Building a Committed, Flexible Integrated Production Partnership

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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