The back-to-school season is incredibly important for retailers: an Adobe roundup of back-to-school stats notes that the shopping season netted 17% of total retail sales in 2017, second only to holiday shopping. That’s a lot of pencils to sharpen! Adobe also notes a trend in families beginning their shopping earlier as years pass, and while most shopping is done in-store, a quarter of parents seek inspiration on social sites like Facebook.

With these insights in mind, it’s clear that relevance is tantamount to brands and retailers hoping to make the grade in the intensely competitive fall season. By bringing together data, media strategy and creative, brands stand to achieve much more relevant messaging whenever and wherever inspiration strikes the consumer—and save in cost and time to market in the process, too. As retailers pull into their most important time of the year, embracing a fit for format approach is key to optimizing exposure in a way that brings the greatest ROI.

Achieve Versatility and Consistency with Fit for Format

With the customer journey spread across channels, relevance is key—not just in terms of content, but also how you frame it up. Every asset should be designed to provide value in the environment where consumers will find it, but developing this volume of content can be a great challenge for brands at first glance. If this sounds familiar, a production partner can help augment your team to scale up production for more assets, relevance and exposure.

This challenge is especially felt by retailers in back-to-school season because there are so many products to highlight and feature, from apparel to tech to school supplies or even dorm furniture. When Mexican department store Coppel wanted to celebrate the variety of savings in their 2019 back-to-school campaign, for example, they needed a partner that could provide an efficient creative process to produce format-ready assets at scale—a service that few production companies in the region are equipped to provide. Recognizing work that we had done with other major retailers like Ikea, Coppel’s agency Saatchi & Saatchi turned to the MediaMonks office in Mexico City for a unique mix of global perspective and amazing local talent to open their TVC script up to new variation and formats.

“Back to school is a very important moment for Coppel,” says Adrian Pastrana, Interactive Producer at MediaMonks. “Having a variety of assets enables Coppel to show their diversity of products, so supporting other digital formats in this way helps them feature more of their stock to the people most interested in it.” Over the course of a three-day shoot, the team produced 73 assets, ready for publishing in print, OOH and across a handful of social platforms.

The big idea approach that some brands favor doesn’t always lend well to this type of process. Instead, we recommend pursuing several smaller, interrelated ideas that share a sense of continuity and coherence. The concept that unites both the TVC and social aspect is the use of lighting on the set and the same main characters,” says Pastrana. “In this respect, we used the same resources to focus on different messages or categories per channel: the tech and home categories were highlighted in digital assets, for example, while we focused on apparel and Coppel’s promotion with the TVC.”

Context is About More than Place and Time

Relevance isn’t just about framing content in the right place and time. In the report “The Power of Customer Context,” Forrester Research notes the importance of taking a wider view of what context really encompasses, urging brands to consider the full scope of user journeys: “Work with your customer experience team to build a marketing strategy to address the end-to-end customer journeys—before, during, and after purchase.”

You must also build around behaviors native to the channels in which your audience engages. Recognizing the features through which teens express themselves on social media, Amazon sought a value-added way to promote its Amazon Teen program for 2018’s back-to-school season. Working with MediaMonks, the retailer didn’t just settle for a series of ads fit for Snapchat and Instagram to build buzz; in addition, we provided a platform that supported the way teens interact with one another digitally.

The resulting #GetTheYes campaign invited students to pitch parents to approve their back-to-school wish lists. The site used a familiar, sticker-like aesthetic that let users customize a message much like they would a Snapchat or Instagram story, letting them express themselves in a way that made sense—especially if they were led to the site via one of the Snap or Instagram ads, offering a seamless transition. It’s worth noting that the campaign also included Facebook ads that spoke to parents on their level, highlighting the importance of remembering that back-to-school is about speaking to both children and their parents, and the need to speak to what matters for both of them.

Study Hard and Make the Grade

What’s notable about back to school is that the season doesn’t have a specific opening or hard deadline; early-bird shoppers might begin their hauls in July, while others will wait into September. Use the long-lasting shopping season to your advantage by collecting insights from your campaign’s early days to optimize it over time. Easily transformable, format-ready content makes this process easier by allowing you to mix and match different layers of content—including products featured, composition and copy—and A/B test which performs best with which segments.

Doing so gives your brand a competitive edge in an incredibly important yet competitive shopping season. Equipped to produce a variety of versatile, fit-for-format content, you can give some love to the full extent of your products or offerings in a way that’s relevant to a wide variety of consumers, earning high marks into the following holiday season.

Advertising Week Europe has come and gone, featuring hundreds of speakers from some of the major players in creative and advertising—including our very own Sir Martin Sorrell of S4 Capital and Martin Verdult, Managing Director at MediaMonks London.

Over the course of the week, brands and agencies alike aired out their grievances, celebrated achievements and explored emerging opportunities for storytelling and connecting with consumers. While there’s a lot to talk about among the 200-some events hosted by the conference, we’re zeroing in on a handful of overarching themes most urgent to brands and agencies alike.

5G is Coming (Eventually)

It’s no advertising conference without a lot of talk about 5G. And while there’s a lot of talk about the technology, there’s still a dearth in tangible examples of how the next generation of mobile connectivity will affect creative storytelling.

But that’s fine for now. 5G is said to revolutionize the way people work and consume entertainment, and political or privacy concerns are sure to rise in response to any technology that promises to change everything (especially in Europe). We’re happy to see the discussion around 5G approached from all angles; tech brands that are ahead of the curve will welcome these discussions rather than shy away from them, building consumers’ and partners’ trust in the process.

TV is Still Exciting to Brands…

The future of TV ad spend is unclear thanks to cord cutters’ mass exodus to streaming services and OTT boxes, but one thing at Advertising Week Europe is clear: brands still place TVC on a pedestal. This may be because broadcasters’ response to recent streaming video controversies was to  frame their own environments as brand-safe alternatives, according to Digiday. Or it might just be because TV viewing is on the rise once you add digital to the equation.

While the one-to-many model of the TVC is rather outdated in today’s omnichannel, connected and stream-binging world, there’s no denying that hero content or a quality film has a certain caché to it. That’s why we’re excited to see the opportunities that addressable TVC provides for brands to reach viewing audiences in a more personalized way. Essentially, the value of TVC won’t be as a primary pillar on which entire campaigns are built; rather, they become one of several entry points to hook consumers’ attention with increased contextual relevancy.

…But Audio is Gaining Traction

With growing popularity of smart speakers and audio content, organizations are beginning to wonder how they might use sonic branding to their advantage—whether that takes the shape of investing in voice or finding ways to better use a new class of influencers within radio and podcasting space. The rewards of sonic branding can be grand: after all, who will ever forget the sound of MailChimp’s iconic ad spot in popular podcast Serial’s heyday? But regarding influencers brand safety is of chief concern in the European market, which is why we’ve come up with some tips for how brands can collaborate while safeguarding themselves.

Every brand knows the importance of its voice, but now they’ll have to take things a bit more literally. When 5G does finally hit, it can drastically increase the capabilities of Internet of Things devices—the very same devices that users commonly invoke via Alexa, Google Assistant and sometimes even Siri. With the importance of voice rising as an interface, brands are looking for opportunities to speak up and be heard.

Brands and Agencies Feel at Odds

At The Drum’s “10 Questions With…” event on Tuesday, the general vibe of the room suggested that agencies in attendance were slow to recognize the need for a digital-first approach. Comments about a return to the old way of doing things—eschewing data-led campaigns and chasing the singular Big, Creative Idea instead—got the audience nodding. You know what they say: old habits die hard.

Unfortunately for them, brands aren’t keen to wait on an obsolete approach. The reality is that they require results for their advertising and marketing spend, highlighting the essential role that data and metrics play in their everyday needs. “Nowadays, more CMOs are compensated on how well they deliver ROI,” says Storm Keys, Director of European Partnerships at MediaMonks London. “The responsibility of a campaign’s success falls directly on them.”

In general, brands desire more control over their marketing, as we’ve seen in those that have gone in-house. “They want to own their data, better understand their consumers and better understand media buy,” says Keys. And that trend isn’t a bad thing; we know that brands and agencies can play nice because we’ve done it before. Through new, flexible models and end-to-end services, the agencies of the future will help brands become nimbler and faster in producing the content their audiences crave.