As the world’s largest and arguably most influential tech trade show, you know we wouldn’t pass up the chance to visit CES this year—and this time we brought the whole family along, including our programmatic sister company MightyHive and parent company S4Capital. At the dawn of a new decade, this year’s CES placed industries at a crossroads, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that stand before them.

CES has become so big in recent years that it’s also sparked its fair share of side events, including C Space: Marketing and Advertising (devoted to disruptive trends that shape consumer behavior and advertising media) and the Brand Innovators’ Mega-Trends summit. MediaMonks had a presence at both events throughout the week, with S4Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell calling Brand Innovators “a CES within CES,” noting its more intimate feel. Below, let’s dive into some of the insights that surfaced across these events.

The Rise of the Challenger Mindset

At the start of the new year, MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar gave Brand Innovators some choice advice: “Adapt quickly, or you risk being left behind. Marketers need to stay constantly curious, take thoughtful risks and scale fast, as the pace of technology and innovation will not slow down anytime soon.”

Speaking of marketers’ role in envisioning the tech-infused brand experience, Silke Meixner (Partner, Digital Business Strategy at IBM Global Business Services) noted how “As MediaMonks thinks about putting emotion into the brand as a partner, marketers need to, too,” mentioning how AR presents an opportunity to achieve that.

Whether being more purposeful in adopting a challenger mindset, raising relevance with the aid of new partner models, or building value in emotion-driven experiences, this year’s CES offered ample opportunities for brands to build stronger connections with consumers through tech. As they embark on a new decade, the discussions at CES look optimistic for brands—and we can’t wait to help refine their big ideas and bring them to life.

It’s a mentality shared by Mitsubishi’s VP and CMO Kimberly Gardiner, who looks outside of her industry for learnings and inspiration. In conversation with Nick Fuller (SVP, Growth at MediaMonks) in a fireside chat at the Brand Innovators summit, she said, “We don’t look at auto competitors for inspiration—we look at DTC companies. We want to be a brand that challenges convention.”

This challenger approach has helped Mitsubishi—which enjoyed its second year in a row as the fastest Asian-owned auto brand—zero in on a dedicated audience. “We can’t outspend our competition, so we focus on a narrow, focused audience,” Gardiner said. “We want to target people that aren’t like everyone else.”

In his own fireside chat shared with MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar, Sir Martin also embraced the disruptive, challenger mindset by building a connection between S4Capital’s mission and Burning Man. “Burning Man reflects creative disruption—it’s about creating something and destroying it every year,” he said.

Achieving Growth and Personalization at Speed and Scale

For brands to successfully challenge conventions and adapt to the quickening pace of technological innovation, they must have the capabilities in place to scale up or pivot with speed. This is especially important given the rise of consumer hyperadoption, or the speed at which consumer behaviors shift, and further challenges traditional metrics of success.

At the S4Capital Storytelling Session at C Space, moderated by Marta Martinez (Director of Google Marketing Platforms), S4 leadership met to discuss some of the reigning challenges and opportunities that brands face while moving into the new decade. Louise Martens, Global Head of Embedded Production at MediaMonks, mentioned how the uptick in social conversation and tech adoption has quickened the pace at which brands must deliver.

“In the past, you may have had four big moments in the year, but now marketers have to turn around thousands of thousands of assets across formats and channels.” The solution? New partner models that satiate brands’ need for speed and scale: “That pressure on organizations has sparked new models like co-location, in housing and embedding.”

And as digital platforms become increasingly saturated, ownership and implementation of data become critical to success. “To win, brands must look at their ecosystem: measure it, test it and feed that data back inside to the creative,” says Martens.

Noting that personalization is table stakes in 2020, MightyHive CEO Pete Kim also mentioned the battle for first-party data and integrating it more closely with a brand’s creative strategy. “I hope to see continued progress as we forge the processes of the future—putting the right message and the right creative in front of the right person at scale.”

Recognizing Value in Emerging Tech

The showroom floor at CES offers its fair share of hits and misses, which presents brands with a sober reminder to ensure their investment in new and emerging tech provides real value, both to the business and consumers alike. Olivier Koelemij, Managing Director of MediaMonks LA, participated in a panel as part of the Digital Hollywood track at CES that sought to highlight the value that one such technology—augmented reality—can offer to brands. Titled “The Augmented/Mixed Reality Experience,” the panel included industry experts such as Magic Leap, Microsoft, IBM Global Business Services and more.

One of the key challenges to mixed reality that the group highlighted, perhaps counter-intuitively, is its fast-growing maturity. While tech leaps have made it easier to design and implement impressive digital experiences—take Depth API’s addition to ARCore, for example—they also raise the bar on what a truly assistive, value-added experience looks like. For brands at a lower digital maturity, the panel highlighted the role that partnerships can play in homing in on that value factor and bringing ideas into reality.

“There are many ways to define value,” says Koelemij. He discussed the Dark Knight Dive, a 4D VR experience that lets users “fly” through a virtual Gotham City while suspended in a skydiving wind tunnel, as a best-in-class example of what brands can achieve when going big on extended reality. “With this project, we were able to connect AT&T with the Batman IP that they’d recently acquired, and the press was all over it. Marketers must think about how they measure and define success.”

Brands seek ways to deliver content faster, at-scale and at a lesser cost—all without diminishing quality. Pulling off each of these might sound impossible, though the integrated production partnership model is ideal for meeting these needs by lending organizations with the support and resources they need. Still, brands will have to take some initial steps to ensure success when working in these partnerships.

An integrated production partnership provides brands with a core team custom-built to their unique challenges and goals, whether it be producing content, optimizing work streams, easing workloads or platform support. Designed for the long term, integrated production partnerships start small but can easily scale up and flex out to meet new challenges and opportunities (for example, localizing in a new market). But despite the convenience of an integrated team, no major change is without growing pains. If you’re considering investing in an integrated production partnership for your brand, take some time to mull over these considerations for success first.

Be Open to Change

Because integrated production partnerships are built from the ground up to support brands’ unique needs, each one begins with a discovery phase that identifies key challenges and their solutions. This process raises questions that can range from fairly basic to quite specific, prompting brands to lay it all out and take a long, hard look at the way they operate.

One major step within this phase includes a data boot camp. Throughout this data audit, we work with the brand to understand what data is available and how it can be used more efficiently across levels of the organization. “Instead of letting data go into a black hole, we can choose a handful of the most necessary data points to focus on,” says Louise Martens, Head of Embedded Production at MediaMonks.

Unlocking data potential often involves revising work streams across an organization—for example, breaking down departmental silos—which requires a brand and its stakeholders to be open and honest about the challenges they face. But nothing is off-limits, and any challenge raised should be viewed as an opportunity.

Look Toward the Future

Once we’ve discovered the most relevant or needed key data points available, we can put them to action by cementing key KPIs that result in success. This takes us to the next major step in discovery: developing a forecast calendar. It can be difficult for brands to extend their view six months to a year into the future, especially when business decisions or priorities can change at a moment’s notice.

Ter Haar asks this all the time: “Will we be relevant in X?” That X could be years, months, or even weeks in the future. While it once was easier for brands to forecast far ahead, that distance is rapidly shrinking, which can be scary for an organization to process. “Because some brands face challenges that far into the future, they may have a fear of locking in a group of people for long-term tasks,” says Martens, “so we keep our core team lean. Flexible and able to tap into the larger MediaMonks talent pool when needed, this new model alleviates any retainer fear that brands might have.”

The process also helps us learn whether the nature of the work is more ad-hoc or rigid in scope. This is where the benefits to an integrated production partnership become clearer to brands: it allows your organization to become more agile and adaptive for when the going gets tough. Forecasting can help map out possible opportunities or capabilities that might become needed in the near or distant future.

“We don’t do this to nickel and dime our services, but to establish a plan that tackles a key issue with the opportunity to scale out organically,” says Martens. While this might sound like typical program management, what makes our partnership unique is the closeness of both parties involved. “Any efficiency we enable benefits us just as directly as our partners,” says Martens. “We want them to be better at their jobs.”

Learn to Love Automation

You can’t push for greater efficiency within your organization without talking about automation, but teams often bristle at the thought of it. And it’s easy to understand why: for creatives, automation can often feel limiting. “Marrying the systematic approach with creative freedom is a general challenge and a natural point of friction,” says Martens. But automating rote tasks and processes can allow for more cost-effective creative without sacrificing quality.

Partners who seriously want to increase their efficiency should view automation as a creative advantage, not hindrance. With automation, says a Forrester report detailing the AI marketing renaissance, “CMOs will be able to let their teams refocus their energy on core marketing activities such as brand strategy, creative thinking, new product innovation, and business models.” This allows creative teams to devote more time to complex, rewarding creative tasks rather than repetitive ones.

As discussed above, an embedded services team can help you define the data most essential for optimizing your output. But how effective that strategy will be boils down to whether your team is prepared to embrace new creative frameworks using automation. For what it’s worth, pushing the limits of machine learning to make creatives’ lives easier is a key motivation for our experimental creative technologists at MediaMonks.

Include Stakeholders from Across the Organization

Forming an integrated production partnership means altering the way your organization works, and therefore requires input from people across departments and levels of the business. “The more colorful the room is, the more points of view you have for building the operation in a tailor-made way,” says Martens. A diverse range of viewpoints also makes it easier to pinpoint problems and KPIs for the core team to tackle.

Often, this places your brand ambassador into the role of mediator, ensuring that all sides of the equation are kept happy or being heard. A great example of this is the point raised above about automation: procurement might love the cost-saving benefits of the initiative, while creatives may push back. But by distilling everyone’s concerns to arrive at a solution, brands can end up with a creative framework that allows for cost-effective, insights-driven content that engages consumers at scale on an individual level—a win for everyone.

“A typical agency might say ‘It’s my way or the highway,’” says Martens, “though our view is that the plan is only relevant when built for the brand.” Gauging pain points among several stakeholders from across the organization allows us to work with brands to prioritize the most pressing needs for efficiency.

Whether your brand struggles to support a continual stream of content or needs long-term platform support, an integrated production partnership helps to zero in on goals, discover opportunities for efficiency and plug in any talent gaps your team might face. After considering the points discussed above, you’re ready to begin envisioning how such a partnership can enhance your organization.

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