While traditional advertising was once the go-to strategy for driving awareness and large reach, the one-size-fits-all approach to creative is no longer effective for maintaining a close relationship with today’s digital audience. Because consumers crave personalization and relevance, brands that are truly customer-focused realize the need to tailor their content for specific formats and channels in which they engage.

Look at it this way: just a single piece of creative limits your ability to impact a wide audience that comprises a diversity of needs, or to provide distinct cultural relevance across many markets. For example, a celebrity ambassador might be perfect for one market, but virtually unknown in another; alternatively, markets may celebrate holidays unique to their culture.

Accounting for these variables requires brands to rethink the way they produce content. Many brands are still quick to implement a project-based approach that can result in inefficiencies to rework, transform and adapt—sometimes ending up with a disarray of many vendors, disconnected campaigns and an inconsistent consumer experience. But even those that have already begun with a traditional “big idea” can extend its value by adapting it into a fit-for-format digital campaign without simply cutting things down.

Instead, a more integrated approach begins by pulling together strategy, media planning and creative ideation from the start, aligning brand and partner on the same page. This empowers both teams to produce versatile, format-ready deliverables capable of accomplishing each campaign goal with just a few shoots done in a week or less, rather than scheduling several shoots a month or getting bungled up in rework.

Format-ready digital content also gives brands the opportunity to learn what type of messaging is most effective for their audience. “The outcome is much more measurable,” says Brett Stiller, Creative Monk at MediaMonks. “The brand can see what’s most effective.” These learnings can be applied to tweaking the assets the brand already has, or can inform the next campaign to make it even stronger.

Iterating the Fit-for-Format Story

Philadelphia Cream Cheese is well-known and deeply loved by many, but the product’s wide appeal and versatile reach means there’s a lot of ways to enjoy it; different countries each have their own favorite cream cheese-based snack, and while a bagel is a staple of American breakfasts, it just won’t cut it in England. Aiming to provide a mouth-watering message, Philadelphia needed a partner capable of adapting a selection of hero TVC scripts that could appeal to a variety of regional appetites.

Putting its extensive global knowledge to the test, the team was able to deliver over 900 assets from one week of shooting, enabling the brand to broadcast just 14 weeks after briefing. We achieved this by taking careful consideration of the many touchpoints that exist along the consumer journey—aiming not just to build awareness, but to direct consumers through the purchase funnel and across digital platforms. For this purpose, it’s important that a creative partner truly understands user behaviors for each format and is able to help your brand influence key decision moments for consumers.

Brands can take a similar approach to expanding their traditional campaigns into digital. Too often, the tactic that some brands use is cutting down their existing creative and trying to force it within the different social formats. But when Calvin Klein sought to expand the reach of a traditional campaign for their Eternity for Men fragrance, they knew they could provide a more meaningful and authentic message to consumers by building a social campaign from scratch, with thematic ties to the original creative.

This also offered an opportunity to refresh the brand, ensuring the digital campaign’s extension in reach would make an impact. “It nodded to the brand, but wasn’t fully ‘Eternity’ as you’ve known it before,” said Stiller. “Part of the work was updating that ethos, aesthetic and tone—extracting the stories from it and letting it reach into the right space.”

For example, while the original TVC focused on Jake Gyllenhaal, the digital one followed influencers as they reflect on the different roles they play in their lives, and how each affects their concept of masculinity. “The influencers are easier to identify with, as their lives are more attainable than a traditional celebrity,” said Sara Tunstall, Senior Content Producer at MediaMonks, “While celebrity fits the context of a TVC well, this approach is more natural to social.” Focused on what makes each subject unique, the campaign offers several opportunities for audiences to connect.

Planning and Trust are Key

The integrated production method can help brands extend the value of their core message and combine reach with added relevance, but the hyper-efficient process succeeds best when campaign needs and KPIs are carefully planned out at the start. Trust is key for any partnership, and careful communication and planning ensures that the creative team has the freedom to adapt a message in all the ways that make sense for the channels in which it lives, while easing any anxieties the brand may have.

For example, we understand that brands may feel overwhelmed by the need to review the high volume of assets made available with integrated production, which is why we’ve made tools in the past to streamline that process for them. If the brand is already well aware of elements or messaging that resonates best with their audiences through iterative testing, establishing those insights early on can ease the need for rework.

Integrated production offers a great way for brands to meaningfully expand their ideas and drive impact. Breaking down the “big idea” offers several possibilities to relate to audiences no matter their interests or channel of choice, helping to augment a brand’s goal to extend reach. With strong collaboration and trust between parties, brands can enjoy a much more efficient process for producing content that provides value to their audiences and achieves a faster time to market.

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.

The Mad Men era championed the “big idea” approach to advertising, but today that tactic feels as vintage as Don Draper’s fashion.

Far from producing just a TV commercial, some print ads and a billboard or two, there are several digital platforms where audiences will expect to see your brand. From YouTube to Facebook to Instagram and beyond, brands must tailor their campaigns and content to the platforms they support. To achieve this, according to Partnerships Director at MediaMonks Liz Pavitt, brands must “rip up the rulebook that traditional agencies have written.”

Creating entertaining and shareable hero content is getting harder and harder, primarily because it’s common for brands to cut down the TVC format (FYI, that’s trade jargon for TV commercial) and call it a day. But this method fails to take advantage of what makes internet platforms unique, not to mention the way audiences interact and respond to content on them. With an abundance of platforms, organizations must take the necessary steps to properly envision and frame their campaign content on a per-platform basis.

“A TVC doesn’t necessarily work on the internet by default,” says Pavitt, “so it’s essential to design an ecosystem of content that fits its respective platform to support the hero content.” Easier said than done? Maybe, but it doesn’t need to be. Building a truly integrated campaign must start from effectively framing your content for the platforms it will call home. From there, everything falls into place.

Turn Hero Content into Superhero Content

A good starting point is to revise the way you approach hero content. Hero content is the big “hook” for your campaign that raises awareness of your brand overall, and is probably the first piece of content from you that your audience will encounter. This means it should have broad, wide appeal much like a TVC, but there’s a difference: when it’s designed for social, it must be shareable, too. This is where a lot of organizations fall into trouble, but Pavitt suggests that understanding your audience and how your brand aligns with their values is key for producing content they’ll want to share: “What is your audience talking about, and does it reflect your brand? What can you naturally add to the conversation?”

We mentioned above how the one-size-fits-all TVC format is a bit outdated, and here’s why: leaps in technology have allowed brands to produce irresistible content that can hook in audiences with higher relevance. For example, we created 162 videos for Booking.com made with Google’s VOGON technology. The dynamic videos are stitched together according to users’ search histories, reacting to their interests by representing different versions of the same narrative thread. It’s a bit like Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, but without the user input, allowing for a more personalized yet consistent experience. The process shows what you can achieve when working beyond the typical, static TVC format, especially when everyone is looking for more content for less budget.

Build Content Around Specific Features

While hero content should hook audiences in with broad appeal, hub content focuses more on targeting specific audience interests and segments. This is where organizations feel the pressure to produce an always-on cascade of intriguing content, which can be tough to find resources and time for. One strategy is to tailor content around specific platforms: a video might translate to a GIF on social, a photo into a cinemagraph for your blog or a behind-the-scenes video can make for an Instagram story.

When designing your hub content, pay special care to supporting the specific context and interactions that users make on those platforms. Each of a platform’s unique features can provide new ways to interact with your audience. Facebook offers hologram-like “3D photos,” for example, that users can see from different angles by moving their devices. Meanwhile, Instagram offers several opportunities for immediate user feedback through polling and Q&A’s with its stories feature. Also consider the device used: while vertical video has been much maligned in the past, for example, shooting 9:16 video natively for vertical displays is always preferable to chopping off the sides of a widescreen video instead.

To meet its highest potential, consider how your campaign can use and build upon these features. Thinking outside the box by creatively playing within platforms’ constraints can also get you far, like making games out of Instagram stories. Along this line of thinking, consider your campaign not as a big idea from which everything else grows, but rather an aggregate of smaller, unique experiences that fit the platform.

Make Your Process More Agile and Flexible

“The internet is encouraging people to expect faster results, which in turn translates to the creative process,” says Pavitt. “We all have to work on ways to work faster and publish quicker without sacrificing quality.” When it comes to supporting integrated campaigns, organizations will have to adopt a more flexible approach and remain open to translating existing content from one format to another—as long as it makes sense for the platform.

For example, there have been several times in our own work where we’ve noticed that our behind-the-scenes films serendipitously offered great nuggets of content that had to be shown to the world. For example, we poked fun at expectations versus reality when we prepared to launch a KFC Zinger sandwich into space with Wieden+Kennedy, producing a video that juxtaposed a dramatic unveiling of a (fictional) interstellar chamber test with the less-than-stellar reality of a sandwich sitting in an empty room, watched by a rather bored-looking Monk. With a sense of humor, we could stand tall on a mountain built from a humble little molehill.

Sometimes things aren’t as cool to watch as they sound, but that doesn’t mean you or your audience can’t have fun with it. “We plan for what we can plan for, but we also plan for the unplanned,” says Pavitt, providing a true MediaMonks-style koan. “By having the flexibility to work on the fly, we can often over-deliver and really stretch the budget.” Flexibility is what it all boils down to, allowing for new ways to envision your content on both established and emerging platforms across the user’s journey and never missing a beat.

See what a truly integrated campaign looks like through our work with Weber.

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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