With insights included from our Global EVP Tyler Pietz, the report stresses an important takeaway: brand, marketing, finance and data managers have a lot to gain from working closely together and building cross-functional integration systems. To that regard, we believe that while companies may invest in different tools for each department, the way each one manages data should be a more general decision that takes into account the broader business context. Seeing the full picture is pivotal to success, and we can only do that with complete, well-organized, integrated data systems.

Keep the enterprise goals in sight.

As Pietz says in the report, “The CMO’s role is to take business insights and bring them to market so value can be realized.” That means turning the data strategy into something actionable. CMOs are responsible for identifying the tactics that will help the business achieve its goals—and things like profitability, revenue drivers and risk management are important factors to weigh as they carry out strategies to attract leads, move into new markets and beyond.

To get there, however, CMOs need access to a comprehensive view of the brand’s consumer data—and the more departments and data points it encompasses, the better. But here’s where it gets tricky. Forrester’s findings show that 37% of B2C marketing decision-makers say driving decision-making with customer insights is one of their organization’s biggest marketing execution challenges. Rather than a skills issue, we believe this is due to structural problems that leave marketing leaders drowning in disorganized data, as well as a disconnect between departments.

Before collecting more data, learn to control it.

With changing privacy laws and platform restrictions, CMOs are hungry for new first-party data collection methods and alternative data sources. This is great, as first-party data is at the heart of any digital maturity and transformation journey. However, it’s important to remember that building a strong enterprise data strategy is not about acquiring as much data as possible; rather, it’s about extracting the most value from it. 

To do so, we need to start by establishing solid data foundations that ensure the information we have is accessible, timely, trustworthy and fit for purpose. While hiring new services like analytics tools and buying platforms is easy, the real challenge is to bridge together all of those data sources and systems in ways that allow us to see the full picture.

In other words, accumulating data is a misuse of our resources unless we can access its benefits—and as companies continue to explore new spaces where they can connect with consumers, the need for solid data foundations will become more pressing. Yes, a lack of control can lead to redundancies and misinformed decisions, but data hoarding presents even bigger risks in terms of user privacy. As the report illustrates, the consequences of a potential breach can be catastrophic if we don’t establish rigorous governance practices.

To deliver a great customer experience, create cross-functional data systems.

In addition to establishing solid data foundations, leveraging your data to its full potential also demands getting rid of departmental silos. While teams often consider only the data that is available to them, it’s possible to unlock additional expertise if we bank on stronger integration capabilities across channels, data sources and technologies.

Marketing teams, for example, may look at lead generation and engagement, while product teams focus on retention and acquisition. However, you need all metrics to get a clear view of the customer, and so you’ll achieve better results if they aren’t tracked separately.

As Forrester says in their report, determining a customer’s next-best experience requires “an orchestra of IT, data science, risk and compliance, marketing, sales and service, and CX.” To get high-quality customer insights, CMOs must look beyond their marketing-specific perspectives and collaborate with their counterparts across departments. Complaints and inventory may not be part of marketing’s responsibilities, but they surely impact the customer experience. Ads for out-of-stock products are a major turn-off for consumers, and nobody likes a brand that continues to do out-of-touch marketing while ignoring the countless complaints in their inboxes and social media comments.

The bottom line is, everyone can benefit from being aligned on what type of data will help the business thrive and how to track it, but CMOs play one of the most important roles in squeezing the juice out of it. While marketing leaders can’t design a fully-fledged data strategy on their own, they are the ones who take these consumer insights and turn them into marketing programs that bring the desired results for the business. Instead of focusing on collecting huge volumes of data, work on unifying these sets in an organized, secure environment, and you’ll find yourself instinctively making data-driven decisions.

The new Wave covers CMOs’ need for integrated digital marketing solutions. “…As C-suite demands for growth and cost effectiveness rise, some enterprise buyers are seeking integrated and orchestrated solutions to unlock value across marketing campaigns, customer experience (CX), and commerce,” writes the report’s author, Forrester Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall. The Forrester Wave(™): Global Marketing Services, Q3 2022 evaluates partners’ abilities to meet each of these needs, helping CMOs identify the one that suits them.

Measured us among our industry peers, Pattisall wrote, “Media.Monks is a good fit for CMOs wanting to push the boundaries of digital (and partnership) with end-to end creative, production, analytics, and activation services.” This is the ambition we hold ourselves to in a time of intense transformation and the cusp of a new era of virtualization, in which insight into consumer behavior are key to unlocking compelling digital experiences and broad transformation.

Hyper-accelerated adoption of consumer behaviors and seismic shifts in the privacy landscape are putting marketers under pressure to deliver differentiated creative experiences. Those who aim to meet virtualized behaviors today require a partner who puts their own skin in the game, takes bold risks and helps them gain confidence to do so—all by seamlessly integrating a suite of services and expertise that shortcut to impact.

A new era calls for a growth partner of record.

A key insight surfaced by the Wave is how the need for integrated marketing services has erupted in recent years. “A recent COMvergence report for new business in the US shows that integrated agency reviews increased fourfold from 2020 to 2021,” writes Pattisall. “And according to Forrester’s Q1 B2C Marketing CMO Pulse Survey, 2022, 31% of B2C CMOs at organizations with 500-plus employees intend to integrate creative and media assignments to boost marketing impact.”

While integrated services are increasingly desired by brands, we’re proud to note that we were the first to bring the unitary idea to the market. Building a foundation in digital freed us from the baggage that beleaguers the more traditional names as they adapt to a new digital era. In a 2020 article, Pattisall told Campaign, “The industry is quite literally trying to move on from the shadow of its advertising heritage to better future proof itself.”

Meanwhile, we believe our newness gives us an edge over the nine other providers evaluated in the Wave when it comes to integration. “Like all others in the category, Media.Monks pursues a strategy to pair end-to-end marketing services, although its newness and mergers/acquisitions make the goal more achievable,” writes Pattisall.

This successful combination of services allows world-leading brands (and future household names) to focus their attention on outcomes that drive growth—not getting lost in a tangle of random acts of digital strung together by a group of competing partners. By bridging together expertise across four pillars—creative content, data, digital media and technology services—we can identify the quickest path to success and iterate toward longer term, broad transformational goals.

Reinventing the model, inside and out.

 “[Media.Monks’] esoteric vision to ‘win the decade’ speaks to its company’s artistic bravado,” Pattisall writes in the report, and achieving this goal relies on growing a new generation of digital technology experts. “Media.Monks’ moxie derives from its strong culture, talent, and EX, marked by an emphasis on upskilling employees, diversity, and programs for social justice and supporting employee 'side hustles’ to stoke creativity." Our Punk.Monks initiative is an example of how we do this. By spotlighting a different member of our community every other week, the series showcases the creative endeavors, businesses, charities and passion projects helmed by our talented team.

Such initiatives demonstrate a trademark of our people: we act like owners, and this foments a shared sense of trust and responsibility in our approach to collaboration. A consultancy may give you something top dollar but not exceptional, because their primary commitment is to their own brand. But truly remarkable results come from a consultative approach that brings work to life—not only consultation and strategy, but also execution derived from a maker’s mindset.

And that also means giving brands themselves greater ownership and control—something the traditional model has withheld for too long. Whether to provide ownership of data, oversight into media optimization and control over how the budget is allocated, a significant part of our service is to help brand marketers become more self-sufficient with unconstrained access to top-tier talent who can scale their ambition to new heights.

True disruption calls for strategic risk.

While the brands and technology platforms we partner with have a verve to shake up their respective industries, we’ve found that in our own market, that same eagerness to agitate is rare. Legacy setups may guarantee success for their clients by eliminating risk, but this conservative approach fails to help brands who need to become disruptive leaders in their own right. With the recent additions of TheoremOne and Zemoga to our team, our technology services pillar continues to rapidly evolve to help brands transform to a new era.

Strategy also plays a key role in balancing risk and reward. While unbridled risk can be problematic, we welcome a level of controlled risk to amplify creativity with intelligence. This helps generate unexpected outcomes for brands, particularly as the hyper adoption of new consumer behaviors challenge the tried-and-true strategies that marketers have leaned on in the past. Following this challenger’s mindset, creative briefs aren’t built just to resonate and perform, but to also generate new qualitative and quantitative data that open opportunities to co-create with audiences.

Success in this new era calls for reliable partnerships built on radical transparency and a shared desire to disrupt. Through cultivating a strong global culture of diverse digital experts with a high level of ownership, we’re committed to helping brands find the best solution—or invent new ones where they previously didn’t exist—to their needs. That’s the strength of a partner who can do it all, and we’re up to the challenge.