We have just released our latest Sound.Monks reel and, if I may say so myself, it’s a true earcatcher. Not just because it showcases our best work of the last few years, but also because it tells a much broader success story: the sound of multiple creative disciplines working together harmoniously. But before we dive into our sound team’s cross-country collaboration, let’s take a moment to spotlight sound itself.

Film award season is upon us, and we were delighted to find a friend of the Monks bestowed with high honors: Fredrik Bond, who was nominated for an Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials by the Directors Guild of America (DGA). And he’s in good company: other nominated directors include fellow MJZ member Spike Jonze and Ridley Scott.

Bond is already highly decorated, with nine career nominations under his belt, all for commercial pieces. In a profile on the director, DGA Quarterly magazine reported on Bond’s feelings toward working within the advertising industry: “He thrives on the collaboration with clients and agencies and the genre hopping he’s able to do in the work.”

We’re delighted to hear it, because we agree—MediaMonks collaborated with Bond on “Lighter Than Air,” a 60-second film promoting HP’s Elite Dragonfly convertible laptop. The film takes a humorous approach to showcasing the HP Dragonfly’s portability and versatility, and is one of three spots that secured Bond’s nomination. When we asked Bond for his thoughts on being recognized by the DGA, he said, “I feel truly honored to get selected by my peers and to be part of the group of nominees whose work I love, adore and constantly steal from.”

“A Hollywood Production, Condensed into 60 Seconds”

The idea behind the Dragonfly film, which humorously portrays a woman being carried ever-upward by her gravity-defying convertible laptop, is two-fold. First, it puts the product’s key feature—lightness—on full display. More meaningfully, it hints at the barrier-defying potential of both the product and the people who use it; as the woman is pulled higher and higher by the device, she quite literally breaks the glass ceiling along the way, until she is joined by her Dragonfly-toting cohorts towering over the world.

The creative process  thrived with a series of high-profile partners and best-in-class talent, including Bond from MJZ, The Mill (whose VFX work touches feature-length films) and Marshall Street Editors. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we were given the opportunity to elevate the genre with a premium quality of work. “HP’s ‘Lighter than Air’ encompassed literally everything you would expect from a high-profile Hollywood production, virtuously condensed into 60 seconds,” says Falk Eumann, Creative Director at MediaMonks leading the Dragonfly campaign.

Expanding the Big Idea

The campaign’s idea outlined above was bigger than the 60-second film at its center.  We don’t believe in cutdowns, and instead build fit-for-format content designed from the start for the channels and contexts in which consumers will find them. “During shooting, we were already thinking about which sequences could fit as a pre-roll,” says Eumann, noting that some sequences were shot in square as well for social channels. But we staged photoshoots simultaneous to the film’s shooting, too, resulting in content that wasn’t just format-optimized, but also format-exclusive.

Because so many of the shots involved both pyrotechnics and visual effects editing, it was a challenge to plan how each could be efficiently revised for the campaign’s various formats. But we made it work—while production is in our blood, we’re well-equipped to make efficiency gains wherever possible.

Making Impact Across Channels—and the World

We love the chance to tell a meaningful story steeped in cultural relevance. Recently, MediaMonks has beefed up its capacity to tell those stories at-scale. In November, we merged with the high-end production shop WhiteBalance, based in India. As a one-stop shop for premium content in India, WhiteBalance’s talent and tech-driven process enable us to expand our efforts in infusing cultural relevance around the globe—much like the solemn and beautiful “Journey to the Underworld” film that our Mexico City office made in collaboration with Mexican beer brand, Victoria, to celebrate the Day of the Dead.

This news follows last fall’s opening of our new film and content studio in the heart of Amsterdam, catering to a diverse clientele. “With fully equipped studios specializing in food, beauty and fashion videography on one hand as well as a team of dedicated creatives on the other, the way the office is set up is unique for The Netherlands,” says Vivian Opsteegh, Head of MediaMonks Film and Content. “And the office will also enjoy the support of a network of more than 1,100 Monks worldwide.”

Likewise, our LA office has similarly opened the doors to its own in-house production studio. Designed for versatility and delivery at speed, both studios put clients in close proximity to creative teams to aid in collaboration and time to market. From tighter integrated campaigns and a more seamless transition from shooting to post-production all in one space, the studio bolsters our promise to offer efficient, consistent and emotionally resonant content optimized for any channel.

In essence, what makes good storytelling are the people behind it. We’re honored to work with passionate tastemakers like Fredrik Bond, whether on our team or through partnerships, to enable a higher quality of creative across channels and around the world. Congratulations to Bond, and here’s to more nominations in the future!

Each Super Bowl, it’s not just the teams on the gridiron that are in a competitive mindset. Of course, the big game doubles as a competitive play for brands and advertisers, who treat the event as one of the biggest opportunities to make an impression on an unusually large TV audience.

Advertising has become so synonymous with the game that brands have begun releasing previews and prequels to ads in the weeks leading up to the game, drumming up excitement among consumers and effectively building an entire genre in the process. In this environment, how is a regionally based business supposed to capture anyone’s attention? It’s enough to make you think that the day is reserved for only the biggest brands—or is it?

Circus, who joined our big tent at the start of the year, didn’t think so. Through a clever mix of ultra-efficient production, ingenious media spend and close collaboration, a cunning campaign idea was born in 2019. Family-owned supermarket chain Northgate Market pre-empted some of the most buzz-worthy Super Bowl ads with pre-roll ads relevant to their content, a strategy that met so much success (including a Cannes Lion nomination) that we’ve built upon it further this year.

Raising Expectations—and the Bar—on Creative Production

The campaign relies on the relationship that digital streaming has with the Super Bowl ad frenzy. When brands release ad previews, consumers seek them out. And this is where we make a daring play: through a pre-roll offering a “behind-the-scenes” look at the ad viewers are about to see. For example, before watching an Avocados From Mexico spot (which features absurd ways to protect the delicate fruit), consumers within Northgate’s local region see a quick pre-roll in which a crew member on a film set carefully secures and delivers the prop avocado.

“After the success of last year’s effort, we knew there was an opportunity for us to own during one of the biggest weeks for Northgate,” says Nava. “Going into the second year we wanted to make sure we continue building in the same territory. All products you see on Super Bowl ads can be found at Northgate Markets, but this time we wanted to say that actual products being used to film those Super Bowl ads also came from the store by doing a fun, behind-the-scenes replica of each commercial.” This is referenced in the slogan for the campaign, “The big game ads start with us,” which directly ties to the brand’s message that “every visit has a story.”

A Genius Game Plan Built on Trust

The pre-rolls not only show that the product is available for purchase at Northgate Market, but also reference the themes and ideas behind the most talked-about Super Bowl ads: in the one mentioned above, Northgate’s crew member has the seriousness of a secret agent passing along classified information, seemingly elevating the avocado’s safety to national security-level. But because the content of any Super Bowl ad is only known a week or two before the big game, there was crucial little time to carry the campaign from concept to market.

Trust and swift collaboration were critical to the campaign’s high-risk, high-reward success. “There’s not a lot of room for back and forth between agency and client, because there’s no time,” says Nava. “The minute a spot is out, we need to prep and shoot for it, so Northgate was part of the process from the beginning, strategizing which products made the most sense for them to promote.”

While the “Super Bowl hijack” tactic was developed as a way to efficiently produce work within a short turnaround time before a major event, it serves as an excellent example of how brands can overcome a growing challenge that’s universally felt: the need to rapidly produce content around the clock. Whether it’s a need to keep up with the rate of conversation, produce always-on content streams or simply anticipate major cultural moments without being left behind, brands seek new ways to cut through the noise amidst fierce competition and dwindling resources. With full-service social media capabilities and as a leader in multicultural marketing, Circus bolsters our ability to produce and deliver relevant digital content at speed for all audiences—not without pulling some tricks in the process.

While traditional advertising was once the go-to strategy for driving awareness and large reach, the one-size-fits-all approach to creative is no longer effective for maintaining a close relationship with today’s digital audience. Because consumers crave personalization and relevance, brands that are truly customer-focused realize the need to tailor their content for specific formats and channels in which they engage.

Look at it this way: just a single piece of creative limits your ability to impact a wide audience that comprises a diversity of needs, or to provide distinct cultural relevance across many markets. For example, a celebrity ambassador might be perfect for one market, but virtually unknown in another; alternatively, markets may celebrate holidays unique to their culture.

Accounting for these variables requires brands to rethink the way they produce content. Many brands are still quick to implement a project-based approach that can result in inefficiencies to rework, transform and adapt—sometimes ending up with a disarray of many vendors, disconnected campaigns and an inconsistent consumer experience. But even those that have already begun with a traditional “big idea” can extend its value by adapting it into a fit-for-format digital campaign without simply cutting things down.

Instead, a more integrated approach begins by pulling together strategy, media planning and creative ideation from the start, aligning brand and partner on the same page. This empowers both teams to produce versatile, format-ready deliverables capable of accomplishing each campaign goal with just a few shoots done in a week or less, rather than scheduling several shoots a month or getting bungled up in rework.

Format-ready digital content also gives brands the opportunity to learn what type of messaging is most effective for their audience. “The outcome is much more measurable,” says Brett Stiller, Creative Monk at MediaMonks. “The brand can see what’s most effective.” These learnings can be applied to tweaking the assets the brand already has, or can inform the next campaign to make it even stronger.

Iterating the Fit-for-Format Story

Philadelphia Cream Cheese is well-known and deeply loved by many, but the product’s wide appeal and versatile reach means there’s a lot of ways to enjoy it; different countries each have their own favorite cream cheese-based snack, and while a bagel is a staple of American breakfasts, it just won’t cut it in England. Aiming to provide a mouth-watering message, Philadelphia needed a partner capable of adapting a selection of hero TVC scripts that could appeal to a variety of regional appetites.

Putting its extensive global knowledge to the test, the team was able to deliver over 900 assets from one week of shooting, enabling the brand to broadcast just 14 weeks after briefing. We achieved this by taking careful consideration of the many touchpoints that exist along the consumer journey—aiming not just to build awareness, but to direct consumers through the purchase funnel and across digital platforms. For this purpose, it’s important that a creative partner truly understands user behaviors for each format and is able to help your brand influence key decision moments for consumers.

Brands can take a similar approach to expanding their traditional campaigns into digital. Too often, the tactic that some brands use is cutting down their existing creative and trying to force it within the different social formats. But when Calvin Klein sought to expand the reach of a traditional campaign for their Eternity for Men fragrance, they knew they could provide a more meaningful and authentic message to consumers by building a social campaign from scratch, with thematic ties to the original creative.

This also offered an opportunity to refresh the brand, ensuring the digital campaign’s extension in reach would make an impact. “It nodded to the brand, but wasn’t fully ‘Eternity’ as you’ve known it before,” said Stiller. “Part of the work was updating that ethos, aesthetic and tone—extracting the stories from it and letting it reach into the right space.”

For example, while the original TVC focused on Jake Gyllenhaal, the digital one followed influencers as they reflect on the different roles they play in their lives, and how each affects their concept of masculinity. “The influencers are easier to identify with, as their lives are more attainable than a traditional celebrity,” said Sara Tunstall, Senior Content Producer at MediaMonks, “While celebrity fits the context of a TVC well, this approach is more natural to social.” Focused on what makes each subject unique, the campaign offers several opportunities for audiences to connect.

Planning and Trust are Key

The integrated production method can help brands extend the value of their core message and combine reach with added relevance, but the hyper-efficient process succeeds best when campaign needs and KPIs are carefully planned out at the start. Trust is key for any partnership, and careful communication and planning ensures that the creative team has the freedom to adapt a message in all the ways that make sense for the channels in which it lives, while easing any anxieties the brand may have.

For example, we understand that brands may feel overwhelmed by the need to review the high volume of assets made available with integrated production, which is why we’ve made tools in the past to streamline that process for them. If the brand is already well aware of elements or messaging that resonates best with their audiences through iterative testing, establishing those insights early on can ease the need for rework.

Integrated production offers a great way for brands to meaningfully expand their ideas and drive impact. Breaking down the “big idea” offers several possibilities to relate to audiences no matter their interests or channel of choice, helping to augment a brand’s goal to extend reach. With strong collaboration and trust between parties, brands can enjoy a much more efficient process for producing content that provides value to their audiences and achieves a faster time to market.

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.

Today’s marketing ecosystem relies on always-on content shared across many channels and tailored to individual user preferences. With new ways of delivering and consuming content comes a need for new ways of working and building partner relationships.

A Forrester report released in early 2019 explores the unique challenges that digital transformation poses to brands and CMOs in particular, who must ensure a better customer experience through the process. But that experience is impacted by a number of factors across the digital landscape, prompting organizations to rethink how they do business at every level. This can manifest in pivoting to new platforms, supporting new content channels or optimizing the production process for deliverables at scale.

Engaging in these challenges, brands are sure to highlight specific needs in their ongoing digital transformation. Once they’ve elevated this need—an optimized transcreation process, for example—brands require a new partnership model that can provide the needed expertise over the long term. According to the Forrester report mentioned above, “CMOs should challenge traditional agencies and insist on new pricing models — asking for a shared risk/revenue approach to test the willingness of their strategic partners to commit to results.”

Rising to meet this need is the integrated partner model, in which we custom-build teams centered on solving key challenges and specific needs for brands—a relationship so closely aligned that we don’t call them “clients,” but rather partners. In the center of this relationship (a unique blend of agency, consultancy and semi in-house/semi-global studio) is the brand ambassador, who cements the relationship between us and our partners.

Strategizing with Shared Risk and Goals

A key benefit of the integrated production partnership is that your custom-built team can reside in-house on a permanent or partial basis. The proximity that the brand ambassador has between an organization and the larger MediaMonks network allows for more quick, agile response to the brand’s needs, whether it be a need to scale up operations, offload some bandwidth or strategize new opportunities.

Learn more ways to achieve more from less.

This is particularly useful for established or legacy brands seeking to adapt to something new—a need that’s become all but required in our fast-changing digital landscape. The digital experience is a primary pillar for any brand, and today’s environment requires they explore and adopt entirely new ways of thinking and working. This is especially important for brands that are beginning to embark on a journey of digital transformation, as an integrated production partner can provide both creative and technical expertise to help organizations execute their goals while protecting their brand.

For example, one sector that’s been dramatically altered by digital disruption is that of ecommerce, wholesale and retail. One of our partners is heavily experienced in offline retail, but found an opportunity to step into the digital wholesale space. Because this was a new environment for our partner to play in, it was important that they had easy access to a UX strategy expert to whom they could consult for help in designing and implementing the digital purchasing experience.

This resulted in the team’s Lead UX Designer serving as a key brand ambassador in the partnership, whose primary responsibilities are to lead workshops, sit down with product owners and draw up a roadmap with key stakeholders in the company. “These talks become much more regular and prominent throughout the development and execution process, as opposed to getting a brief and then building a solution,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks LA. What results is a close, long-term partnership focused on future-proofing and sustained success.

In researching how to implement the best UX for this partner’s platform, we recommended conducting user interviews—something the partner was originally reticent about.

But our brand ambassador was able to understand, relay and engage with those concerns to eventually make the case for the interviews’ usefulness. “The insights gleaned from those interviews shifted the course of the project for the better,” says Martens. “Thanks to the embedded model, the brand could quickly pivot to respond to new insights without taking the project off-track.

Safeguarding Brands with Design Acumen

We’re well aware of how essential it is for brands to safeguard themselves, whether it be ensuring a consistent experience across markets and touchpoints, or placing work in hands they can trust to understand and execute the brand’s voice. This concern is right at the heart of the integrated production partnership, which is dedicated to upholding and protecting design standards while lightening its workload.

This is achieved by having the production talent and experience on the ground to inform the strategy provided to partners. Traditional consultancies may be focused primarily on business strategy and its technical implementations, but our brand ambassadors provide partners with an open door to the vast creative talent available in our network. With our own high visual standards, we strive to be proactive in seeking new opportunities to showcase partners’ brands with best-in-class design.

While preparing for its annual keynote presentation, for example, one partner sought out bold, flashy animations to ensure its points stuck. While this work was outside the scope of our typical, day-to-day deliverables with the partner, our flexible setup connected them with an animation team capable of bringing their design needs to life. Because the partner had a very specific look and feel in mind for the project, fluid communication between both parties—a process streamlined by the ambassador at the center, who has a clear understanding of their brand’s design philosophy—ensured it could be done quickly and to standard.

A Long-Term Partnership Designed for Success

One of the reasons why an integrated partnership brand ambassador can facilitate these projects so easily is because they work so closely with the brand, often partially in-house. This proximity provides complete transparency on both sides of the aisle, and helps the brand ambassador gauge what bandwidth is available for finishing projects or optimizing the workflow.

The integrated production partnership model means that both parties have skin in the game and have a shared desire for success across the board. For the partner whose ecommerce platform is discussed above, we found an opportunity to optimize its B2B platforms as well. This process began with optimizing the existing UI and creating a new design system informed by continuous user testing. From there, we’re looking forward to implementing new features into the platform to improve customer experience worldwide.

This goal for a more holistic brand experience drives home what makes this nature of partnership so unique: it might be designed to specifically tackle one goal, but over time capabilities can evolve with a brand’s needs, with the brand ambassador available at arm’s length to kick off talks and help source talent. From there, organizations are better equipped to adapt to any need that crops up in the fast-changing digital landscape they seek to carve a path through.

The Mad Men era championed the “big idea” approach to advertising, but today that tactic feels as vintage as Don Draper’s fashion.

Far from producing just a TV commercial, some print ads and a billboard or two, there are several digital platforms where audiences will expect to see your brand. From YouTube to Facebook to Instagram and beyond, brands must tailor their campaigns and content to the platforms they support. To achieve this, according to Partnerships Director at MediaMonks Liz Pavitt, brands must “rip up the rulebook that traditional agencies have written.”

Creating entertaining and shareable hero content is getting harder and harder, primarily because it’s common for brands to cut down the TVC format (FYI, that’s trade jargon for TV commercial) and call it a day. But this method fails to take advantage of what makes internet platforms unique, not to mention the way audiences interact and respond to content on them. With an abundance of platforms, organizations must take the necessary steps to properly envision and frame their campaign content on a per-platform basis.

“A TVC doesn’t necessarily work on the internet by default,” says Pavitt, “so it’s essential to design an ecosystem of content that fits its respective platform to support the hero content.” Easier said than done? Maybe, but it doesn’t need to be. Building a truly integrated campaign must start from effectively framing your content for the platforms it will call home. From there, everything falls into place.

Turn Hero Content into Superhero Content

A good starting point is to revise the way you approach hero content. Hero content is the big “hook” for your campaign that raises awareness of your brand overall, and is probably the first piece of content from you that your audience will encounter. This means it should have broad, wide appeal much like a TVC, but there’s a difference: when it’s designed for social, it must be shareable, too. This is where a lot of organizations fall into trouble, but Pavitt suggests that understanding your audience and how your brand aligns with their values is key for producing content they’ll want to share: “What is your audience talking about, and does it reflect your brand? What can you naturally add to the conversation?”

We mentioned above how the one-size-fits-all TVC format is a bit outdated, and here’s why: leaps in technology have allowed brands to produce irresistible content that can hook in audiences with higher relevance. For example, we created 162 videos for Booking.com made with Google’s VOGON technology. The dynamic videos are stitched together according to users’ search histories, reacting to their interests by representing different versions of the same narrative thread. It’s a bit like Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, but without the user input, allowing for a more personalized yet consistent experience. The process shows what you can achieve when working beyond the typical, static TVC format, especially when everyone is looking for more content for less budget.

Build Content Around Specific Features

While hero content should hook audiences in with broad appeal, hub content focuses more on targeting specific audience interests and segments. This is where organizations feel the pressure to produce an always-on cascade of intriguing content, which can be tough to find resources and time for. One strategy is to tailor content around specific platforms: a video might translate to a GIF on social, a photo into a cinemagraph for your blog or a behind-the-scenes video can make for an Instagram story.

When designing your hub content, pay special care to supporting the specific context and interactions that users make on those platforms. Each of a platform’s unique features can provide new ways to interact with your audience. Facebook offers hologram-like “3D photos,” for example, that users can see from different angles by moving their devices. Meanwhile, Instagram offers several opportunities for immediate user feedback through polling and Q&A’s with its stories feature. Also consider the device used: while vertical video has been much maligned in the past, for example, shooting 9:16 video natively for vertical displays is always preferable to chopping off the sides of a widescreen video instead.

To meet its highest potential, consider how your campaign can use and build upon these features. Thinking outside the box by creatively playing within platforms’ constraints can also get you far, like making games out of Instagram stories. Along this line of thinking, consider your campaign not as a big idea from which everything else grows, but rather an aggregate of smaller, unique experiences that fit the platform.

Make Your Process More Agile and Flexible

“The internet is encouraging people to expect faster results, which in turn translates to the creative process,” says Pavitt. “We all have to work on ways to work faster and publish quicker without sacrificing quality.” When it comes to supporting integrated campaigns, organizations will have to adopt a more flexible approach and remain open to translating existing content from one format to another—as long as it makes sense for the platform.

For example, there have been several times in our own work where we’ve noticed that our behind-the-scenes films serendipitously offered great nuggets of content that had to be shown to the world. For example, we poked fun at expectations versus reality when we prepared to launch a KFC Zinger sandwich into space with Wieden+Kennedy, producing a video that juxtaposed a dramatic unveiling of a (fictional) interstellar chamber test with the less-than-stellar reality of a sandwich sitting in an empty room, watched by a rather bored-looking Monk. With a sense of humor, we could stand tall on a mountain built from a humble little molehill.

Sometimes things aren’t as cool to watch as they sound, but that doesn’t mean you or your audience can’t have fun with it. “We plan for what we can plan for, but we also plan for the unplanned,” says Pavitt, providing a true MediaMonks-style koan. “By having the flexibility to work on the fly, we can often over-deliver and really stretch the budget.” Flexibility is what it all boils down to, allowing for new ways to envision your content on both established and emerging platforms across the user’s journey and never missing a beat.

See what a truly integrated campaign looks like through our work with Weber.