In a post-COVID world where hypergrowth will go from the unicorn story to a key business imperative, the industry will need to redefine digital transformation to a lean, iterative approach that connects the customer decision journey. To succeed in this future, brands must not only pivot their efforts now, but act fast to envision how they will meet the needs of audiences into the future.

Since COVID-19 cases surged globally, we’ve seen several businesses pivot their manufacturing practices at unprecedented speed, from Pernod-Ricard’s hand sanitizer production to Ford’s protective face shields. Both brands’ rapid change in operations demonstrate an urgency to transform with agility. Likewise, many are now realizing the need to transform and adapt digitally—not only in response to the pandemic itself, but also its eventual resolution, with no well-defined window of time between those two moments.

This might sound overwhelming, but the solution is simple if you merely shift your perspective on what digital transformation means during COVID-19: the pandemic doesn’t call for unprecedented change as much as it reinforces and hastens the changes that brands have been trying to implement for the past decade. “Things have not changed as much as they have accelerated,” says Joe Olsen, Chief Growth Officer at MediaMonks. “While other crises reshaped the future, COVID-19 is making the future happen faster,” underscoring the need for digital transformation that had always existed.

Brands can look at Starbucks as an example of this: its app, allowing customers to place an order before visiting stores and make contactless payments allowed the brand to continue enabling pickup orders in the early stages of COVID-19’s spread. On the other end of the pandemic, this contactless, digital infrastructure is likely to provide reassurance to a changed society that aims to limit the spread of germs without sacrificing convenience.

Another brand whose strong digital infrastructure continued to aid consumers’ needs is Nike. Supporting consumers through a digital ecosystem that includes not only ecommerce but also an app dedicated to video workout content led by a network of fitness trainers, Nike experienced lower than expected losses during the worst of COVID-19’s spread in China. In the west, the brand quickly leveraged its expert trainer network to offer weekly livestreamed workouts via YouTube, which MediaMonks helped to produce alongside Wieden+Kennedy in just days before the initial livestreamed event.

Transform at Speed with Lean Strategy and Development

While brands have long understood the need to transform, for many of them the process has seemed lengthy and abstract. Now, brands are quickly understanding the specific actions they must take at speed—compressing the transformation process. “For many brands, digital transformation has been in the back of their minds, and now it’s front and center,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar.

“There will be long-term effects that won’t magically go away once this is ‘over,’” he says. “Think about what this means for your brand, how services are going to change between your products and people, and opportunities to act differently.” Among some of the primary needs are brand ecosystems, access to first party data and truly owning the brand experience.

Brands may be surprised to find that they can make these vast changes faster than they thought possible. “The slowness, overhead, lack of agility the industry is known for has to change much quicker now because you have to play an important part in what’s happening,” says ter Haar. Noticing this need, we’ve eliminated roadblocks to develop a lean strategy and execution process to ensure rapid transformation in just a few weeks.

Here’s how it works. First, brands begin building scenarios and strategizing around the current landscape and where their brand fits within it. “Identify scenarios and changes in social behavior,” says ter Haar, noting how discomfort about flying may persist to further challenge the travel industry, which has been especially hit hard by the pandemic. “Be proactive by thinking about how your brand fits within this new world.”

This helps the brand identify challenges while also approaching their transformation with a sense of purpose. In addition to prioritizing KPIs and identifying requirements and limitations in technology, teams will have to envision how the tech will ultimately be used by audiences.

This feeds into the next steps: collecting design and UX insights while importing available data into a backend architecture. This may be the brunt work in planning a new platform, but this “get ready” phase can be done in just a week with UX and tech teams working concurrently. By having both teams work together from the start, you eliminate time wasted on creative ideas that ultimately aren’t practical in a technical sense.

Finally, the team develops, builds and tests for quality assurance before launching—followed by an ongoing test and learn phase to further improve the product or highlight new audience needs. With the proper planning steps in place, brands can move from idea to market in just a month.

Connect Random Acts of Digital to Build Brand Coherence

It’s possible that you’ve already invested in random acts of digital—also known as the siloed and disconnected digital experiences that consumers may encounter at different touchpoints. A simple way to boost digital maturity and prepare for the future is to connect these random acts of digital into a cohesive customer decision journey.

Taking stock in your existing digital strategy is an important step in finding new opportunities to connect with consumers within an uncertain landscape. Again, don’t forget your sense of purpose, either. To accommodate a sense of wanderlust in travelers whose plans had been canceled, for example, Marriott pivoted its content strategy around staycations—including links to its ecommerce platform featuring products that its hotel rooms serve as showrooms for.

In her report, “Best-In-Class Digital Leaders Embrace These Four Guidelines,” Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali notes that digital leaders “focus on their core products. While innovation is crucial, much of what the best digital disruptors do is continue to focus on their core product, or ‘keep the lights on’ work.” Minor, iterative tweaks and quality-of-life improvements can ladder up into premier digital experiences.

Understanding this, we partner best with brands embarking on digital transformation initiatives that can prioritize speed over perfection. Building on the foundation of your existing digital strategy, look for the simplest (and most effective) changes you can make to carry momentum on the way to larger-term goals. This approach isn’t just about building speed; when prioritizing velocity in the transformation process, rigorously test and measure performance to apply those learnings to successive iterations and phases.

Own the CDJ to Continually Support Audiences

One of the biggest challenges fueling digital transformation is that brands may miss out on the value of engaging with consumers if they rely solely on channels they don’t own, with insights on those interactions lost within walled gardens. Chief to connecting a coherent digital journey is eradicating data silos and building insights driven by first-party data. One need only look at how retail has been affected by COVID-19 to see this in effect.

“If you look at CPG brands who exclusively sell through retail, many of them don’t have a business now,” says ter Haar. “When owning the consumer journey, you have to have a direct relationship with your audience.” He notes that in addition to selling directly to consumers, you also build a more active, ongoing relationship that lays the foundation for when they want to buy further down the road–highlighting the important role that assistive content and digital experiences can take right now while consumers are craving entertainment and connection at home, even if it’s not strictly conversion-based.

While digital transformation has long conjured up the notion of years spent with consultancies that are all talk and no action—and resulting in plans that are obsolete before coming into fruition—it’s easy to see how many brands have viewed the process as a daunting slog. But today, advanced digital maturity is table stakes; and with a need to adapt at speed, brands can act right now on steps that drive fast results.

You can’t achieve hypergrowth without reactivating customer obsession.

It’s time to acknowledge the elephant in the room: during a time of instability and hardship, should brands halt their advertising and go dark? Data shows that most consumers still want to hear from brands, but their message should be focused on building value. Still, even the idea of what constitutes as an appropriate response varies day-by-day and by location, highlighting the need for brands to invest in truly understanding their audiences and how they can lend support to them at speed.

In fact, brands who continue to invest in advertising spend throughout a recession tend to benefit by experiencing revenue gains that persist beyond its passing. 44% of consumers plan to delay purchases until after the COVID-19 outbreak has ended, and brands must use this time to prepare for the inevitable need to quickly grow following significant revenue loss throughout the pandemic.

Still, brands must consider whether spending makes sense. “Traditional advertising response is spend, spend, spend,” S4Capital Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell told audiences in conversation with Ad Age. “But when companies are facing existential crises in Q2 and not sure if they have enough money to survive, it’s ridiculous.” Instead, he recommends that those in tech who planned campaigns and sponsorships for canceled sporting events “should divert that spending to doing good, purpose-driven campaigns. But those campaigns should be highly practical–equipment, vaccine development, therapy–supporting those on the frontline. It shouldn’t be self-seeking. You have to encourage clients to deploy their resources more effectively and divert money into digital because that’s more effective.”

Still how do brand ensure their focus is on providing real, authentic value to audiences in the coming months? The secret lies in redefining the role of the brand in consumers’ lives and being proactive to their shifting needs in a disruptive landscape.

Invest in Insights-Driven Creative

“In the first couple of weeks, data suggested that people didn’t want to hear from brands,” says Andre Rood, Global Advertising Director at MediaMonks. “Afterwards, you saw them slowly get into the mindset, as long as brands were being helpful.” He notes how brands’ initial response to the coronavirus from felt so repetitious, with so many brands reiterating the same message: wash your hands for 20 seconds and stay at home. They weren’t differentiating or cutting through to individuals’ specific needs at the time.

Now more than ever, customer obsession is critical to brand health.

MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar notes that in reacting to COVID-19, it’s more important than ever that brands invest in personalization, or they risk looking insensitive. This prompts brands to consider personalization beyond the typical categories of demographics and user preferences. Instead, they have to dig deep into the nuances of what their audiences are dealing with, and the myriad ways that the brand can help.

“The COVID curve is different everywhere, even affecting people differently who live in the same community,” ter Haar says. “For some that means looking for a cure to boredom—but that messaging is insensitive for a family of six that is homeschooling while working from home, who are too busy to be bored. It’s never been more important to actually understand who you’re talking to.”

Rood echoes this sentiment by cautioning that brands shouldn’t rely on the standard segmentation methods, which currently offer little relevance. “The way you should target individuals should be totally different now,” he says. Mood triggers, for example, can help a brand tailor the most supportive and relevant message to audiences whose experience with the pandemic can wildly differ.

Test New Production Solutions at Speed

The speed at which the COVID-19 situation can change also poses a challenge to brands focused on keeping connected with their audiences throughout the full scope of the pandemic. For example, a brand might be set to launch a campaign, only to find that it’s suddenly no longer relevant. In addition to offering a dynamic campaign as mentioned above, brands must employ rigorous testing to understand how people are responding to creative week by week.

“Due to the fact that this is moving so quickly into unknown areas, brands must be able to galvanize and shift content immediately,” says Patrick Kirby, Digital Strategist at MediaMonks, noting that becoming more agile is essential to success.

Ways to do this include repurposing archival material for legacy brands who have it, turning to quick and versatile animation as a production alternative or encouraging UGC and influencer content to build community engagement. Each of these approaches enable brands to reallocate budgets or refresh existing content, but more importantly, they can do so at speed.

Redefine the Brand’s Role

More than simply continuing to advertise to consumers with conversion-based content, now is a good time for brands to truly focus on building brand value and becoming more purposeful. For example, while brands should tread lightly in approaching the current moment with humor, there is value in using creative to lift spirits and boost morale.

There’s a lot of talk too about how manufacturers have done substantial good by shifting operations to produce much-needed masks, hand sanitizer, ventilators and more. This approach isn’t practical for many—for example, smaller or mid-sized brands. But there are still opportunities to get creative in how you leverage your channels and platforms, like HP and Folding@Home’s initiative that encourages users to donate a fraction of their computing power to aid in the research toward a COVID-19 cure.

Such approaches are rooted in customer obsession, in which brands pool together resources to listen to the customer and deliver upon those needs. Willemijn Jongbloed, Digital Strategist at MediaMonks, notes how Nike was able to adapt well to offer value to consumers under quarantine thanks to its customer obsession strategy. MediaMonks has partnered with the athletic brand and Wieden+Kennedy to host a weekly series of livestreamed workouts that get people active and moving despite staying at home.

“When Nike moved into events, that was a bold move at the time, but now you can clearly see the many sides of the brand. In a time when people have largely stopped buying clothes, they have created the ability to move into online events, and thus can instantly serve their audience in a different way.” What makes the experience powerful isn’t just the product itself, she says, “but the full story around it—including all benefits, use cases, mindset and emotional connection that will set a company up for success.”

That drives home an important point for brands as they seek to engage with and support consumers over the next few months. Wielding brand voice in a global pandemic isn’t a matter of simply keeping your name out there or driving conversions; it’s also about building trust, becoming more purposeful and experimenting with more agile ways of working. As brands hone these skills now, they’ll emerge from the other end of the pandemic stronger than before, and their audiences will come to appreciate those efforts.

It’s fitting that the premier digital experience conference went all-digital this year, as just one of many tech conferences that have rapidly adapted their strategies in light of the COVID-19 pandemic—building the on-demand streaming alternative in just a month. Pictured above, you’ll see MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar speaking at Adobe’s last tentpole event, Adobe MAX.

This urgency for stronger digital experiences served as a key theme for the conference. “We are clearly living in unprecedented times,” said Adobe Chairman, President and CEO Shantanu Narayen. “COVID-19 is changing everything about life and work as we know it. Now more than ever, we must come together as a community to share best practices to digitally engage with customers.”

During the keynote address, Adobe unveiled new tools and updated features that can help brands provide a better customer experience and reach their business goals: most notable is the Digital Economy Index, a tool that analyzes more than a trillion online transactions across 100 million product sales to help brands understand, act on and anticipate digital commerce trends. In addition to that and new updates to Adobe Experience Cloud Manager, Narayen called for a stronger relationship between CMOs and CIOs as brands spend 2020 refocusing their digital strategies and seek new ways to connect all known user data across the customer journey.

Digital is Table Stakes, and Brands Need to Adapt

 “Whether you’re replacing an in-person conference with a digital event, or working to engage with your customers virtually, the theme is the same: digital is revolutionizing how we interact with each other,” said Narayen. This sentiment has become all the more obvious in the past month, in which social distancing policies have shed a spotlight on the gaps that brands must fill in their digital transformation efforts and the need for emotionally resonant creative digital experiences.

Today, customer experiences are much more than just delivering delightful and relevant experiences in real time, it is supporting the users’ needs in an almost completely digital world. From e-commerce services bringing products to our door, to paperless contracts and virtual offices, or digital tools enabling students to continue with their education, “digital isn’t only changing and reshaping our daily lives, it’s driving the economy,” says Narayen.

This change isn’t exactly new, but has become a moment of reckoning for brands. “Everything has been moving remote and online in one way, shape or form over the years,” says Henry Cowling, Managing Director at MediaMonks San Francisco, in our most recent report on reactivating customer obsession. “This is the chance for brands to really look at that, and reinvent how the digital experience looks and feels, because they’ll need to do it eventually.” 

The Moment for Real-Time CX is Here

Prioritizing customer experience management has become fundamental in a world dominated by digital interactions. Users expect more and demand more from brands, and they do not have the patience to wait for it, they want it all right now. Brands need to understand and use their data to craft a personalized and relevant experience that their users will enjoy in real time.

In one breakout session, Adobe Principal Product Manager Trevor Paulson reassured audiences, “Almost everyone is trying to better understand the entire customer journey across all their channels … So, if you think you’re behind your competition, chances are you’re probably not.” Among the top challenges in customer journey analytics he identified are disconnected data, not enough data expertise and inability to action insights—each of which inhibit a brand’s ability to meet its audience’s needs throughout the full, end-to-end brand experience.

Cross-functional collaboration helps brands gather together diverse knowledge and expertise to bridge these gaps. Successfully achieving data-driven creative workstreams is key to building the creatively differentiated experiences that build brand love, assisting consumers wherever and whenever it’s most needed along the CDJ.

Get Ready for a Cookie-less Future

Third-party cookies have been a key part of digital experiences for a long time, but that is coming to an end. With browsers having banned them gradually over the last years, Google announced a few months ago that it will eliminate all third-party cookies in 24 months. We are entering a new era of cross-domain personalization enabled only for known users.

“Cookies aren’t that good for marketing, they overstate how many people brands are actually reaching, they lead to wrong demographic targeting, they miss conversions that are happening, and they overrepresent the individual you are trying to target,” said Justin Merickel, VP of Adobe Advertising Cloud. “They haven’t been great at providing the value that they were set out to do.”

“Delivering personalized experiences at scale requires rethinking the approach to data,” says Pari Sawant, Director of Product Management at Adobe. First, they must remember that personalization should aim to truly help consumers; and to execute on that need, they must realize the power of context over relentless retargeting.

Knowing that brands will soon not be able to use third-party data, which today may make up a good portion of all their data points, they need to rethink how they use it to build truly valuable experiences by owning, operating and maximizing first-party data. Data clean rooms offer one interesting solution; as brands aim to reinvent their CX strategies or digitally transform in a fast-changing digital landscape, brands can lean on their creative partners to highlight new technologies as they emerge and determine which make the best fit.

Customers Expect Control All Across their Journey

For decades consumers were forced to stay static and receive an experience where they had no input whatsoever, but with the emergence of digital and mobile environments, they have become empowered, and they know it. Consumers expect to have a say on everything, from the decisions they make, to the content they consume, at every single touch point. 

For decades, consumers have had little control over how their data was used by brands. But with brands focused on a need for building first-party relationships a cookie-less world, an opportunity emerges for them to empower customers. to become active participants in the creative experiences they consume. There needs to be a clear value exchange for users to part with their data, further driving home the need for content to be assistive. This approach requires brands to take ownership of the customer relationship.

The bar has been raised for consumers and brands alike, particularly when it comes to digital native newcomers who have forged deep relationships with consumers by aligning purpose with data-driven creativity. “The experiences they receive in the applications and services they use online every day have led them to demand the same from every brand they deal with,” said Nick McLachlan, Product Marketing lead for Advertising Cloud in APAC at Adobe. Between 65% and 70% of consumers expect highly contextual, personalized experiences in real time.

Brands face a unique challenge in order to fulfill the customers’ expectations; they need to create strategies that cater to those needs across every channel, taking a user-centered approach to how they do business. These challenges have come to a head in a year where fractures in brands’ existing digital strategies are apparent. Thankfully, the Adobe Summit streaming platform goes live at the perfect time for brands to begin refocusing their strategies for the rest of the year and beyond.

With social distancing taking hold around the world, people are turning toward screens and machines now more than ever for connection, comfort and entertainment. Despite this unprecedented opportunity to connect directly with consumers through content, many brands feel hampered by those same social distancing policies, which limit their ability to produce content.

Whether stuck working at home or seeking a partner somewhere in the world who can safely secure a shooting location, there’s never been a more necessary time for speed, quality and value. Thankfully, even if mobility and personnel are seriously limited, you can still strategize around offering impactful content with just a single room, a single actor and a smart media plan, which was the recipe used for our Northgate Market Super Bowl campaign.

We’re confident that resourceful brands of any size can likewise generate high-quality content under great restraint, including at home. Below are just a handful of ways that they can do so, either by themselves or with the guidance of a creative and production partner.

Considerations for Shooting at Home

Livestreaming is a relatively simple alternative for brands seeking to build an authentic, transparent connection to those at home. In fact, TV broadcasters around the world have begun livestreaming their reportage from home offices, sometimes even with a pet in tow. While livestreaming is great for maintaining a connection with audiences, brands should pay special care toward having the necessary equipment setup—even for the simplest of livestreamed experiences.

“Livestreaming has a lot better value than most people think,” says Lewis Smithingham, Director of Creative Solutions at MediaMonks. “But while people don’t need satellite, giant server farms or origin servers, it’s worth asking yourself: what happens if I lose my feed, if my kid kicks out my power cable, or the dishwasher blows a fuse?” Anticipating hiccups like these in a professional context becomes especially imperative given the fact that networks are under strain while millions of people work from home or stream content simultaneously.

Partnering with an influencer can mitigate some of these concerns: they offer that same penchant for authenticity and are well-experienced when it comes to connecting with fans at home. The more casual atmosphere of an influencer speaking directly to their close audience can also ease worry about a momentary loss of connection. In addition, content creators are adept at producing first-rate content at home without the need for having a director “on set” to achieve quality, having all of the equipment on-hand that they need.

And speaking of equipment for producing traditional video: while rental houses may still be open in some parts of the world, you can never be too certain when situations change overnight. This is where there’s still value in leaning on a global partner who can zero in and identify regions that safely and securely enable production.

But a safer bet would be to simply use your smartphone, if nothing else is readily available. Their cameras have become so advanced that any flagship phone is likely to offer a professional-grade output. (If you don’t believe us, have a look at any of these films shot on smartphones.)  That said, different teams using different devices can lead to compatibility issues; for example, some phones might be more difficult to export to post than others due to differences in file type or software compatibility.

Can’t Shoot Anything New? Easily Refresh Existing Assets Instead

This moment offers an opportunity for brands to really get creative and think more agile in terms of content production—and one of the simplest ways to do so is by refreshing or optimizing existing content in a way that quickly results in relevant assets at scale. We’ve taken a similar approach in transforming a handful of existing assets into a social awareness campaign that grew more effective week after week, using performance metrics to continually optimize and drill deeper into audience segments.

This same method could be incredibly useful for brands who must reassess a content strategy, optimizing it to better reach consumers at home via digital channels. When high-quality stock video is added to the mix, you can keep your creative content current by translating the brand narrative to different contexts with the footage available.

But a more unique way to refresh existing content and offer something new is through animation. There are a handful of different techniques used by our global animation team to produce animations for brands, two of which work well with existing assets: the cut-out technique, which animates flat assets and backgrounds, or 2D motion graphics. Both of these methods are highly scalable, adaptable and fast to produce, making it easier to squeeze value or quickly iterate new content when needed.

Innovate with Entirely New Ways to Shoot

Before social distancing, a lot of businesses balked at the thought of remote work—and most of them probably discovered they can remain just as productive from afar after all. The same can be said for shoots on set; consider having a production team—with minimal personnel to ensure regional safety regulations—overseen by your team via livestream, as if you were there in-person. A team distributed across the globe can help identify where and when these opportunities are possible, ensuring they’re executed with safety and security in mind.

Those with bigger expectations in mind can take a cue from game engines. “If I were a camera operator, I’d be learning how to operate a camera virtually,” says Smithingham. “Do an activation within an online game. There are ways around this and do shoots virtually; if you look at The Mandalorian, the whole thing was shot in one room. Brands can lean into that and do wild and crazy stuff.”

Content shot within a virtual space would certainly challenge brands to rethink their content production strategy. But it could also help them be seen as innovators—and become more relevant at a critical moment: interest in videogames has spiked in the past few weeks as a means of entertainment and gathering with friends virtually.

By marrying together a technical and creative mindset, brands can find the most effective and accessible solutions to generating content while working from home. “We don’t think anything is impossible,” says Smithingham. “From ensuring livestreams don’t miss a beat to connecting with content creators who have high-end tools in house already, any challenge is doable or fixable.”

There are more ways to (Re)Activate Customer Obsession.