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.

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.