for applying makeup, beauty brand Ulta wanted to make one of their own that could help add product relevance to users. Our solution, made in partnership with Google, is the Moxi Mirror. The smart mirror app scans the user’s face before providing them with a personalized stream of beauty content. Because they can access the mirror while viewing the content, users can apply their new know-how while applying their makeup.

Setting the Foundation for Personalization

The user experience detailed above is simple, though the tech under the hood may be a bit complicated for some organizations to design for. While everyone can see the value in personalization, the under-the-hood requirements often intimidates. But “personalization doesn’t need to be really complex to make a huge impact,” says Vuurmans. “You could create just three different segments for your audience and conversion will already improve.”

The first step to tactical planning for simpler user experiences aided by AI is to open up your strategy to different types of messaging and methods for distributing them. The singular creative thought behind your brand or campaign should be conceived as a platform from which related ideas can thrive—different ideas and messages you can tailor to segments.

When planning or distributing your content, ask yourself: “What is the key information, and how are we tapping ad tech to solve that loop?” The second question can be a bit trickier to answer—but help is available for brands who need help making that next step. “Our focus at MediaMonks is largely on the user experience and value proposition,” says Prohaska, “then bringing the best out of ad tech on behalf of brand initiatives and UX, evolving the bad and old into new hotness that is more valuable to our partners.”

By keeping informed about what messaging works on a per-audience and per-channel basis, you can provide fun and simple, intuitive experiences across channels that drive conversions. This makes all the difference between content that annoys versus content users enjoy, helping you achieve your goals reaching into the new year with a stronger brand-customer relationship.

We all have a favorite barista: it’s the person who greets you every morning when you pick up your daily cup of coffee—and who already knows that you want just one spoonful of sugar and a splash of oat milk without having to ask.

The barista who’s attuned to their customers’ preferences is a classic example of the power of personalization. Able to minimize friction at the point of sale or aid in product discovery, personalization has a significant impact on customers’ experience when done well: according to Forrester, “Retailers that use omnichannel customer data to deliver unique value to customers and resolve pain points set themselves up to build brand loyalty and create great commerce experiences.”

This is a best-case scenario for ecommerce platforms. “What’s really exciting is capturing your marketing audience through personalized media,” says Remco Vroom, Business Lead for Platforms & ecommerce at MediaMonks HQ. “Then, we can capture them in a similarly personalized way on your website and storefront,” creating a holistic customer experience.

The Genesis car configurator released last year, for example, lets users personalize the car’s specifications and see the results in a 3D model in an experience that rivaled the configurations you’d see in a videogame—all within a web browser. “But what really made the tool special was that it tied to the back-end,” says Vroom. “Users could save their configuration, which is sent to the closest dealership for them to actually buy.” That ability to port preferences and information from one channel or source to another can be powerful when extended across numerous touch points, delivering relevancy every step of the way.

Catch Attention with Detailed Messaging Tailored to Preference

Delivering personalized assets across the consumer journey can certainly seem overwhelming and intimidating. That’s why we’ve developed a new creative framework for delivering vast amounts of content with minimal rework and designed for transcreation, ensuring that organizations don’t need a heavy share of resources to provide relevant, customized messaging to their audiences. It all boils down to starting with an overall structure or narrative, then identifying the variables you can customize per audience—a bit like filling in the blanks of a Mad Libs story using a pre-defined word bank.

You can see this in action with the dynamic video campaign we made for Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour series. The process was simple: we made 12 edits highlighting different aspects of the show, each of which would appeal differently to audience segments. We then cut up those edits and stitched them back together using Google’s Vogon tool, resulting in 88 different videos tailored to specific user profiles.

Enhance the Customer Experience Through Recommendations

Attracting customers’ attention is one thing, but once they visit your store, personalized recommendation engines can help them quickly discover the products most relevant to them.

One brand that has done a great job in optimizing product discovery is beauty brand OPI. Its Nail Clinic Healthy Nails Quiz, made in collaboration with MediaMonks, helps consumers learn how to take care of their specific nail issues or woes by answering a few questions. This process is fast and easy, with each question limiting responses to only two options. For example, do their nails bend easily? Are they prone to breaking, or peeling? After completing the questionnaire, the tool provides them with a nail treatment product suited to their needs.

“The purpose of the tool is to diagnose nail problems, then educate customers on how they can fix them,” says Cynthia Lin, Program Director at MediaMonks LA.  “For example, if you have a weak nail, the application can recommend a treatment product to strengthen it before putting a color on.” The process is evocative of talking to a shopping assistant at a brick-and-mortar store, offering personalized, one-on-one attention that’s often missed within a digital environment.

Keep a Balance Between Search and Discovery

One thing to keep in mind when embracing personalization in ecommerce is to allow plenty of room for organic discovery. While recommendation engines can be great for helping users immediately find relevant results, you don’t want your customers to feel like they’ve given up their autonomy or control.

So how does one strike the balance? OPI has a tool similar to the Healthy Nails Quiz that allows users to “try on” any of the colors in the nail catalogue. The quiz-based approach—which asks about things like skin tone, nail length, preferred color family and more—fits well within the brand’s content strategy to help customers discover products in a fun, accessible way.

After completing the quiz, users receive color recommendations and alongside an image that helps them visualize it on their own hand.  But customers aren’t forced to accept those results; they’re invited to go back and change responses or freely explore the colors available, opening up the opportunity to freely browse and discover after being matched with a recommendation.

“This tool lets users explore color based on their skin tone, which is important in the world of nail polish and beauty,” says Lin. “It addresses an issue that many people face, allowing us to cater toward a more diverse range of audiences.” As Lin says, representation is incredibly important to the beauty industry: consumers must set expectations for how a given product will make them look, and what types of bodies or skin tones are represented can have the effect of setting beauty standards. The image, which changes based on the user’s inputted skin tone and nail length, also demonstrates the usefulness of personalized assets like those mentioned above.

That really drives home the power of a personalized ecommerce platform: customers can better identify with a given product or envision it in their lives. Through personalized messaging and more relevant product selections, ecommerce brands can meet users’ needs before, during and after a sale—and forge deeper, more lasting connections in the process.

As customer attention is placed more and more on a variety of digital channels, it’s increasingly important for organizations to appeal to them at the right place at the right time. The challenge? Most organizations feel limited—in terms of team size/bandwidth, awareness of local markets they might be catering to and more—in their ability to execute relevant, fresh content strategies.

From driving traffic to brand websites or engaging on social media with share-worthy, relatable content, a good content strategy is essential for boosting a brand’s presale capabilities. This is likely the reason why digital work makes up more than half of all US agency revenue today. So, how can brands of any size take better advantage of the technology available?

Good Content Begets Better Content

This method of creating and distributing content is powerful because it can react to users’ experience along their journey. Think of it this way: good content leads to more sales, which feeds into welcoming new customers or building advocates through a great experience. This in turn should fuel your marketing efforts, opening a feedback loop: what about the customer experience really resonated? Where could messaging be stronger?

When it comes to marketing, I feel the traditional ad model sticks to a channel-based approach, but it’s important to remember that today’s consumers view digital as a series of experiences across several platforms and channels. Likewise, your content shouldn’t be relegated to a single channel—don’t set up a blog and call it a day. Instead, you should relate to the user on all the platforms they visit across the user journey in a way that makes sense, then use that activity to better inform your content and continue to provide value. While the model of expanding a big idea worked in the past, it doesn’t translate well to digital. A modern content strategy instead starts with a strategic foundation, which is then retailored, varied and personalized across the different platforms available, which in aggregate build into a creative direction.

The good news is that today we have a myriad of new ways to give context through content, allowing for more engaging experiences that relate to the users no matter the platforms they frequent. By making use of the latest technologies available, brands of all sizes can boost their creative capabilities and deliver more engaging content at scale, paving the way for better customer experiences.

But before going further, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page for what a content strategy is. Your content strategy encompasses the planning and development of all consumer-facing communication from your organization, including your CEO’s talking points, your PR strategy, how you introduce your organization in interviews and more. As the VP of Marketing at MediaMonks, I’ve led content marketing initiatives for organizations of all sizes. Through that experience, I’ve discovered a few strategies and takeaways for how brands big and small can take a more modern approach to their blog content.

The best place to begin devising such a content strategy is to define your organization’s purpose, so take a moment to consider your brand’s purpose and what it wants to achieve. Honing in on a purpose is easier for some brands than others; challenger brands by their very nature exemplify some sort of purpose, for example, while legacy brands might struggle to articulate the heritage and personality that they’ve built up within a fast-changing landscape.

Speak to Experiences

Today’s consumers are more concerned with experience than product. This shift might prompt a best-in-class grill manufacturer, for example, to devise a content strategy focused more on celebrating the act of grilling than the grill itself. Through content that seeks to inspire and inform, a key purpose for such a brand would be helping people make memories together.

If you’re uncertain on how to articulate your purpose, begin with your most profitable offering or differentiated value. From there, consider the white spaces—the stuff your audience is working to resolve or understand. This process helps you define talk tracks, or a handful of topics that your content will focus on. You should be able to examine a talk track from several viewpoints; for example, a talk track about “emerging tech” can explore AR, VR, artificial intelligence and more in terms of both their development, benefits and challenges. For our grilling example above, cultivating a sense of togetherness was key, which manifests in recipes, inspiration for entertaining or helping prospects discover which features of a grill or its accessories suits their lifestyle.

It may be tempting to chase several talk tracks, but keep it down to only three to five. Since you’ll consistently measure effectiveness for your content, you can always switch up or change talk tracks later.

The Demographic Death-Knell

On a basic level, you’ll need to divide your content up on where it sits within the sales funnel: whether someone is researching your product for the first time, is coming back from a retargeting campaign or is a repeat customer. Each step of this journey offers different questions the customer needs answered, which your content should support.

In addition to planning around specific steps of the funnel or consumer journey, specific forms of content should be built around user personas: who are your best customers, and what do they respond to? How does that differ from your second-best? How do different talk tracks relate to different segments? When developing personas and segments, it’s better to group users by preferences and interest than demographics. Why? Because demographics are dead: an older, midwestern man who likes American Crime Story might have more interests in common with a teen girl from LA who also likes the show, than his own demographic peers. Simply put, “Demographic information doesn’t tell us anything,” says MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar. “It’s all about the user’ preferences.”

Defining personas makes it easier to develop content because you know what sort of things to include or exclude. If writing for an individual who prefers content geared at business-related tips and tricks, but also watches sports and is interested in local events, you know to play up those preferences in your content. Some organizations have several personas to accommodate; for example, a travel booking site would need to generate content for all their destinations, and perhaps interests as well—is the customer a partier, someone who likes historical places, a foodie? For organizations who need to develop content on a large scale, we offer them a modular approach: where we define what variables exist in your content, which can be tweaked and revised in different ways for different personas. With this plug-and-play, modular method, we’re not just generating content but creating an entire content framework that not only targets users but A/B tests what’s effective. This lets us dynamically produce content without additional cost.

These kinds of assets at scale are increasingly necessary with the rapid demand for always-on, personalized content. From dynamic videos custom-built to preferences without any user input to thousands of pieces of localized content for markets around the globe, brands face many challenges in providing timely, relevant content at scale. Even though most brands don’t have the resources that Netflix or Amazon do—which have perhaps two of the most-effective recommendation engines in the world—partnerships can help them fill those gaps. For those just starting out and who prefer a little more flexibility, an embedded team that can handle your content production is easily capable of scaling up if your needs or situation change.

For example, we just announced a new always-on content hub that will accommodate Avon’s million representatives spread across more than 50 markets. These assets are designed to maintain brand consistency while allowing representatives room to customize to their local markets’ needs. With each piece of content tailor-made for different channels, reps can effectively engage with their customers and clients wherever they’ve built those relationships—whether it be Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or somewhere else. In addition to reaching consumers in more relevant ways, the move helps Avon provide its reps with more autonomy in their messaging without risking the brand’s identity, supporting digital growth in the process.