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

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

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

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

Improve Connections by Fostering Interactions

In today’s changed landscape, brands can no longer rely on face-to-face interactions with their customers. “As we come to grips with a world where we can’t shortcut to experience through physical engagement and personal proximity, the challenge is to deliver on the original intent of digital,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar. “Interactive, tactile and personalized moments of magic that create conversation, conversion and commercial opportunities.”

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

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

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

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

There Are No Borders, Your Playground is Digital

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

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

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

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

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

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.