A little over a decade ago in Paris, the advertising services company Dare.Win was born out of the desire to help brands rise above the noise through daring experiences. Working with both French brands and international companies looking to tap into the local market, the Dare.Win team thrived by leveraging new formats across entertainment—a powerful tool to get audiences emotionally engaged. 

Eleven years after Dare.Win’s founding, the digital ecosystem has evolved beyond measure—fueled by an audience that’s more demanding, and in more control, than ever before. To achieve the agility needed to build brand relevance in today’s digital ecosystem, Media.Monks and Dare.Win combined forces in 2020 to operate at scale with an integrated offering across data, media, content creation, production and more. Now, we’re taking our unified approach to the next level. With a new name that cements a change in dimension, we’re proud to introduce our combined local team, the Paris.Monks.

Experiences imbued with cultural insight. 

Whether developing experiences that are fully virtual, physical or somewhere in between, our job as end-to-end partners is to create meaningful, branded moments that resonate with the target audience. Sounds simple, but here’s the catch: tastes are nuanced, and no two markets are exactly alike. In France, like in every market, brands need to factor in local insights—both to adapt their existing content and to inform future decisions.

During one of Paris’ hottest summers, our experts drew upon the extreme temperature to generate exposure for Get 27, a traditional French apéritif. The experience featured a “fresh street” where locals could cool down in a branded space—giving them what they needed when they needed it. Experiential activations like this thrive on local intuition, which is equally important in every aspect of a brand’s marketing. When it comes to media buying, for instance, brands need to know their publishers and their background. The same happens with influencer marketing. And even after you’ve mastered the cultural component, personal nuances enter the picture.

First-party data fuels personalization.

Even within a specific market and cultural framework, consumer interests can widely vary, which is where the power of data comes into play. We know consumers expect products and experiences to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle, but this level of personalization only comes with a solid first-party data strategy.

How you use data can make or break your relationship with consumers. They want to feel seen, not spied on. No one likes to have a repetitive ad chasing them from platform to platform, or to share all their data before they can even assess how much value a brand can offer them. “Today, consumers expect personalization in a balanced way,” says Charles Moynet, the head of our DDM practice in France. “Tailored to their interests, but not creepy."

Indeed, first-party data should be the fuel that feeds the rest of the supply chain. When capabilities are siloed, the value that the data team extracts rarely informs the work of creative teams, whereas in a unified approach, insights flow seamlessly between them. The goal is never to frantically collect data; rather, to reach a healthy feedback cycle in which users’ data improves the experience and vice versa. 

Local understanding through the bird’s-eye view of a global team.

Cultural insight and a solid first-party data strategy are key ingredients in the recipe for business growth—but above all, the secret sauce is banking on a multicultural team of professionals from all walks of life.

For global brands, having a multicultural partner can help them show up authentically for various audiences. And while having specific cultural insight helps identify opportunities, banking on a global team comes in handy when tapping into multiple markets. A good example of this is how our fashion and luxury capability team, the FLUX.Monks, helped Amazon Fashion Europe build their cred in five different markets: France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK. Through a 360-degree campaign spanning content creation, influencer marketing, translation support and more, we established a council where each member represented a key market and gave a humanized feel to the brand’s wide offering.

The importance of an integrated approach stems from the fact that driving desire and relevance within a specific audience means being in touch with the topics, channels, formats and technologies they find alluring. says Liam Osbourne, Our Global Client Partner for FLUX.

Through a group of professionals belonging to a variety of cultures and subcultures, we foster opportunities for innovation—combining the best of all worlds for a well-informed pursuit of relevance. Working from Paris’ backyard and backed by a global team, the Paris.Monks will continue to reinvent marketing and support our partners through a digital-first offering that spans creative content, technology, performance, media buying and everything in between.

Just in time for putting the finishing touches on strategic marketing plans for the new year, Forrester has recently released three reports, authored by Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall, identifying key goals for modern marketers and the partners who can best help achieve them: the Q4 2021 reports “Now Tech: Media Management Services,” “Now Tech: Global Marketing Services” and “Now Tech: Marketing Creative and Content Services.”

When read together, they illustrate a marketing services industry in flux—a moment that puts the traditional advertising/marketing services model into question. Jay Pattisall writes in Now Tech: Global Marketing Services, Q4 2021: “CMOs and B2C marketing executives, if you, like so many we have spoken with, wrestle to deliver more growth and acquisition with fewer marketing resources, then it’s time for a new model. No longer will you find the effectiveness needed to elevate your marketing impact by piecing together multiple best-in-class providers from market to market.” We couldn't agree more.

It's Time for Agencies to Answer the Call

Pattisall's insight pre-empted a recent article by Jameson Fleming at Adweek that captures agencies and digital service partners wrestling with an existential question: what's their superpower? Exploring how agencies can better demonstrate their value—particularly toward marketers who are dealing with the very same urgent needs as raised by Pattisall's research—Fleming advises agencies “to show how different moving parts can function together to create more agile and responsive teams.”

Taking the opportunity to share our own perspective, S4Capital Founder and Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell explained the strength that lies in our digital-first focus: “The great thing about digital is it’s about brainpower, not brawn,” he said. “When you’re buying media in a nanosecond, the need for brainpower rather than brawn becomes more and more important.” This inseparable relationship between strategy and agile execution is crucial to unlocking the flexibility and speed that brands require to adapt and prepare for another year of disruption.

This means partners who can offer creative problem-solving supported by a customer-centric perspective when it comes to content; who can deliver growth within the stop-and-go pandemic recovery in their global marketing; and deliver expertise in media management to respond to shifting privacy regulations imposed by both governments and big tech—not to mention consumers’ own evolving digital behaviors.

The Industry is Overdue for a New Model

Flip through the names listed in the reports linked above and you'll find that Media.Monks is the only name that shows up on each—because we've always understood the necessity of integrating and unifying each of these capabilities into a new model built for a new era. Even when specialist partners belong to the same holding company, foundational complexities inherent to the traditional model often stifle their ability to coordinate swiftly together to meet a client’s need. “The irony of networks is they do not have a network effect,” Media.Monks Co-Founder Wesley ter Haar told audiences at Advertising Week New York last fall, detailing how our API model is built to scale up and flex out across solutions and capabilities at speed.

The same idea translates to our merger model. Noting that many traditional holding companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to scale capabilities and delivery, in the Forrester report noted above, Pattisall advises marketers to “ensure all the operating companies share the same goals, the same incentive structure, and answer to the same leader—ideally the global account lead.” This is where true integration thrives in building alignment. 

“For traditional companies, the old trade was you retain your autonomy and independence and we’ll do the back office. Our trade is different: you merge your company into ours, and you become part of Media.Monks,” Sir Martin Sorrell told Erik Siekmann in a recent episode of the Marketing Transformation Podcast. This approach to mergers—not acquisitions—lays the groundwork for streamlined collaboration across clients’ integrated marketing needs, because everyone is on the same team united by the same values.

Toward Stronger, More Flexible Partnership

The need for greater flexibility has become only more urgent as global supply chain issues, inflation, pandemic uncertainties and other geopolitical disruptions continue. This has led to an urgent need for scalable solutions that fit brands’ changing needs as digital behaviors evolve. One way we’ve been able to build strong, collaborative relationships with brands is our “land and expand” strategy, in which we’re brought in to solve a key need, then work along with our clients to zero in on more opportunities to make a greater impact or deliver stronger results. 

In “Now Tech: Marketing Creative and Content Services, Q4 2021,” Pattisall recommends setting “an environment for co-innovation” between yourself and partners: “Increase your brand’s and your agencies’ chances to hit the creative mark with a co-innovation partnership, where internal marketing experts and external content and campaign experts work together.” With a shared desire with both parties to innovate, our “land and expand” relationships with brands grow along with their ambition. In addition, this frees brands from a continual cycle of navigating competitive pitches that slow innovation momentum.

Such an approach only works when a partner has broken down the silos and barriers that traditionally stifle collaboration, innovation and agility—for example, marrying strategy, data with production to boost creative effectiveness in real time. By collaborating with a partner whose unitary model provides seamless access to a diverse team of global talent, brands will be better supported in strengthening the effectiveness of their marketing across the digital ecosystem.