A new Forrester report by Jay Pattisall, unveiled at the start of Cannes Lions, highlights how the pursuit of customer experience (CX) as a go-to strategy has in fact inhibited growth for many brands. Instead, brands must invest in creativity (and identify the right partners to help them do so) to achieve higher returns. It’s welcome news at Cannes, which celebrates creative excellence and serves as a benchmark for best-in-class communications—and MediaMonks is proud to have been interviewed alongside other agencies for the report.

Pattisall relates CMOs’ focus on CX to a diminishing prioritization of creativity; one   finding in his Forrester report is that “Every brand offers the same digital experience because they all address the same customer needs, use the same technology platforms, and design for the same mobile use case.” Brands shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket by focusing purely on function, but place greater attention on offering creative experiences.

A recent article published by Marketing Week agrees that brand creativity is on an overall decline, yet is a key indicator of success: 67% of companies with top ratings on McKinsey’s Award Creativity Score—measuring quantity, variety and consistency of Cannes Lions awards won—have above-average growth, according to the article.

Learn more about the cost of losing creativity.

What does this mean? Creativity might not be immediately quantifiable, but it can go a long way in increasing enterprise value. MediaMonks Global Executive Creative Director Jouke Vuurmans has long spoken out against brands failing to take advantage of the creative opportunities available to them. He has noticed a “suburbanization” of design where bold brand identity has taken a back stage to sanitized interfaces that tick off the same boxes. Because digital interfaces are often the most common—or even first—settings in which users will engage with a brand, this results in a lot of wasted potential for brands to differentiate themselves and deliver on the brand promise.

Building content and experiences requires input from many people across the organization, each perhaps pursuing their own goals—but they must collaborate to ensure their efforts are on the same page. “Just because so much focus is on digital doesn’t mean we should ignore brand within this relentless creation and distribution of content,” says ter Haar as quoted in the Forrester report, “The Cost of Losing Creativity,” highlighting the importance in remembering that even the most solutions-oriented approach shouldn’t dismiss the brand-building opportunities of creativity.

The Interface is the Brand

At MediaMonks, we believe every engagement that users have with a brand is an opportunity to represent its core products and services. Most apps that exist to fulfill a specific function essentially look and feel identical, lost in a sea of sameness where differentiating factors are slight, if they exist at all. This is especially true in travel brands, for example: any airline app will let you book a flight or check in with a digital boarding pass. But brands can stand out by fusing creativity and technology to fulfill a wider purpose. The Aeroméxico app is a great example of this by offering smart content based on users’ itineraries, helping them easily find offers most relevant to their trips.

The use of highly relevant and targeted personalized content shows how even the smallest interactions can make a big impact on the user experience—and those interactions directly translate into brand loyalty. “Creative experiences that embed the brand’s purpose and values within a tech-fueled solution connect the uniqueness of the brand, the emotional needs of its customers, and the convenience of technology,” writes Pattisall in the Forrester report.

We agree. While brands have come under great pressure to engage their consumers through always-on content, it’s become easy to view small pieces of content as disposable or having limited impact on the overall consumer experience. “People underestimate the creative value of always-on communication,” cautions ter Haar. “Just because it’s 6 seconds on Facebook doesn’t mean you can’t think about distinction.”

Drive Purpose Across the Ecosystem

A remedy for unlocking the creative potential in any touchpoint or piece of content is to begin thinking in terms of ecosystems. The user journey extends beyond individual channels and platforms. Likewise, brands should take a more holistic approach at the creative experiences they provide. “We spend a lot of time thinking about creativity as a broader term—something as part of UX, digital design, flow—across anything that’s building people into an ecosystem,” says ter Haar. “How does the work we do for brands lock people into an ecosystem?”

Take grilling brand Weber, who also realized audiences were beginning to care less about objects—like grills—and gravitate more towards experience. This shift in consumer focus provided Weber with an untapped opportunity: how could they use creativity through content and experience to position grilling (and by extension, their brand) at the center of social experiences that consumers crave?

The result is an all-encompassing digital ecosystem that serves not only as a place to learn about grilling products, but to seek out and discover inspiration about grilling as a lifestyle. By infusing this promise across an ecosystem that encompasses personalized web content, connected apps, interactive demos, in-person experiences and more, Weber has achieved a compelling digital ecosystem that accounts for a griller’s every need, infusing emotion and aspiration into every step of the experience.

In his Forrester report, Pattisall highlights the importance of infusing creative problem solving at the beginning of every creative process: “Rather than bolting creative on at the end of the process as an established look or defined list of deliverables, initiate the project with creative problem solving to help define the problem and craft a solution at the start,” he writes.

It all boils down to instilling your work with a sense of purpose. When working with clients to narrow their efforts and align those goals with moving the business forward, we enjoy quoting the NASA janitor who proudly told President Kennedy that he was helping to put a man on the moon. A similar sense of purpose should manifest from every step of the creative process, at every level of an organization and at every touchpoint at which users engage. Such an approach ensures customer experiences differentiate a brand and uniquely affect consumers to strike a stronger, longer-lasting connection.

While an exciting game and sports-stars-turned-celebrities alone were once enough to raise an audience for broadcast sports, today’s leading brands strive to provide premier, engaging digital experiences that reach users through personalization and emerging tech. And we know, because MediaMonks recently went for the gold and made it onto the Hashtag Sports Engage 150 list, which features the top partners engaging consumers through sports and fan culture today.

Through our sports-related work—encompassing platforms, creative content and technical innovation—we’ve formulated a game plan for brands to better engage and deliver upon the needs of fans through sports. This includes more effective utilization of user data and investing in emerging tech solutions, allowing brands to bring their A-game to enhance spectatorship for fans both near and far away from the game.

Transform Spectators into Active Participants with Emerging Tech

We all know the joke of those who buy the biggest TV screen available before an important game, only to return it after hosting a viewing party. But today’s digital media allows brands to do more than just provide a larger-than-life picture; through emerging tech, they can provide entirely new experiences that significantly improve spectatorship through heightened immersion.

A premier platform achieving this is the 2018 Webby Award-winning Red Bull Air Race for Google Daydream, which takes users on a thrilling ride aboard a virtual airplane that follows actual flight paths from real races. Giving users full control to look wherever they please, the experience makes them feel as if they’re really there.

But VR lets you do more than let users feel present in the moment. “The benefit something like AR has over 360-degree video is that it’s a platform,” says Robert-Jan Blonk, Senior Interactive Producer at MediaMonks, noting the amount of on-screen data present to the user. “In this case, we built a platform with pilot info, race standings and different locations where races are held, which users can go back and replay.”

This added level of autonomy is powerful for fans who want to be part of the action. “Sports fans want to feel like they have a role in the game and aren’t just bystanders,” says Emily Veraart, Senior Digital Strategist at MediaMonks. While Red Bull Air Race users don’t influence the race directly, interactive toggling of the camera lets them experience the event in their preferred way—whether it be the middle of the fray or at a safe, omniscient distance.

For MediaMonks Operations Manager Donny Hofman, this level of interactivity is integral to the experience.  “The most interesting thing about an experience like this is the freedom you can give to users,” he says. “You can potentially get anywhere in the action that you want—and where you can’t place a camera in real life, you can in VR.” That latter point describes how emerging tech can enhance sports spectatorship through entirely new perspectives: “It’s a rediscovery of something you’re familiar with,” says Hofman.

Reach Fans with Targeted Content and Personalization

The sports industry encompasses several different parties, each of whom has their own fans and content: teams, federations, individual players and industry-adjacent influencers. This makes the industry ripe for producing always-on content.

During the Rio Olympics, we produced with Google Zoo a platform to deliver content to sports fans throughout the Games. Designed for both online fans and those visiting Rio de Janeiro to attend in-person, the platform integrated various forms of content (like timely updates and summaries from some of the region’s most influential YouTube content creators, the Castro brothers) onto a map of the city. In addition to providing relevant spatial information in this way, the platform surfaces up personalized content responsive to how they interact with the platform, like recommending content based off behavioral habits and viewing preferences.

The benefits to better understand fans are measurable. According to MightyHive’s Data Confident Marketer report, data-confident marketers’ success “is attributed to becoming more customer-centric: they’re able to apply first-party data in ways that help them understand who their customers are, what motivates them, and how digital advertising plays a role in their purchasing decisions.” Such confidence in their data allows brands to identify which information fans seek, where and when—and which partners make the best sense for engaging with fans through supplementary content.

This level of personalization, paired with forging partnerships with content creators and influencers, is ideal for delivering upon changing user expectations for how to consume sports. “With sports, there’s a bigger generational divide in user behavior,” says Veraart. “Baby boomers and millennials are used to watching sports with their family, but Gen Z doesn’t have that relationship with how they watch sports.” According to Veraart, much of this shift is informed by the constant discussion happening on social media, as well as an abundance of statistics and data available for the most avid fans to track. Brands can meet this need with a content strategy that offers a sliding scale of data and content tailored to fans’ individual preferences.

Engage User Needs through Contextual Design

When developing a digital platform for sports consumption, carefully consider the context in which users will interact. Consider micro-moments that prompt users to engage in the first place: the sports tourist attending a big gaming event in town, the stats-obsessed fan, the user who simply wants to see what games are playing at the height of the season. “How you guide the user through a schedule is a key example of the types of challenges a sporting federation may face,” says Joeri Lambert, Business Monk at MediaMonks. “Another is how you apply the data that you have to alert the user of games or information that they want to see.”

One crucial consideration in how to best support user context is whether the platform is accessed via mobile or desktop. With the All of Brazil Plays platform, for example, the mobile experience was tailored more toward location-based information for those attending the Games who needed to know where to go, and when. On desktop, meanwhile, users were treated to their personalized newsfeed of recap content, perfect for those catching up on a day’s many events.

Marrying data with digital creative—whether it be a digital content platform or emerging tech—is a smart strategy for brands to reach sports-obsessed and average fans alike. From helping users keep up with their favorite team to placing them right into the action with immersive tech, digital content transforms spectatorship from a passive experience to an active one, letting everyone revel in a good sporting victory.

Recently, the FIAP Awards kicked off for four days of talks, Q&As and insights on advertising and communications.

If you’re not familiar with FIAP (Festival Iberoamericano de Publicidad), it’s one of the leading creative events in Latin America, hosted in Buenos Aires and home to one of our offices. This year’s edition featured several key speakers including Sir Martin Sorrell of S4 Capital and MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar.

One of the recurring themes throughout the conference was the challenges brands face in using data effectively, creatively affordably. If this sounds relatable, get up to speed on these big ideas surrounding the opportunities that data affords.

Budgets are tight, and the appetite for content isn’t slowing down.

“Nowadays you need more for less. There’s a constant need for content, but budgets are getting smaller.” – Wesley ter Haar

In his tongue-twisting talk “Ten Techtonic Trends,” Wesley ter Haar pointed out that marketing budgets peaked in 2016, only to fall the following year. Despite stagnant and decreasing budgets, the drive for content is always increasing as is the demand to provide more personalized, custom experiences. And if that doesn’t sound difficult enough, the challenge is expounded by an explosion of new forms of media: AR/VR experiences, live video, 360-degree video and more. Those in fear of missing out on the next big media platform might scramble to develop content for each, but this can be difficult to afford and organize. When producing so much content for so many different platforms, it’s easy for everything to feel a bit disconnected. That’s why it’s important to switch up your mentality and framework (find out how below).

Developing assets at scale is one way to satiate the growing hunger for content. It’s a process and creative framework that involves developing hundreds, thousands or maybe billions of unique assets tailored to hyper-specific segments in your market with only a handful of pieces of content. But how can organizations pull it off affordably? The answer lies in changing their way of thinking, which brings us to our next big idea:

Brands must integrate data and analytics throughout the creative process, not just at the end.

“Data is information, and information is power. What gives you the difference is to interpret it and know how to use it … and use it as a basis to create something.” –Eva Santos

Santos touched upon a key idea from FIAP: that relegating data and analytics to the end of the creative cycle is obsolete. Instead, agencies must incorporate data into every step of the creative process. Sir Martin Sorrell had a similar message when he said: “Data will inform creative and it will inform media planning. It will make them better, it won’t make them worse.”

Sir Martin Sorrell used the example of Netflix recommendations, which surface up customized posters and dynamic trailers tailored to audiences’ unique preferences. It’s easy to see how this makes content compelling, but it’s also a smart and economical way to generate tons of assets with relatively few pieces to begin with: with just 115 scenes and 3 intro animations, you could make almost 1.5 million pieces of content.

But this requires a bit of rethinking your strategy, too. Assets at scale rely on content frameworks punctuated with dynamic variables. So rather than developing a different piece of content per segment or interest, you simply develop a framework which you can use to test, scale and create more content without an added cost.

Demographics are dead; long live preferences.

“Demographic information doesn’t give us anything, it’s all about the users’ preferences.” – Wesley ter Haar

Bad news: demographics like geography, age or gender are dead. Good news: with today’s technology, delivering on user preferences is king. Ter Haar elaborates on the idea in his talk by giving us an example. Consider a young girl on the west coast who loves Breaking Bad. She has much more taste in common with other fans of the show—like an older man in Kentucky who’s also obsessed with it—than with other girls in her community who hate the show.

The next big battleground is personalization and context, which means both new and legacy brands will need to revise their data strategies to stay on top. And the stakes are high:  Adobe predicts that $800 billion will go to the top 15% of companies alone who get the formula right. That makes now more important than ever to get an effective data strategy in place.