Localization is a key challenge for any brand targeting several geographic markets, whether they be multinational or domestic. The way you’ll talk to a New Yorker about pizza, after all, might resonate differently with an audience in Italy. This gets at the heart of what good localization really is: it’s not just a matter of translation, but of paying special care to include the smaller details and nuances that appeal to a specific market.

Pulling off this level of transcreation can be tough due to the sheer volume of assets needed per market, the knowledge required about what markets respond to, and complex processes that hamper brands’ abilities to push this content out efficiently. For organizations struggling with any of these challenges, an integrated production partnership can help optimize transcreation workflows and implement local to infuse campaigns with a high level of local relevance around the globe.

An integrated production partnership is a team custom-built for your brand and its specific needs. Rather than brief an agency on a project, an integrated partnership focuses on the long-term and can scale up or down according to your need, whether it be through growth in consistent, daily responsibilities or sudden one-off projects. Working partially in-house, an integrated team provides access to a varied talent base across the globe, making the model a practical solution for brands seeking to provide local relevancy to always-on content.

Streamline Production for Growth

Inefficient transcreation isn’t just a matter of audience reach; it can impede growth as well. For example, one of our integrated partners is a digital brand that’s experienced very rapid growth through the acquisition of local businesses. With every new acquisition and market came a new need for assets, burying their in-house studio with an ever-increasing workload. An integrated partnership enabled the brand to offload lower complexity tasks and speed up the production process to match the rate of growth.

For some brands, a social media presence or their chosen industry might require an ever-quickening pace of asset production. This challenge rises exponentially for those catering to different local markets. An entertainment brand, for example, must react to current events across markets with speed, understanding how a given story’s relevance might differ among those markets. Because integrated partnerships thrive on long-term relationships and provide organizations with teams that are dedicated to their brands, they can streamline the production process by enabling daily deliverables rather than use a project-oriented approach. When brands feel increased pressure to develop always-on content ecosystems targeting different markets and cultures, an integrated partnership with access to a global talent base is ideal for offering the right message at the right time.

Improve Consistency Across Markets with New Creative Frameworks

Offloading tasks is simple enough, though the true potential of an integrated partnership is to optimize workflows across levels of the production process. A common challenge for large, global organizations is that they juggle several vendors per market, which can complicate the production process or threaten quality and consistency.

Through the guidance or talent resources provided by an integrated partnership, brands can provide local markets with autonomy to tailor messaging without having to worry about inconsistent style or messaging. While it might seem as though such a partnership is inviting yet another outside vendor into the process, this model is developed for the long term around a sense of shared responsibility. Custom-built and engrained within your organization’s culture, integrated partnerships have deep knowledge of a brand and can therefore serve as a safeguard.

Let’s consider another partner as an example. Its US team controlled asset production in other markets including Asia, which resulted in messaging that wasn’t necessarily relevant to them. This prompted local markets to work with their own vendors to develop assets with more cultural relevance. While they succeeded in that effort, the new materials lacked consistency. As the adage says, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” In this case, inviting several voices and vendors in the mix resulted in an inconsistent brand experience.

Our solution was to find a way to give room for freedom and autonomy to local markets while still allowing for a centralized work stream. At MediaMonks, we’re well-experienced in producing assets at scale through a unique creative framework that allows for several variations with little rework or added cost. We adapted this process for our partner by producing a series of master templates which would ensure a consistent visual style, while also being easy for local markets to adapt. This approach maintained flexibility while also quickening the time to market. “What sets this process apart is that transcreation is kept at front-of-mind and engrained into the process rather than being treated as an afterthought,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks LA.

A Talent Studio That Knows Your Brand—And Your Local Audience

Finally, our integrated partnerships provide brands with access to an always-on, global talent studio that can easily place a brand in any market. When a brand sees an opportunity in a new market, we can tap into a local talent pool with an awareness of what resonates there. “This flexibility in matching organizations to the larger MediaMonks network whenever needed is one of the key capabilities of integrated partnerships,” says Martens, “and is especially helpful for organizations that know no borders.”

Whether your organization is eyeing opportunities in new markets, is dealing with an unmanageable workload or simply needs to ensure a greater level of consistency across markets, an integrated partnership makes for a versatile, scalable model designed to fit those needs. Once in place, your team is equipped to adapt to new opportunities and challenges that can help your organization work faster and more efficiently, resulting in better ways to meet the needs of your audience no matter where they call home.

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To acclimatize to the fast-changing digital environment, many brands seek to think and work more like startups. No, brands aren’t rushing to install foosball tables in their conference rooms (though that does sound like fun); rather, they see a need to open themselves up to more agile, flexible ways of working to continually adapt to new needs and trends. An integrated production partnership—unique in providing a team dedicated to a brand, but which also provides access to the larger production toolset—delivers a great environment for brands to map out their transformation and reduce production pain points.

Brands have been flocking to in-house models in order to save on budget, achieve a faster time to market and to ensure their brands are faithfully represented by those who know them best. In a time when always-on content is required for maintaining relevancy and a direct connection to consumers, these needs are incredibly common. But finding the right model for taking capabilities in-house (or partially in-house) is essential for success, as we’ve seen with brands whose priorities have shifted after establishing their own studios, requiring them to reorient yet again.

The Start of an Intimate Relationship

We know that organizational needs are prone to change, and are often hard to pinpoint for that matter. That’s why integrated production partnerships provide the stability of working in-house, while offering the flexibility of an agency and production partnership that accommodates rapid growth or sudden needs. Because our teams share goals with our partners and are in for the long haul, we help brands optimize efficiencies and extract more value for less time and budget, lowering cost per asset.

One key example of this is the always-on content studio, which provides partners with access to our global talent network when required. “What we’re seeing now in the market is that a lot of procurement teams are looking to consolidate vendors on a repetitive basis, not reinvent the wheel with frequent RFP’s,” says Louise Martens, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. “The idea of having a content studio is gaining traction.” For brands that don’t have the resources to go in-house, or simply need help in reducing their in-house studio’s workload, an integrated partnership makes for a great alternative.

Finding the Right Fit is Key

A couple years ago, there was a big push for a “pivot to video”: a trend in which publishers cut their writing teams and switched their focus to short-form, social video content that seemed like a better investment at the time. Such sudden changes in strategy are common these days, but they can also be incredibly disruptive when brands aren’t equipped to adapt at a moment’s notice—and they can also be unwise for those who are simply following a trend rather than making a fully thought out, strategic decision, as we saw when the pivot to video blew up in some organizations’ faces. This is where integrated production partnerships really shine: while they’re designed to achieve a specific business goal, they’re easy to ladder up on all levels of the production process, whether that be merely offloading a brand’s in-house workload, consolidating workstreams or costs, or providing a more active role in a brand’s strategy—for example, how to best support a new digital platform for the long term.

“We run a few models and none of them are the same,” says Martens, “and that’s because no two brands are the same.” Despite this, the process in establishing such teams always starts at the same place: with a discovery phase that prompts partners to look toward the long-term, at least six months down the line. “A lot of brands might not know what they’ll be up to six months from now,” says Martens, particularly because the landscape is always changing. By helping brands identify goals with the highest business impact, we can accelerate their evolution and easily scale up from there.

Start Small, but Think Big

While integrated production teams primarily zero in on doing specific things really well—creating easily transformable assets at scale, for example—they’re by no means limited to a single task. Integrated into to the larger MediaMonks network, these teams can quickly and easily connect brands with new, added capabilities as they arise. This helps brands achieve ongoing optimization across the production process and incrementally attain a higher digital maturity through a smoother transition.

Think about it: digital transformation is an overwhelming endeavor. But starting with clear objectives and working your way out from there makes the progression more palatable and easier to process. “The problem is when you try to fix everything at once,” says Martens. “Instead, we start with one workstream and move up from there to, say, eight workstreams.”

Because platforms, technologies and user behaviors are always in a state of change, the work is never done in making processes more efficient. This reality makes it essential for brands to optimize and make themselves more agile and flexible to react to—or lead with—new trends and deeper, more frequent user experiences. Integrated production partnerships exist to provide the level of sustained, long-term support that organizations may require to meet these long-term ambitions.

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Brands seek ways to deliver content faster, at-scale and at a lesser cost—all without diminishing quality. Pulling off each of these might sound impossible, though the integrated production partnership model is ideal for meeting these needs by lending organizations with the support and resources they need. Still, brands will have to take some initial steps to ensure success when working in these partnerships.

An integrated production partnership provides brands with a core team custom-built to their unique challenges and goals, whether it be producing content, optimizing work streams, easing workloads or platform support. Designed for the long term, integrated production partnerships start small but can easily scale up and flex out to meet new challenges and opportunities (for example, localizing in a new market). But despite the convenience of an integrated team, no major change is without growing pains. If you’re considering investing in an integrated production partnership for your brand, take some time to mull over these considerations for success first.

Be Open to Change

Because integrated production partnerships are built from the ground up to support brands’ unique needs, each one begins with a discovery phase that identifies key challenges and their solutions. This process raises questions that can range from fairly basic to quite specific, prompting brands to lay it all out and take a long, hard look at the way they operate.

One major step within this phase includes a data boot camp. Throughout this data audit, we work with the brand to understand what data is available and how it can be used more efficiently across levels of the organization. “Instead of letting data go into a black hole, we can choose a handful of the most necessary data points to focus on,” says Louise Martens, Head of Embedded Production at MediaMonks.

Unlocking data potential often involves revising work streams across an organization—for example, breaking down departmental silos—which requires a brand and its stakeholders to be open and honest about the challenges they face. But nothing is off-limits, and any challenge raised should be viewed as an opportunity.

Look Toward the Future

Once we’ve discovered the most relevant or needed key data points available, we can put them to action by cementing key KPIs that result in success. This takes us to the next major step in discovery: developing a forecast calendar. It can be difficult for brands to extend their view six months to a year into the future, especially when business decisions or priorities can change at a moment’s notice.

Ter Haar asks this all the time: “Will we be relevant in X?” That X could be years, months, or even weeks in the future. While it once was easier for brands to forecast far ahead, that distance is rapidly shrinking, which can be scary for an organization to process. “Because some brands face challenges that far into the future, they may have a fear of locking in a group of people for long-term tasks,” says Martens, “so we keep our core team lean. Flexible and able to tap into the larger MediaMonks talent pool when needed, this new model alleviates any retainer fear that brands might have.”

The process also helps us learn whether the nature of the work is more ad-hoc or rigid in scope. This is where the benefits to an integrated production partnership become clearer to brands: it allows your organization to become more agile and adaptive for when the going gets tough. Forecasting can help map out possible opportunities or capabilities that might become needed in the near or distant future.

“We don’t do this to nickel and dime our services, but to establish a plan that tackles a key issue with the opportunity to scale out organically,” says Martens. While this might sound like typical program management, what makes our partnership unique is the closeness of both parties involved. “Any efficiency we enable benefits us just as directly as our partners,” says Martens. “We want them to be better at their jobs.”

Learn to Love Automation

You can’t push for greater efficiency within your organization without talking about automation, but teams often bristle at the thought of it. And it’s easy to understand why: for creatives, automation can often feel limiting. “Marrying the systematic approach with creative freedom is a general challenge and a natural point of friction,” says Martens. But automating rote tasks and processes can allow for more cost-effective creative without sacrificing quality.

Partners who seriously want to increase their efficiency should view automation as a creative advantage, not hindrance. With automation, says a Forrester report detailing the AI marketing renaissance, “CMOs will be able to let their teams refocus their energy on core marketing activities such as brand strategy, creative thinking, new product innovation, and business models.” This allows creative teams to devote more time to complex, rewarding creative tasks rather than repetitive ones.

As discussed above, an embedded services team can help you define the data most essential for optimizing your output. But how effective that strategy will be boils down to whether your team is prepared to embrace new creative frameworks using automation. For what it’s worth, pushing the limits of machine learning to make creatives’ lives easier is a key motivation for our experimental creative technologists at MediaMonks.

Include Stakeholders from Across the Organization

Forming an integrated production partnership means altering the way your organization works, and therefore requires input from people across departments and levels of the business. “The more colorful the room is, the more points of view you have for building the operation in a tailor-made way,” says Martens. A diverse range of viewpoints also makes it easier to pinpoint problems and KPIs for the core team to tackle.

Often, this places your brand ambassador into the role of mediator, ensuring that all sides of the equation are kept happy or being heard. A great example of this is the point raised above about automation: procurement might love the cost-saving benefits of the initiative, while creatives may push back. But by distilling everyone’s concerns to arrive at a solution, brands can end up with a creative framework that allows for cost-effective, insights-driven content that engages consumers at scale on an individual level—a win for everyone.

“A typical agency might say ‘It’s my way or the highway,’” says Martens, “though our view is that the plan is only relevant when built for the brand.” Gauging pain points among several stakeholders from across the organization allows us to work with brands to prioritize the most pressing needs for efficiency.

Whether your brand struggles to support a continual stream of content or needs long-term platform support, an integrated production partnership helps to zero in on goals, discover opportunities for efficiency and plug in any talent gaps your team might face. After considering the points discussed above, you’re ready to begin envisioning how such a partnership can enhance your organization.

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One of the greatest challenges that brands face today is the need to cut time and cost without cutting corners. According to the 2019 SoDA Global Digital Outlook Report, 63% of client-side marketers cite producing and publishing targeted digital content is a major business priority, but thanks to a quickening pace of digital media consumption and growing consumer demand for always-on (and relevant) content, many struggle to produce the content they require in a timely manner—until now, that is.

The integrated production partnership is a unique setup that speaks to the challenges above by augmenting organizations’ existing teams with a global, multi-discipline talent studio. Unlike a typical outsourcing model, integrated production partnerships provide teams that truly belong to the brand, dedicated to their success and designed strictly for their specific needs through a consultative discovery phase. The result is a more efficient, partially in-house production workflow that empowers brands to optimize and scale up at a moment’s notice, or easily pivot as soon as priorities change.

Every organization is different, and they each have a lot to consider when choosing a partner. Responding to the challenges that brands face, we’ve crafted a guide that explains the diverse benefits that integrated production partnerships offer, including key takeaways to consider when planning a partnership. These include: optimizing production while balancing global consistency with local relevance; how to scale up production with rapid turnaround times; discovering different models to achieve different goals; and what to consider before jumping into a production partnership.

Equipped with this knowledge, your organization will be ready to take back control, identify opportunities for efficiency and enhance its production capabilities.

Learn how an integrated production partnership can solve your brand’s production challenges.