March began with the ANA Brand Masters conference in Scottsdale, AZ, where some of the world’s leading brands gathered to discuss their unique approaches to marketing, developing strategies that are highly effective and drive results.

ANA CEO Bob Liodice set the focus in his opening remarks: “What do you want to do with your brand?” he asked the audience, building an imperative for change and reinvention. “It’s the most important asset your company has. And we need to think about this intelligently, dynamically and with great purpose.” Those three points exemplify what’s top-of-mind for brand marketers today, as they confront a need to adapt at a time of hyperadoption, in which new consumer behaviors are adopted and dropped at an ever-quickening pace.

But transformation isn’t a simple task for many organizations to wrap their heads around, and ANA Brand Masters wasted no time in exploring how legacy brands—for whom transformation efforts can become highly complex—have adapted by translating consistent values into bold ideas.

Brad Hiranaga, Brand Marketer at General Mills, described how the 150-year-old business retains relevance with today’s audiences. His point that “If you’re going to get fired for an idea, it’s probably a good one” went over well with the audience, showing how important it is that brands be a bit gutsy in their approach to solving challenges—for example, Cheerios giving away free breakfast to the entire city of Buffalo, NY, or Totino’s doubling down on a 4/20 campaign that other, more conservative brands, might have found too risky. At the end of the day, what matters to the brand should be what matters to the audience, and General Mills seemed to have discovered a winning recipe for keeping up with its target.

Test and Learn to Deliver What Audiences Crave

So, how does a brand identify the best opportunity—or know whether an idea is effective? A couple speakers at the event discussed the strategies they use to identify customer needs and white spaces to fulfill. Lesya Lysyj, CMO at The Boston Beer Co., went in-depth on how the beermaker uses an agile practice to quickly zero in and iterate upon new ideas, translating learnings into growth opportunities.

Noticing overwhelming sameness across the beer category, The Boston Beer Co. wanted to differentiate in a significant way. They developed a new beverage tailored toward women, only to discover that more men made up the audience than originally anticipated. Rather than scrap the product for failing to appeal to the target in mind, The Boston Beer Co. simply transformed its packaging to fit the new one. Lysyj summarizes this approach simply: “Get it out fast, even if it’s wrong,” she said. Then, iterate it based on feedback and new insights.

Using this strategy, Lysyj says that brands of any size can become challengers in their own right. Firewood Marketing, which merged with MediaMonks last year, uses a similar process called “progressive branding.” “In today’s market, where technology moves marketing at a rapid pace, innovation comes from our ability to invent and try on the go,” says Marco Ianucci, Senior Director, Strategy at Firewood. “The conversation with consumers is two-way, and marketers no longer own their message outright.” A focus on data is crucial for iterating on this process: “It’s less about ‘nailing the idea the first time’ and more about ‘here’s how we think a few options may resonate,’ and then use performance metrics to guide,” says Ianucci.

Drive Emotional Connection by Recognizing Consumer Insights

Lysyj wasn’t the only one who had something to say about insights-driven marketing. In her talk, “Brand with Iconic Roots Driving Future Growth,” Kim Yates, VP of New Brand and Business Model Development at Russell Stover Chocolates, discussed how insight on the joy of gifting—or the emotional benefit that gifting provides for the giver as well as the receiver—became  a foundation for driving emotionally resonant experiences.

Similarly, Dove’s Director of Masterbrand US Engagement Molly Kennedy mentioned how its award-winning and culturally significant “For Real Beauty” campaign—which aimed to help women feel more confident in their bodies—was inspired by a key societal insight: that only 2% of women around the globe call themselves beautiful.

For brands to truly connect with audiences, it’s critical that they recognize opportunities to put emotion into the code of the total brand experience. To this effect, Manos Spanos, SVP/CMO of Brand – Yogurt BU at Danone, called today’s consumers “chronically distracted” by an unprecedented volume of content clutter. How do brands cut through the noise? By recognizing that “People don’t need great ads, they need great storytelling,” Spanos says, a point that MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar made in conversation with Adobe last year.

Automation and Authenticity Aren’t Mutually Exclusive

Ensuring efforts like those outlined above requires carefully weaving together data, automation and creativity. “Meaningful human interactions must coexist with marketing automation and digitization,” explained Vinoo Vijay, CMO of H&R Block, in discussing how critical the role of personalization is in inspiring confidence for consumers during tax season and beyond.

Later in the conference, Ann Rubin, VP Corporate Marketing at IBM, discussed the role that purpose plays in establishing a leading brand—and that it’s important to not only listen to data, but your customers as well. This approach helped the company break down concerns and fears the public had about AI with its Watson technology. Since then, the brand has made an excellent commitment to telling authentic stories about its impact on the world, an example being their feature-length documentary “Code & Response,” which MediaMonks helped produce last year.

Focused mostly on transformation, relevance and emotion, the running theme at this year’s ANA Brand Masters conference may as well be simply listening more to your consumers, whether that be through active research, data optimization or adopting a more human-centric approach to product and experience design. By making a commitment to better recognize and react to consumers’ shifting needs, brands position themselves to remain relevant into the future—and the brands on stage at ANA Brand Masters are a testament to that.

This week, marketers descended upon San Diego for ANA’s Digital & Social Media Conference, where representatives from top brands within their respective industries spoke about their approaches to digital marketing. An over-arching theme of the event was how digital experience (DX)—through a combination of investments in emerging tech, supporting cultural moments and delivering authentic social content—builds brand love in an era where consumers are increasingly critical (and annoyed by) online advertising.

From machine learning to influencer marketing to programmatic, ANA’s speakers covered it all. We’ve cherrypicked the highlights to keep you up-to-date on where top brands have met success, and the learnings they’ve taken from it.

Being a “Challenger” Brand Isn’t About Size—It’s Attitude

When you think of challenger brands, you probably think of smaller, up-and-coming brands that have sprung onto the scene with disruptive strategies that upend their respective industries. But even established, legacy brands can be challengers in their own right. Sharing the stage with representatives from VMLY&R in the talk “How Inventive Brand Experiences Are Powering New Balance’s Success,” New Balance Global Consumer Marketing Director Allie Tsavdarides positioned the athletic brand as a challenger dedicated to seeking out ways to do things smarter.

Amplify your team’s DX capabilities across the full customer journey.

One way to do this? Injecting the brand with some cultural relevance by “looking to engage in a cultural point in time.” Going far beyond tweeting a message acknowledging a holiday or event, New Balance’s interest lies in taking a more strategic approach to cultural moments. Both the brand and its agency showcased their Runaway Pub, a pub opened in the lead-up to the London Marathon, where runners could pay for drinks with digital points earned by succeeding in a series of running challenges.

The campaign leveraged a cultural moment that inspired many to achieve their running and fitness goals, giving runners a space not only to train, but to connect and unwind over a couple of (free!) pints. MediaMonks helped bring the experience to life by enabling the integration between fitness app Strava—which measured users’ running progress—and the digital wallet, and by producing a clever bartender web app to ensure simple, seamless service.

Embrace Being a Work-in-Progress

New Balance wasn’t the only legacy brand embracing tech in innovative ways. In his talk “From Bad Pizza to Machine Learning,” Domino’s VP of Digital Marketing and Global Ecommerce Christopher Thomas-Moore discussed how important it is for brands to consider themselves as works-in-progress. While many brands might find discomfort in the move-fast-and-break-things attitude popularized by startups, Thomas-Moore suggests the secret to the Domino’s pizza sauce is being an early adopter of emerging tech.

“Being an early adopter allows your brand to understand and refine,” he said. So is Domino’s—who’s prototyped delivery robots, self-driving cars, an order-taking chatbot and was named 2018’s Tech Accelerator of the Year—a tech company, or a pizza company? For Thomas-Moore, everything ties back to the core product; if the pizza weren’t good, after all, no one would want to eat it. “If we could get our product right, then the other pieces would fall in place,” he told the audience.

MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar says that “Real innovation lies in learning how to start matching your products and services to evolve with user behavior.” It’s through this desire to constantly iterate that brands like Domino’s and New Balance can adopt a challenger mindset.

You Can’t Beat a Good Story

In her talk “Target: Innovation Driven by the Basics,” Kristi Argyilan—President of Target’s in-house media company Roundel—gave a peek at how the retailer generates results for its partners and itself: relevance. Mentioning shuttered retailers like Toys ‘R’ Us, The Limited and Circuit City, Argilyan noted that “what every failure has in common is that it was preceded by a loss of relevance.” (It’s worth noting that Toys ‘R’ Us may have learned its lesson, with plans to return just in time for the holidays with a renewed focus on experience.)

Retailers—and brands in general—are at a crossroads on delivering more relevant messages and experiences to their consumers, who are spread across many different channels along the path to purchase. Target’s Roundel media company exists to hit a bullseye on consumer needs by pushing relevant content tailor-made for Target guests.

From applying the retailer’s own insights to crafting creative and picking the most relevant channels, Roundel, quite simply, is dedicated to giving people what they want. “People don’t like online ads,” says Argyilan. “They like good stories.”

With user journeys becoming increasingly fragmented, these stories will need to fit within a larger strategic narrative that can be easily reconfigured to different segments and channels. In the conference’s first kickoff session, “From Alligator to Zebra: Digital Storytelling at the San Diego Zoo,” the zoo’s Director of Marketing Debra Erickson discussed how “a great story is great, and it’s platform-agnostic.”

But how do brands envision a platform-agnostic story? Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell noted later during the conference that the “big idea” approach is outdated, and that brands must leverage data to address end-to-end customer journeys. Along these means, Argyilan noted the importance of leveraging partnerships—even for in-house media companies like Roundel—to expand a brand’s capabilities for maintaining relevance across channels and from all directions in the decision-making process.

First and Foremost, Social is About People

If anyone understands applying data to achieve relevance, it’s MGM Resorts. Their VP of Social Portfolio Strategy, Beverly Jackson, spoke about how data is key to meeting customers’ expectations. But just as important is authenticity, which the brand maintains through social-first, fit-for-format content.  Some of Jackson’s most interesting ideas were about social: “Selling FOMO is becoming just as important as selling a ticket,” she said.

According to Jackson, “social marketing is on the frontlines of bringing the brand promise to life.” By applying data-driven insights to content that in turn drives experiences, the brand has adopted a lean, nimble approach to social marketing that helps it better deliver upon consumers’ shifting expectations.

One of the key ways that MGM inspires consumers is through strategic influencer partnerships—and they weren’t alone. In her talk “Creating Digital Content That Sparks Engagement,” Emeline Berlind, VP of Content Strategy at Sephora, mentioned that “social was created for people, not brands,” highlighting the unique points of view that influencers offer to brands and their audience. As for how to remain authentic in these partnerships, she said that “It’s a balancing act … We can’t be too prescriptive with the brief. We create guidelines, but are not prescriptive.”