Today’s CMOs have a lot on their plate: their role is increasingly responsible for overall business growth, managing brand communications, customer experience and in some cases the adoption of new technologies. Each of these responsibilities touch upon the different ways that consumers interact with a brand, making it essential for CMOs—and their teams—to manage a wide-lens view of the consumer journey. But in order to successfully integrate business objectives with data and customer experience, they’ll need to establish marketing strategies in which both work hand-in-hand to support one another.

By achieving this through constant performance measurement and optimization of content, organizations empower themselves to adopt a more agile process of marketing, which enables them to rapidly experiment and optimize campaign content and media spend through engagement. This culture of experimentation—with results to back it up—is key to achieving the always-on stream of content that today’s consumer expects, offering several relevant, personalized permutations of a message rather than the “big idea” campaign that was so popular in the past.

Close the Loop on End-to-End Marketing

Effective marketing today isn’t born just from an initial set of figures, but in fact results in new data that can be used to further optimize that content. This strengthens the creative so that it remains relevant to consumers along the digital journey. Whether an initial set of metrics lives up to expectations or not, data-confident organizations that continually measure performance may use those insights to increase content effectiveness, save in costs over the long-term and maintain trust in their creative partners.

Think about what a campaign that uses data poorly looks like. We’ve all found ourselves haunted by a product we’ve viewed (or even purchased) in our travels across the internet—an experience that can come off as annoying or even downright creepy. That this situation is all too common demonstrates how brands often miss key opportunities for effective retargeting or adapting their message to consumers’ changing priorities or intents. Those who continually optimize content through an agile process rapidly gain and apply new insights to adapt their message to the consumer’s interests or place in the sales funnel, resulting in more relevant and effective targeting.

We took this end-to-end approach in a recent awareness campaign for Gladskin, the Dutch skincare brand, and their award-winning acne treatment. The processes described below enabled the brand to five-times lower CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) and higher-than-forecasted reach. To achieve this, we measured what content brought audiences past initial engagement, then applied those insights to continually change the positioning, messaging and creative for greater results.

Optimizing Content for Increased Relevance

As with any campaign, this one began with an initial set of research on a hypothesized audience. Through preliminary engagements from consumers, we were able to quickly zero in on key insights that informed the next phase of production and user targeting. For example, we noticed that Instagram Story content focusing on models’ faces performed especially well in the awareness stage; this content achieved a 37% higher CTR than story content that focused on the product’s effect on the skin.

This aligned well with what you would expect from a platform like Instagram, as the face-focused content was akin to your standard beauty deliverable. But we found that the opposite was true in the consideration phase: Instagram Story content that performed better at this stage fixated on the skin and science behind the product.

Similarly, content that drove more users to convert focused on the research behind the product’s award-winning formula and customer testimonials, depending on the format used. The former was most effective with carousels that let users dive deeper into the product benefits in detail, while the latter performed best in single-image link ads.

Which type of message performs best per platform or format isn’t set in stone; it’s different per campaign, driving home the importance of closely measuring performance across the course of any campaign. But what both winning formats in the consideration and purchase phases had in common was that they provided consumers with justification to buy after their interest had initially been piqued, a key insight for subsequent retargeting efforts.

One can imagine how sticking to a single type of content throughout the consumer journey is comparatively ineffective in pushing consumers through the funnel; think back on that example of a product listing stalking a customer who happened upon it once. By highlighting new insights through frequent A/B testing, we could rapidly remix transformable assets into more and more attractive deliverables—and even support new creative formats, like Instant Experiences on Facebook.

Boost ROI with Optimized Spend

Cracking the code to the most thumb-stopping, relevant messages to consumers is one thing, but it doesn’t do anyone good when those messages fall on deaf ears. In addition to optimizing content, agile marketing processes let you plug data in to deeply target new groups (or continue to retarget engaged ones) for continued success.

For Gladskin, we worked with Brainlabs (an award-winning digital marketing agency) on a new approach to organizing target interests. Rather than sort them by theme—in this case, things like “teenage skincare” or “acne treatment”—we identified how well each individual interest performed. From there, we divided the top-performing ones from the bottom.

Weekly reporting enabled us to continually replace the lowest-performing interests with new ones. Over time, this process will result in ever-higher engagement rates and reach into new, increasingly relevant audiences over the course of the campaign. Tied with the process of optimizing insights-driven content as detailed above, this end-to-end approach is truly reactive to audience engagements and intents.

As measurement becomes increasingly essential for CMOs to improve customer experience, increase communication effectiveness and drive overall business goals, brands must embrace agile processes that allow for the continuous optimization of campaigns. This repeated experimentation through closed-loop, end-to-end systems provides brands with the insights they need to achieve specific business outcomes for long-term success.

Performance marketing is just the first step.

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.

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.

Brands face several challenges when it comes to using data effectively: organizing it in a way to ensure that it’s usable, extracting actionable insights that optimize creative, and envisioning how to translate abstract data into tangible value. That’s why we recently released Unlocking Data & Silos to Enhance Creative Potential, a guide touching upon each of these issues and more, opening with a foreword that explores one of the most urgent challenges defined by Forrester that CMOs face today: solving the CMO-CIO paradox at a time when both roles’ strategic alignment is so crucial to organizational success. You can read the foreword below, or grab the ebook in full right here.

The promise of big data was always to give organizations the insights they required to take their relationship with consumers to the next level. While some have achieved this, others have struggled to digitally transform and transition into an environment in which they can organize and activate the mountains of data that they’re sitting on.

This might make it sound like big data is a big problem for some, but that’s a defeatist way of looking at things; rather, the challenge offers an opportunity for organizations to break down silos and work together more effectively, particularly when it comes to the relationship between CMOs, CIOs and their teams. CMOs find themselves tasked with driving organizational growth through their ownership of the brand-customer experience, for example, and doing so requires joining together multiple streams of data into a comprehensive, single view of the customer—which means a data architecture must be in place to define the data and KPIs necessary to measure results and infer more about consumers.

Of course, this presents an excellent opportunity for CIOs to tie their technology strategy to clear business goals, elevating their role into a more strategic one. The problem? In most organizations, the CMO and CIO aren’t closely aligned. In fact, Forrester Research reports that only 16% of B2C decision makers say that their roles function together as strategic partners. 35%, meanwhile, say that IT merely manages one-off projects that are prioritized by the needs of the company.

One way for CMOs to kickstart a closer relationship with their CIO is to build a unified data strategy and break down silos in the process. Historically, both have had differing business perspectives—sometimes so misaligned that marketing teams would turn to external point solutions rather than rely on IT for handling data. Such practices have only widened the divide even further because data extracted this way is often framed for a specific purpose and incompatible with other systems used within the organization—diminishing CMOs’ ability to forecast into the future and truly lead in the digital transformation process.

This presents the ultimate irony: CMOs find themselves with greater responsibility to drive growth and serve the brand strategically, yet often find marketing projects deprioritized. Strengthening their relationship with IT is key in establishing the tools they need to deliver on this responsibility, but first they must increase their data literacy and learn to better align marketing KPIs to clear business outcomes that move the needle.

With a greater understanding of data strategy and how to support it with a cross-organizational data architecture, CMOs can achieve the buy-in they need from IT and the brand as a whole—and take back control at a time when extracting consumer insights at a quickened pace has become so critical. According to the same Forrester report noted above, CIOs who have worked closely with their CMOs report a 1.3-time likelihood of substantial growth year over year. Now that’s a data point to get excited by. Through the lens of attaining a better understanding of your consumers and enhancing the power of creative, this book sets out to show how you, too, can break down silos and elevate your role into a strategic driver of growth.

There are many more benefits to strengthening your data strategy.

Brands have felt the pressure from digital-native, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands in more ways than one. A primary advantage that DTC brands have over others is that they’re closely aligned with consumer data. The benefits to this are two-fold: first, it’s enabled them to establish stronger, more relevant marketing strategies with first-party data. Second, it provides insights needed for product development, placing the brands’ focus and output squarely on customers and their needs.

Popular DTC beauty brand Glossier, for example, leverages its close connection to consumers to innovate new products—like its dual makeup remover and face cleanser, inspired by insights that its customers washed their face in two steps by using two different products. It’s an example of how the brand places its customers at the forefront of product and brand strategy, whereas the focus of legacy CPG brands may lie in retailers.

Achieve Greater Storytelling with Integrated Production

Digital-native brands are well-versed in telling their brand story effectively through social media. Without other outlets at their disposal, they had to build buzz this way, and it’s that do-or-die struggle to build a brand in an intensely competitive digital environment that has allowed successful digital-native brands to establish the customer relationships envied by other brands, who have struggled to translate their identity into digital.

And this is where most brands have faltered in their story: eschewing digital-first content for the traditional “big idea.” While an impressive TVC is still useful for broad reach, it’s ill-equipped to achieve the relevancy required by today’s consumers, who are trained to tune out information that doesn’t immediately purport to serve them.

“These brands tend to create a more traditional piece, then re-edit to tell a story in hindsight,” says Olivier Koelemij, Managing Director at MediaMonks LA. One need only look at a widescreen TVC awkwardly clipped into a vertically consumed, 6-second social ad to see why it doesn’t work.

What brands should do instead, says Koelemij, is connect data and media strategy with creative ahead of moving into production. This enables a strategy for producing content that’s fit for format. While that might sound overwhelming for brands that aren’t fluent in the nuances of different channels and how users interact on them, Koelemij assures brands that “This approach is often cheaper and more efficient, because it’s easier to post-produce.”

There are many other ways brands can achieve more for less.

Efficiency isn’t just a matter of getting things done quickly. It’s transforming your production process into actionable results. “Efficient creative drives tangible business effects, is instrumental to cultural change or integral in the achievement of brand purpose,” says Louise Martens, Global Head of Content Studios at MediaMonks. By investing strategically in the right channels and adopting smarter production processes, brands can better validate their purpose and draw in audiences with greater relevance.

Begin Your Creative Process with a Channel Strategy

“Where the sweet spot lies in integrated production is connecting creative and media strategy before production,” says Koelemij. “The focus should line up with the media spend.” This equips brands to build content tailor-made for the different channels they’ll support over the course of a campaign, rather than treat them as an afterthought—promising greater relevance and effectiveness in the process.

“The problem lies in not thinking about your channels and audience when initiating creative,” says Koelemij. He suggests focusing on a creative insight (much like the big idea that traditional brands are so used to thinking about), but following through with several “little-big” ideas that are optimized per channel.

So, what would a good YouTube-first video look like, for example, opposed to a cut-down TVC? We made a whole series of them for feminine hygiene brand Always. CPG brands have perhaps felt the biggest competition from DTC brands, which have built brand loyalty through direct customer relationships that traditional CPG brands tend to miss out on.

Still, best-in-class creative provides brands the opportunity to build valuable customer relationships. In this case, the goal was to help Always strike a bond with girls as they fielded questions about their first period or other concerns about puberty. Our video series, titled “Girl Talk,” features episodes that dive into these topics through the questions that young girls may feel too embarrassed to ask friends or family about.

Taking the form of an upbeat quiz show, the videos fit well within the context of self-researching awkward questions. With a fun format and cheerful animations that look like they’ve jumped right off the pages of a marble composition notebook, the videos serve as a great example of what can be achieved by planning and executing the entire process efficiently—through ideation to production and finally editing in animations for an added dose of relatability.

To help brands achieve this faster than ever before, we opened a new production studio as part of our new Venice Beach office in Los Angeles, California. The all-white photo studio is versatile and easily customizable to a brand’s stylistic or content needs, including multi-camera interviews, gorgeous tabletop shots and straight-to-camera scenes. With two full editing bays on premises, teams can immediately post-produce or edit film and photos while shooting simultaneously, offering a more streamlined production process.

“You can walk in with your actors and team in the morning, then exit at the end of the day with all of your assets—all optimized,” says Koelemij. And that’s another benefit to producing transformable, fit-for-format content: you can quickly adapt the content depending on what works and what doesn’t.

“Fit-for-format ideation blows traditional creative concepting out of the water in terms of results,” says Martens, mentioning how online retailer Chewy saved $10K in just a week after we re-edited and optimized their creative into a YouTube-first format. Brands that take a more strategic approach to their channel strategy, and integrate it into the earliest phases of the creative process, can likewise optimize their production to drive results.

The back-to-school season is incredibly important for retailers: an Adobe roundup of back-to-school stats notes that the shopping season netted 17% of total retail sales in 2017, second only to holiday shopping. That’s a lot of pencils to sharpen! Adobe also notes a trend in families beginning their shopping earlier as years pass, and while most shopping is done in-store, a quarter of parents seek inspiration on social sites like Facebook.

With these insights in mind, it’s clear that relevance is tantamount to brands and retailers hoping to make the grade in the intensely competitive fall season. By bringing together data, media strategy and creative, brands stand to achieve much more relevant messaging whenever and wherever inspiration strikes the consumer—and save in cost and time to market in the process, too. As retailers pull into their most important time of the year, embracing a fit for format approach is key to optimizing exposure in a way that brings the greatest ROI.

Achieve Versatility and Consistency with Fit for Format

With the customer journey spread across channels, relevance is key—not just in terms of content, but also how you frame it up. Every asset should be designed to provide value in the environment where consumers will find it, but developing this volume of content can be a great challenge for brands at first glance. If this sounds familiar, a production partner can help augment your team to scale up production for more assets, relevance and exposure.

This challenge is especially felt by retailers in back-to-school season because there are so many products to highlight and feature, from apparel to tech to school supplies or even dorm furniture. When Mexican department store Coppel wanted to celebrate the variety of savings in their 2019 back-to-school campaign, for example, they needed a partner that could provide an efficient creative process to produce format-ready assets at scale—a service that few production companies in the region are equipped to provide. Recognizing work that we had done with other major retailers like Ikea, Coppel’s agency Saatchi & Saatchi turned to the MediaMonks office in Mexico City for a unique mix of global perspective and amazing local talent to open their TVC script up to new variation and formats.

“Back to school is a very important moment for Coppel,” says Adrian Pastrana, Interactive Producer at MediaMonks. “Having a variety of assets enables Coppel to show their diversity of products, so supporting other digital formats in this way helps them feature more of their stock to the people most interested in it.” Over the course of a three-day shoot, the team produced 73 assets, ready for publishing in print, OOH and across a handful of social platforms.

The big idea approach that some brands favor doesn’t always lend well to this type of process. Instead, we recommend pursuing several smaller, interrelated ideas that share a sense of continuity and coherence. The concept that unites both the TVC and social aspect is the use of lighting on the set and the same main characters,” says Pastrana. “In this respect, we used the same resources to focus on different messages or categories per channel: the tech and home categories were highlighted in digital assets, for example, while we focused on apparel and Coppel’s promotion with the TVC.”

Context is About More than Place and Time

Relevance isn’t just about framing content in the right place and time. In the report “The Power of Customer Context,” Forrester Research notes the importance of taking a wider view of what context really encompasses, urging brands to consider the full scope of user journeys: “Work with your customer experience team to build a marketing strategy to address the end-to-end customer journeys—before, during, and after purchase.”

You must also build around behaviors native to the channels in which your audience engages. Recognizing the features through which teens express themselves on social media, Amazon sought a value-added way to promote its Amazon Teen program for 2018’s back-to-school season. Working with MediaMonks, the retailer didn’t just settle for a series of ads fit for Snapchat and Instagram to build buzz; in addition, we provided a platform that supported the way teens interact with one another digitally.

The resulting #GetTheYes campaign invited students to pitch parents to approve their back-to-school wish lists. The site used a familiar, sticker-like aesthetic that let users customize a message much like they would a Snapchat or Instagram story, letting them express themselves in a way that made sense—especially if they were led to the site via one of the Snap or Instagram ads, offering a seamless transition. It’s worth noting that the campaign also included Facebook ads that spoke to parents on their level, highlighting the importance of remembering that back-to-school is about speaking to both children and their parents, and the need to speak to what matters for both of them.

Study Hard and Make the Grade

What’s notable about back to school is that the season doesn’t have a specific opening or hard deadline; early-bird shoppers might begin their hauls in July, while others will wait into September. Use the long-lasting shopping season to your advantage by collecting insights from your campaign’s early days to optimize it over time. Easily transformable, format-ready content makes this process easier by allowing you to mix and match different layers of content—including products featured, composition and copy—and A/B test which performs best with which segments.

Doing so gives your brand a competitive edge in an incredibly important yet competitive shopping season. Equipped to produce a variety of versatile, fit-for-format content, you can give some love to the full extent of your products or offerings in a way that’s relevant to a wide variety of consumers, earning high marks into the following holiday season.

Localization is a key challenge for any brand targeting several geographic markets, whether they be multinational or domestic. The way you’ll talk to a New Yorker about pizza, after all, might resonate differently with an audience in Italy. This gets at the heart of what good localization really is: it’s not just a matter of translation, but of paying special care to include the smaller details and nuances that appeal to a specific market.

Pulling off this level of transcreation can be tough due to the sheer volume of assets needed per market, the knowledge required about what markets respond to, and complex processes that hamper brands’ abilities to push this content out efficiently. For organizations struggling with any of these challenges, an integrated production partnership can help optimize transcreation workflows and implement local to infuse campaigns with a high level of local relevance around the globe.

An integrated production partnership is a team custom-built for your brand and its specific needs. Rather than brief an agency on a project, an integrated partnership focuses on the long-term and can scale up or down according to your need, whether it be through growth in consistent, daily responsibilities or sudden one-off projects. Working partially in-house, an integrated team provides access to a varied talent base across the globe, making the model a practical solution for brands seeking to provide local relevancy to always-on content.

Streamline Production for Growth

Inefficient transcreation isn’t just a matter of audience reach; it can impede growth as well. For example, one of our integrated partners is a digital brand that’s experienced very rapid growth through the acquisition of local businesses. With every new acquisition and market came a new need for assets, burying their in-house studio with an ever-increasing workload. An integrated partnership enabled the brand to offload lower complexity tasks and speed up the production process to match the rate of growth.

For some brands, a social media presence or their chosen industry might require an ever-quickening pace of asset production. This challenge rises exponentially for those catering to different local markets. An entertainment brand, for example, must react to current events across markets with speed, understanding how a given story’s relevance might differ among those markets. Because integrated partnerships thrive on long-term relationships and provide organizations with teams that are dedicated to their brands, they can streamline the production process by enabling daily deliverables rather than use a project-oriented approach. When brands feel increased pressure to develop always-on content ecosystems targeting different markets and cultures, an integrated partnership with access to a global talent base is ideal for offering the right message at the right time.

Improve Consistency Across Markets with New Creative Frameworks

Offloading tasks is simple enough, though the true potential of an integrated partnership is to optimize workflows across levels of the production process. A common challenge for large, global organizations is that they juggle several vendors per market, which can complicate the production process or threaten quality and consistency.

Through the guidance or talent resources provided by an integrated partnership, brands can provide local markets with autonomy to tailor messaging without having to worry about inconsistent style or messaging. While it might seem as though such a partnership is inviting yet another outside vendor into the process, this model is developed for the long term around a sense of shared responsibility. Custom-built and engrained within your organization’s culture, integrated partnerships have deep knowledge of a brand and can therefore serve as a safeguard.

Let’s consider another partner as an example. Its US team controlled asset production in other markets including Asia, which resulted in messaging that wasn’t necessarily relevant to them. This prompted local markets to work with their own vendors to develop assets with more cultural relevance. While they succeeded in that effort, the new materials lacked consistency. As the adage says, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” In this case, inviting several voices and vendors in the mix resulted in an inconsistent brand experience.

Our solution was to find a way to give room for freedom and autonomy to local markets while still allowing for a centralized work stream. At MediaMonks, we’re well-experienced in producing assets at scale through a unique creative framework that allows for several variations with little rework or added cost. We adapted this process for our partner by producing a series of master templates which would ensure a consistent visual style, while also being easy for local markets to adapt. This approach maintained flexibility while also quickening the time to market. “What sets this process apart is that transcreation is kept at front-of-mind and engrained into the process rather than being treated as an afterthought,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks LA.

A Talent Studio That Knows Your Brand—And Your Local Audience

Finally, our integrated partnerships provide brands with access to an always-on, global talent studio that can easily place a brand in any market. When a brand sees an opportunity in a new market, we can tap into a local talent pool with an awareness of what resonates there. “This flexibility in matching organizations to the larger MediaMonks network whenever needed is one of the key capabilities of integrated partnerships,” says Martens, “and is especially helpful for organizations that know no borders.”

Whether your organization is eyeing opportunities in new markets, is dealing with an unmanageable workload or simply needs to ensure a greater level of consistency across markets, an integrated partnership makes for a versatile, scalable model designed to fit those needs. Once in place, your team is equipped to adapt to new opportunities and challenges that can help your organization work faster and more efficiently, resulting in better ways to meet the needs of your audience no matter where they call home.

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