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.

What if you could develop an unmissable ad—one so compelling that it immediately grabbed attention and made its point before viewers had a chance to look away? It might sound like the stuff of dreams, but it’s not a far-fetched idea. When L’Oréal sought to raise awareness of their Unbelieva-Brow product launch on social media, they needed an approach that would raise eyebrows before anyone could blink. The result? Ultra-short, super-fast video that makes an immediate value add before you can scroll past.

The challenge of standing out in competitive, fast-moving social media channels highlights the importance of micromoments: the quick moments in which users turn to a device to do or figure something out. These unassuming moments can be powerful for driving results, employing channel strategy to reach users in the perfect place and time.

With L’Oréal, for example, we drew upon our close relationship with Facebook to highlight what seemed like a bad user behavior—rapid scrolling and low engagement times with posts—into an opportunity: 1.7-second video designed to instantly captivate audiences and achieve a higher quality of engagement. “What were once missed opportunities have become brands’ most desirable, unmissable content,” says MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar. “By applying platform insights to consumer data, MediaMonks partners with brands to leverage digital-first content and drive more conversions–better, faster and cheaper than ever before.”

Identifying Your Audience’s Biggest Micromoments

Micromoments might seem innocuous enough: the time spent waiting for your bus, checking your phone in bed or a quick glance on your way to the coffee shop. But these moments add up, rivaling time spent watching TV: According to Nielsen’s Q1 2018 Total Audience Report, the average US adult devotes about 4:41 hours to digital media each day, almost the amount of time devoted to live or time-shifted TV consumption.

Employing social listening of L’Oréal’s audience, we highlighted several moments throughout the day in which users engage with the platforms supported by the campaign: Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Because the campaign’s content followed influencers through a “day in the life” format, establishing a timeline of where, when and how users accessed social media enabled us to optimize the story beats for the platform at that time of day. For example, realizing that users check Facebook on mobile early in the morning, we could optimize morning content for the platform—like a video demonstrating how the Unbelieva-Brow makeup can survive a sweaty morning workout routine.

Support Moments Through Channel Strategy

Our unmissable ad format grew out of a key channel strategy insight about the unique ways that users browse Facebook and Instagram: they scroll through content quickly. Social platforms may look very similar at first glance, but each digital touchpoint offers unique features. To stand out, brands must use these distinctive features to their disposal. While brands might struggle to identify the nuances of communication from one platform to another, a creative and production partner like MediaMonks can provide the insights necessary through research and existing platform partnerships. “Facebook is such a fast-paced platform that we have to ensure to catch the attention of the user as fast as possible,” says Andre Rood, Global Advertising Director at MediaMonks. “Applying this research to your advertising is a recipe for success.”

Influencers are trendy–but are they worth a risk?

On Instagram, meanwhile, we used native platform features to drive engagement. This included highlighting and encouraging UGC through story reposts, creating polls within stories and countdowns to new content. Interactive content like this not only engages users, but also provides brands with contextual metrics through which they can better understand the way users consume or interact with a given touchpoint. This can include time spent viewing content, customer pathways and more. For campaigns to be effective, brands must be able to unlock value from insights specific to their audience or platform.

Identify Opportunities for Relevancy

Meeting users at the right time and place as outlined above is important, but you’re missing out if you don’t ensure the message is relevant to audiences to begin with. Early in developing the campaign, we highlighted key audience: that the target skewed younger and liked to stay on-trend, and that durability was a key need from consumers. These insights informed the tone of the campaign and the makeup features to highlight.

But that’s not all: what good is a social campaign that isn’t social? Highlighting different audience segments—the sporty type, the nightlife lover, travel enthusiast and girl on the go—we pulled together influencers from L’Oréal’s pre-existing partner roster whose content embodied each. This ensured content had relevance to diverse interests and values, highlighting all the different scenarios in which the durability of the makeup might be tested.

Continual Optimization is Key for Long-Term Success

What sets digital content apart from traditional is real-time performance metrics that provide detailed results on what works and what doesn’t. Campaigns must employ continuous optimization. Forrester defines continuous optimization as “a data-, analytics-, and insights-driven approach that seeks to leverage every customer interaction to evolve the understanding of the customer in order to adapt and optimize customer experiences.” This approach allows for fine-tuning of deliverables throughout a campaign’s lifespan—and insights gleaned can translate to the next campaign’s design as well, allowing for more relevant customer experiences.

With CMOs seeking accountability in partners, the demand for results is becoming more pronounced. “As an industry, there has been so much focus on making everything quicker and cheaper,” MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar said in an interview with Adobe’s 99U. “More and more it is about the effectiveness of the work.” Through designing and iterating on digital-first content, organizations provide themselves the opportunity to collect and iterate upon actionable data, building brand equity through relevancy and a closer connection to audiences.

While social media platforms might share key features, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to marketing on them. A vertical video is right at home in a Snap ad, sure, but doesn’t work as well on YouTube. Meanwhile, assets that ask users to vote among options are a natural fit for platforms like Twitter or Instagram stories.

In addition to the unique features of digital platforms, a shift in audience significance can also prompt brands to rethink their channel strategies. For example, Millennial consumers are finally coming to age with a greater share of purchasing power: according to a Forrester webinar presented by Satish Meena and Michael O’Grady, they’ll make up 46% of adults by 2020, while today 86% of them live in emerging markets. But reaching this audience isn’t as easy as reaching their parents, as we’ll explore below in detail. With shifting audience demographics and the emergence of new platforms, an effective channel strategy is key to providing engaging digital experiences.

Channel strategy is focusing on the right platforms to convey the value of your brand, product or service. This is an essential part of planning out an integrated campaign and is increasingly important for providing a consistent experience across the user journey where users research to make a buying decision. The process for establishing a good channel strategy involves listing out the goals you hope to achieve, the personas you want to engage, then strategizing which channels can bring those goals and people together.

Finding the Features that Fit

The first step to any effective channel strategy is to plan out your objective. Are you trying to reach a new audience? Do you want to increase engagement through more interactive content? Perhaps you want to raise awareness and drive signups to a newly launched service, just like Amazon did with their Amazon Teen service that allows kids to make a purchase with their parents’ approval. Once you’ve set your campaign’s goals, you must identify target personas, paying special care to their digital habits. For Amazon teen, the personas were pretty easy to spot: parents and their teenage children.

When taking digital habits into account, the generation gap can sometimes feel like a perilous chasm, highlighting the importance in researching the differences in how the audiences you’re approaching interact online. Just like the way Millennials have been accused of killing the canned tuna industry, much has been said about how Gen-Z users just aren’t into Facebook as much as their parents are. This means that while Facebook would be a good channel to sell the Amazon Teen service to parents, we’d need a different approach to speaking to kids in their own language.

Through research, we identified key differences between teens’ and their parents’ online interactions. Teens prefer visual communications while older generations prefer standard email, for example. Parents also prefer sharing videos on Facebook while their children enjoy creating and consuming mobile video.

Equipped with the info above, the next step was to strategize which channel would bridge the gap between the service being sold and the audience Amazon wanted to reach. This inspired a microsite that mimicked the content creation tools that teens enjoy on apps like Instagram and Snapchat, offering interactions through playful, brightly colored stickers and other artistic tools. Because the microsite targeted teens through ads on those platforms, its lighthearted design and prompt for them to create allowed for a seamless transition from social platform to branded experience. The trick was just to translate those native creative functions to the brand.

The Integration Imperative

Far from just driving awareness to a service, a channel strategy that smartly leans in to content creation and sharing can have a profound effect on a user’s personal connection with a brand. This is where channel integration plays a key role: once your audience has had an awesome experience with you, how will they share that out to friends?

While works of art exist to strike a human connection, Amsterdam’s world-renowned Rijksmuseum felt that your average museum tour could use an upgrade in order to better connect with youth. Rijksmuseum partnered with Maak creative agency to produce a Snapchat-inspired tour guide in which influencers would lead visitors from work to work through short videos, then encourage viewers to record their own reflections. While Maak created the concept and video content, they brought MediaMonks on to build the mobile web experience allowing users to take the video tour.

“SnapGuide is a powerful, new channel for Rijksmuseum to connect with the youth,” said Rik Spruijt, Producer at MediaMonks. One way to meet a new target demographic: speak their language, which is why Rijksmuseum prompted youth-oriented influencers to give the virtual tours. “They didn’t give the influencers much brief,” says Spruijt. “By letting them make videos in their own tone and voice, the experience could remain as authentic as possible.”

Visitors follow along with some of their favorite influencers as they explore the museum. Once they complete watching a video, they’re prompted to respond via Snapchat, Instagram or their phone’s camera. The transition between the mobile site and social media is seamless, allowing users the ability to engage without having to download any extra apps.

“This experience is tailored for a specific target demographic: young people,” says Spruijt. “So it contains crucial elements that are very attractive to them, like snappy content and usability that they’d expect from apps like Snapchat and Instagram.”

Despite its simplicity, SnapGuide does quite a bit: it entertains users, prompts them to reflect on the works of art through content creation, then provides a fast and easy way to share it. The guide shows how an engaging experience doesn’t have to come with the cost of a complex, flashy app; it only takes a few well-executed features refined through channel strategy. In fact, the video tour has been so popular that subsequent tours have dropped the sole focus on a student audience and diversified to accommodate other segments of the museum’s clientele.

What’s important to remember is that channel strategy isn’t just a matter of what you say, but how and where you say it. It requires a key understanding of what kinds of interactions are supported on the myriad of platforms out there, and how those interactions inform the way users connect with content. From there, it’s essential that you provide audiences with the tools they’ll need to express themselves and pass your message along. A mix of smart channel strategy and seamless integration, then, is the fulcrum on which a campaign hinges between #awesome and #fail.

This week saw the 4A’s CreateTech conference in New York City for a rousing exchange of ideas from creative technologists and leaders in advertising. Focused on technology’s power to provide new forms of storytelling and engagement, this year’s event was focused on the new “Innovation Imperative,” a sink-or-swim feeling faced by organizations who find themselves anxious about identifying the next big thing—or struggling to catch up to the last one.

The conference had a sense of urgency about it, but not without excitement, too. Its prevailing theme was to look past preconceived notions of what’s possible and to view challenges as new opportunities. A shortlist of concerns: What if artificial intelligence threatens my job security? How can my organization reach audiences on cutting-edge channels? How do we anticipate the fabled Next Big Thing?

Attendees didn’t have to wait very long for a solution to these questions. In her opening remarks, 4A’s President and CEO Marla Kaplowitz presented an edict in response to technology’s encroachment into the creative process: “We must all become creative technologists, at every level of the organization.” Easier said than done, perhaps, though with so many bright minds in a room together, plans of action were sure to emerge.

Eschew Fear for Fun

Our very own Sam Snider-Held, VR/AR Creative Technologist at MediaMonks NY, uses the term “techno-wizard” to describe the work that he does: “It’s like being a wizard, but instead of using magical stones and spell books, my tools are VR, AR, programming and machine learning.” In his playful talk “Becoming a Techno-Wizard,” Snider-Held expressed how a personal, creative goal can propel anyone “through learning all the hard, technical stuff” in their way. In essence, creative technologists should have fun.

For Snider-Held, that goal is “technologically-driven lucid dreaming,” or translating environments from imagination to virtual space with as little friction as possible using machine learning. This nod to imagination and play highlights how ingenuity shouldn’t be lost in working with tech. In fact, at a later CreateTech panel on artificial intelligence, event emcee Charlie Oliver and CEO of Tech2025 mused how “Something that’s missing in AI is ‘charm.’” Basically, she says, technology’s status as a black box sometimes leads to a sense of unease for creatives and marketers who don’t yet understand it.

But this anxiety about the changing tech landscape is exactly why Snider-Held suggests everyone empower themselves to leverage for their own goals. “AI isn’t going to take my job,” he says. “Instead, it’s allowing me to spend more time to make cool things rather than do detail-oriented, repetitive work.”

Become a Techno-Wizard

Snider-Held may be right that the closest thing we have to magic is technology, but how does a techno-muggle become a techno-wizard? The answer lies in committing to a constant willingness to learn and expand your (or your team’s) skillset bit-by-bit through an iterative process.

The industry tends to think of innovation and “the next big thing” as a monolith—a disrupting force that must be unlocked. But this view obscures all the little things that made it possible to arrive at the big thing. In his opening keynote at CreateTech, Dr. Kumar Mehta offered a tongue-twisting shift of perspective: “The thing behind the next big thing might be ‘the thing.’” He gave the example of how the invention of the wheel is seen as remarkable, “but what gave it value was the axle, which attached it to a movable platform.” Innovation, then, is an iterative process where one thing leads to another—the big thing is an aggregate of little things. Those who really want to lead in “innovation” must first and foremost treat it as a learning process where experimentation can eventually lead to value.

This way of thinking provides a more approachable framework for adapting to trends: start somewhere small and work up from there. Snider-Held walked the audience through his iterative process of creating a simple tool that performs complex world-building tasks in virtual reality. With just a few gestures, the tool lets you place AI-designed, animated three-dimensional assets within the space.

Just a small experiment born out of curiosity—“What if I could use machine learning to place assets in a virtual environment?”—snowballed into something bigger, resulting in a tool that could help Snider-Held and colleagues design much faster. But the experiment isn’t the only thing that transformed: so did Snider-Held. “I started off being the AR and VR guy on the team,” he told the audience, “but now I’m the AR, VR and machine learning guy.” He also mentioned how such experiments can result in ready-made prototypes that can serve as tangible solutions to new problems, showing how the techno-wizard mindset is as useful to entire organizations as it is for inspired individuals.

In summary, “Don’t wait for opportunities,” says Snider-Held, which really speaks to the over-arching theme of the event. Organizations shouldn’t wait for a big change but continually seek out new ways of doing things. Through this, both organizations and individuals can enjoy a new sense of confidence and enthusiasm to tackling the latest trend challenges.