Over the past few years, brands have aimed to beef up their creative and production capabilities. The reasons why are clear: doing so offers them numerous opportunities to streamline the production workflow, enhance creativity with brand knowledge and retain a closer connection to consumers. They also become more versatile in the process; Forrester Research defines such brands as those which interweave “key capabilities across creative, digital marketing, and media between in-house and external agencies.”

Firewood has helped carve this path, coining the phrase “your in-house team, extended,” offering a variety of services such as creative, strategy and planning, performance media, technology and events. Firewood recently ranked #6 on Adweek’s Fastest Growing Large Agencies—and for good measure, as they’ve pioneered the embedded agency model in Silicon Valley and across the Americas and Europe. With service offerings that closely align with our own dedication to brands, we welcome Firewood into the S4 Capital family.

“Firewood’s ’embedded’ approach will allow us to build deeper and broader relationships with our clients, helping us work in a more flexible, collaborative and integrated way,” explains MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. That flexibility and sense of collaboration are key; the embedded model helps brands achieve success much more easily through direct access to specialized skillsets as needed, helping them scale up and achieve a more streamlined production process.

Attaining Greater Transparency

Among one of the greatest concerns that brands face is a need for greater transparency. Whether it’s in cost of services or ensuring they’re not victims of ad fraud, there are some trust issues brewing between brands and traditional agencies. The embedded model does away with these tensions by fully integrating its staff within the client’s infrastructure and go-to-market strategies. This gives brands a seat at the table and alleviates the pain points that they may feel by working with traditional agencies—like a cycle of rework.

This offering is just one of the ways that the S4 model aims to integrate capabilities that help brands take a more active role within the production process. Our sister company MightyHive, for example, helps brands become more self sufficient in their media planning and spend. By pairing clients with the specific capabilities they require, we remain laser focused on helping them achieve success without having to sacrifice their ownership of a project.

Cutting Cost & Time, Not Corners

Brands are also driven to boost their internal creative capacity to produce work faster, aided by a closer connection between the creative team and decision makers. With a strong sense of ownership, they uphold a high standard of what makes good creative work. Still, a key challenge many brands face is a lack of resources that allow them to meet their fullest potential, whether it be a need for all hands on deck to produce always-on content, or specialized skillsets for quick and one-off projects.

This highlights another need for new partnership models. As the time-to-market shortens and the pressure for always-on content at scale grows, brands don’t have time to waste by following the typical RFP process or in hiring and onboarding new talent. Instead, an embedded team can offer an individual who provides direction and is backed by an agency’s full creative and production abilities.

Building a Culture of Confident Experimentation

When enjoying a closer relationship with consumers and a faster time to market, brands are in a great position to rapidly experiment and optimize their creative strategy, helping them home in on creatively differentiated experiences and messaging for their audiences. But truly delivering on this potential requires they cover the full end-to-end capabilities spectrum.

But most in-house agencies begin with just a specific capability that they strive to support and grow out from there. We believe a truer sense of partnership, designed specifically around enhancing in-house skillsets. At this year’s Advertising Week New York conference, MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar shared the stage with S4 Capital’s Sir Martin Sorrell and MightyHive’s Emily Del Greco to discuss how aligning data and creative is essential to innovating through experimentation.

“With traditional work, there’s a conservatism that you can’t marry data with being creative,” ter Haar said, noting how brands can take risks with confidence when backed by partners who have their back. As the S4 model grows, it will help brands integrate forward by taking back control and retaining a sense of ownership in their creative and production, ensuring they can meet success easier than ever before.

You can learn more about Firewood and S4 Capital joining forces through numerous sources covering the merger. Watch Sir Martin Sorrell’s on-air interview on the new partnership over at CNBC; at Ad Age, you can find Firewood Co-Founder and CEO Juan Zambrano provide insight on how his client-side background inspired the agency’s unique approach. And as covered by Reuters, Sir Martin offers a couple hints behind the overall S4 strategy and what to look forward to next for brands seeking new ways of working. We can’t wait to see what’s on the horizon.

Earlier this year, Adobe’s Digital Trends for Creative and Design Leaders report showed that front-end customer experiences had become a key differentiator for brands, though only 28% of creatives and marketers felt their company did an excellent job at personalizing content across consumer touch points. Fast-forward to now, and it doesn’t seem like much has changed.

According to Adobe’s new State of Creative and Marketing Collaboration Survey, 59% of marketers agree that it’s difficult to personalize content at scale, in part because of the time it takes to generate content. While everyone seems to agree that personalization is important (creative and agency leaders both cited it as the most exciting medium-term opportunity in the earlier report), keeping up with the pace of user demand is a considerable challenge.

Delivering at scale with a greater speed requires organizations to rethink their creative culture process. One example of how you can achieve this is with smart production, which enables you to generate dozens (if not hundreds) of assets customized to persona or location. Starting with just a handful of assets or a single shoot, smart production shows what brands are capable of when revising their creative framework to the technologies available today.

Foster a More Creative Environment

High-ranking businesses in the McKinsey Design Index (which measures an organization’s strength in design with respect to financial performance) outperformed industry benchmark growth as much as two to one across industries. They also resulted in higher revenue growth and returns to shareholders than their less design-focused counterparts. This is because a creative culture is key to developing standout content that differentiates a brand.

Another big factor is digital maturity. The Adobe State of Creative and Marketing Survey reported that 59% of organizations that consider themselves digitally mature say they are outperforming competition—something only 39% of other companies can say. They were also more likely to cite marketing as a differentiation for their organization.

See what happens when creative and automation come together.

The numbers indicate organizations must catch up to the technologies available today to create personalized content. Fostering a creative environment can be a great way to futureproof an organization and target the skills necessary for new digital marketing opportunities. Raising skill visibility or keeping the creative juices flowing by encouraging side projects is another great way for organizations to remain adaptive. This is particularly useful for organizations that are design-focused, yet still notice significant skill gaps.

Don’t Shun Data and Automation—Work with It

Quality of content is top-of-mind for designers and marketers, ranking as a higher priority than cost and personalization. This suggests no one wants to sacrifice quality for more accurate personalization or a faster output. While data-led marketing, bolstered by AI and machine learning, can help marketers keep up with growing user expectation and demand for constant content, many worry that doing so could cheapen the content quality or stifle creativity.

But having a clear understanding of user behavior and interests can free up time to focus on creative work by better defining personas or use cases—or even provide new creative opportunities. And while personalization is less important to marketers than overall content quality, it’s worth mentioning that the two aren’t mutually exclusive: content that’s more relevant to audiences is certainly more resonant. In their primer on workplace creativity, Harvard Business Review made the genius analogy of Leonardo da Vinci, who drew on science to support his creative ideas. Likewise, today’s brands can discover a wide breadth of opportunities for storytelling with today’s tools at their disposal.

The typical pain point here is outdated workflows which slow teams down. But with pressure to deliver large amounts of timely, personalized content, creative teams don’t have time to spare tied up in red tape. One of the most effective ways to work more creatively with data is to break down silos within the organization and allow for more cross-functional collaboration.

In general, organizations will need to rely on entirely new ways of thinking in the creative process to generate massive amounts of personalized content at scale. Leveraging today’s technologies like smart production don’t only allow you to cater to specific personas; it also lets you frame your messaging to several different platforms and touchpoints where consumers might come in contact with your organization, allowing for engaging integrated campaigns with much less effort.

With their ideas and workflows optimized by using data productively, your design team becomes a more strategic and valuable asset within the organization—which in turn allows you to better reach your business goals. Designing new creative frameworks enhanced by data and tech therefore equip organizations to become more agile and efficient in their marketing, maintaining a competitive edge to meet demanding output.

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