To stay ahead of the curve in customer engagement, brands must move beyond delivering AI-generated content (AIGC) to delivering AI-powered consumer experiences (AICX). While AIGC levels up content by creating content at scale, AICX levels up the customer experience by creating personalized interactions. Applying AI to CX is not just about chatbots for customer service, it's about adopting a customer-centric approach across all functions, from product development to marketing, and across all touchpoints, from digital to retail, all enabled by AI. AI has the ability to create intimate and hyper-personalized one-to-one interactions across all touchpoints of the consumer decision journey, and will be a key factor in how brands are perceived, valued and ultimately loved by consumers. Here’s how, in three ways.

AICX levels up storytelling.

Applying AI to consumer experience means moving from advertising a brand world, to participating and engaging in a brand world. The most discerning audiences in the world are demanding nothing less than a seamless and immersive brand experience: 73% point to brand experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, right behind price and product quality. Here are the ways brands are already leveling up engagement via immersive brand experiences powered by AI, and developed by Media.Monks:

• Building smart and immersive flagship stores. Chinese EV brand JIDU launched the world's smartest showroom in Beijing, powered by Baidu AI technology. This immersive space offers a unique brand experience with life-size avatars and captures valuable user data.  
• Embedding consumers directly into any story. Intel’s AI-powered technology connects young people in China to their remarkable heritage by scanning and mapping their faces in real time onto historical figures in a series of animated films that were projected on the city walls of Xi’an.

AICX levels up personalization.

The benefits of personalized customer experiences—one-on-one interaction between a customer and a brand—helps to massively uplift sales and loyalty. Research suggests that personalized and tailored CX drives over 66% of customer loyalty—more than price and brand combined. Meanwhile, 78% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend companies that personalize their interactions. 

• Creating hyper-personalized celebrity content at scale. In collaboration with Spotify, we created an interactive listening experience with a deep fake version of The Weeknd giving users a personalized greeting using data from their Spotify accounts. We created an AI to synthesize the artist’s voice allowing for an interactive listening experience between the fan and the artist himself. Over 600K fans visited in the first few hours—and The Weeknd knew every one of them.
• Personifying an AI personal shopper. What if your customers could have a conversation with an AI personal shopper that could recommend style tips and products, creating cross-selling and repeat purchase opportunities for higher customer lifetime value? For a long time, brands have tried to do this with chatbots to handle questions or complaints in a customer service capacity further down the funnel, but now conversational UI creates a smoother experience and will be used earlier in the funnel for ecommerce exploration. 

AICX levels up co-creation.

Involving consumers in product development very early on in R&D is proven to drive product success, advocacy and conversion. Companies that involve customers in the product development process see numerous benefits, including a higher customer advocacy, than those that don't. The proof is there, but brands find it very difficult to execute on immersive co-creation because it typically involves different departments and different organizational structures. That’s where AI comes in. Here are some AI-powered co-creation applications that we’re helping brands experiment with today.

• Generating consumer insights. At the Estee Lauder R&D Experience Center in Shanghai, the beauty brand engages consumers and key opinion leaders in product testing, validation and co-creation sessions for new products. Touch tables and magic mirrors powered with AI technology enhance workshops and ideation sessions and support the generation of consumer insights from participants in the room.
• Co-creating new products with customers in real time. What if a fashion lifestyle brand could run live design sessions with their community, their best creative directors and celebrities in a livestream that could generate the must-have sneaker, handbag or you-name-it based on their input…in real time? Not only would it speed products to market, but community co-creation and input would virtually guarantee success.

Get ahead by embracing AICX now.

The evolution of AI technology—from analyzing and processing data, to creating more content faster and at scale, to facilitating personalized storytelling through experiences that deepen the collaboration and intimacy between brands and its customers—is extremely exciting…and disruptive. There are new developments in the technology and its application for brand engagement literally every day, and brands that are able to harness AI’s power will be able to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their customers and drive business growth like never before. Again, this will mean looking beyond AI’s power to merely build efficiency; in an environment of content overload, delivering AICX is how brands can truly deliver value.

For one of our clients, their team had spent quite a good amount of time and effort building a series of email marketing campaigns in order to optimize online customer journeys. Some results were great: the CTR, for example, was extremely high considering the industry benchmark. So, how come the team was not able to demonstrate the impact of their investment just yet?

As soon as our team set out to analyze the email campaign data from top to bottom, a common issue sprung into view. It wasn’t really about the email content or the automation settings. The problem was at the top of their email campaign journey: the number of email leads put into the campaign pipelines was significantly low.

Before you start, consider your input.

Data from the 2022 ROI Report by Nielsen shows that increased investment in upper-funnel to mid-funnel marketing campaigns elevated brands’ ROI by 70%. Clearly, it is critical to create and strengthen a marketing system where you can maximize the impact of your input and draw the best outcomes. However, at times, we forget two of the main aspects of implementing a successful marketing strategy: the amount and quality of your input. Both should be satisfied, because without a decent amount of quality email leads at the top of the email marketing funnel, the outcomes will never suffice or provide the expected value for the team’s investment.

The Nielsen report also shows a significant, positive correlation between audience targeting and campaign ROI: high target reach campaigns (those that aim to reach a large number of people within a specific target audience) present a higher ROI than medium and lower target reach campaigns. Considering the power of the upper-mid funnel marketing, audience targeting in the upper funnel can lead to unlock maximized potentials of campaign performance. But in order to secure a healthy amount of customers at the top of the funnel, approaching the right targets in your upper funnel campaigns is pivotal. And here’s the good news: media campaign platforms offer a variety of options for you to fine-tune your targeting strategies by grouping customers into meaningful subsets.

When it comes to navigating the myriad categories and data points used for targeting, I follow a list of strategies and criteria to better target and activate audiences in marketing campaigns, which in turn helps to improve the upper funnel. Note that some strategies may not be viable, depending on the features of the media campaign platforms your team is using or the availability of the online customer data.

• Demographics: gender, age, education, job title, etc.
• Life events: critical lifetime milestones such as change in marital status, having a baby, or buying a house.
• Affinity: specific interests of consumers while browsing online.
• In-market: strong consumer interest in the products or services you are selling.
• Previous interactions with your website or app: visited, viewed a product, clicked “add to cart,” logged in, downloaded brochures, etc.
• Current customers: existing records in CRM matching with the campaign channels.
• Likely-to-be customers: people who are sharing similar characteristics to the existing customers.

By segmenting target customers into the right subsets and serving them relevant content in marketing channels, your team will be more likely to have strong upper pipelines, leading to stronger performance down the funnel. And if your team has robust input and a solid marketing system, ROI improvement is just around the corner!

In the latest episode of In a Monk’s Opinion, our SVP, Global Performance and Enterprise eCommerce Kashif Zafar sits down with special guest Holly Elliot, VP Growth Marketing at Hatch, and fellow Monks Robbie Wiedie, VP Creative Services, and Jackie Andreetta, Associate Director of eCommerce, to discuss the smart-sleeping giant’s approach to marketing and advertising and their most recent strategic decisions. Furthermore, they talk about Hatch’s partnership with Media.Monks, the value of starting a creative mission with data, the importance of keeping track of trends and meeting customers where they are, and why advertisers shouldn’t miss out on Amazon. The golden thread? Whatever you do, always test and learn. 

In case you missed it—you can watch the full conversation below.

Hatch has had creative consistency and an unquestionable brand ethos since day one, which was instantly clear to Holly when she joined the team in 2021. As any growth marketer knows, starting a new role shortly before Q4 can be quite intense, but luckily she was given a warm and well-branded welcome. However, in preparing the marketing and advertising for the upcoming holiday season, Holly discovered two gaps: channels were optimized in silos and creative work was conducted based on campaigns rather than evergreen performance—in short, nothing that Media.Monks can’t solve.  

Acting as an extension of Hatch’s creative team, our main task was to make memorable content that could also perform, keeping in mind the company’s paid efforts. “We like to think of performance creative as fuel for the media engine,” says Robbie. The secret to success is starting with the data. So, our team first looked at the performance data on all the creative work to date, and then took existing assets, learned to speak the brand language, and created iterations of the top performers. Through a post-production-only methodology, our team repurposed existing creative assets into channel-specific iterations in a fast and efficient way—with the first social ads going live within a couple of weeks, before moving on to user-generated content and larger campaign stories. “We often say data is our creative director and this really holds true,” says Robbie, noting the role that insights can play in refining creative ideas.

While Hatch’s internal creative team primarily works on brand marketing, Media.Monks focuses on the performance part. “The speed at which we work with Media.Monks is so essential,” says Holly. “We’re able to test content on new platforms very quickly, which we couldn’t have done on our own.” On top of that, media learnings make the process seamless. This is crucial, as the health and wellness brand plans to focus on media diversification even more in the future. “It’s all about making sure you find new places to reach people,” says Holly, to which Robbie adds: “And that it’s based on the learnings, because you can’t argue with data.” Curious to hear what else the future of Hatch will hold, and how the brand readies itself for the upcoming holiday season? Take a look at the video above to find out more.

We all know the age-old adage that content is king, but when all marketers use the same strategy by leveraging content to promote their product or service, the question remains: does this strategy still work? With millions of options available and thousands of alternatives in place, what can make your brand stand out as the most memorable? The answer to both questions lie in context marketing, a crucial strategy for helping your content resonate with audiences—and one that has enjoyed renewed interest and attention due to recent conversations about privacy and cookieless marketing.

Cut through the noise and drive memorability for your brand.

Context marketing provides the right meaning and insights to maximize relevance between people and your brand. Too often, brands focus fully on the content of their creative and not enough on the context in which people view them—the channels, cultural trends and other variables that shape their behavior online. But modern marketers know that there’s often a need to strategically balance content and context depending on their marketing goals. When building a content or context marketing strategy, there are a few factors that brands and marketers can consider. 

Frequency. How frequently will users see the ads? Too high a frequency can lead to ad fatigue. But if the ad frequency is low due to your budget or if your audience pool is smaller, there will only be a few chances to make an impact at speed. When users decide within a matter of seconds where to devote their attention, context can at times take priority over content. In Uni’s rebrand, focusing on enriching lives by inspiring creativity and connection, our paid media team worked closely with the creative team to ensure the media strategy was in line with the campaign’s creative vision. This approach enabled us to capture audience attention quickly through creative.

Shifts in preferences and trends. Over time, trends and shifts in consumer attitude will ebb and flow. For example, a particular skincare product is not useful for me in summer due to my skin type, but I did find it to be good for winter. Unfortunately for the brand, they never targeted me in the off season, which makes me wonder how things would have turned out differently had they re-evaluated audience targeting over time. Because trends and needs change, it’s wise to continually test audience targeting and exclusions over time. This will help you strategically adapt your marketing plan, its content and its context to meet changing tastes and preferences throughout the year.

Channel and vertical. The channel determines the format of creative and the content that will be delivered to the audience. For example, some channels favor video content while others are focused on images. Some are good for longform content, while content on others is more snackable. Some might even be interactive. Keep in mind how the channel may influence audience expectations, and also consider how your vertical may guide the approach to content. 

This is a strategy we used in helping Hatch, a fast-growing wellness and health brand, win over the hearts of countless people hoping to improve their sleep. We built a constant flow of fit-for-format content bespoke for each channel, each with narrative arcs that told the deeper story of Hatch Restore, the brand’s latest sleep assistant. The focus on format returned a 220% increase in click-through rate and 120% increase in view-to-completion rates.

Target audience. When it comes to your audience, it’s important to achieve the desired sentiment. This starts by selecting the right audience. For Hill House, a lifestyle direct-to-consumer brand, we analyzed audience signals from previous buyers to identify current and would-be customers. These insights allowed us to build data-driven creative we could optimize for this audience. These efforts not only drive performance—Hill House saw 80% higher ad engagement—but also enhance brand recall.

Maximize your marketing efforts with context marketing.

The above factors, while not all inclusive, offer a way to begin tapping into audiences more effectively through context marketing. Context marketing lets you deliver the right ad, at the right time, with the right message and format. By testing your creative relative to the variables above—frequency, trends, channel and audience—you enhance personalization and boost the strength of your marketing. This is especially useful as brands seek new strategies to adapt to a cookieless, more privacy-focused marketing landscape.

Ad fatigue is real: with so much content out there demanding our attention, it’s all too easy for audiences to tune things out. When it comes to building memorable creative, a strategic mix of content and context is key. That said, how will you build your next marketing strategy?

This was key to the design of our website, particularly our homepage, which emulates the look and feel of a newspaper. The format calls for experiences that feel new and contemporary on a regular basis, compounded by the accelerated pace in which our industry changes. Now one year since the launch of our brand, we’re looking at how our approach to content curation has panned out, solving key challenges that many brands face when it comes to delivering distinct digital experiences or breathing new life into their legacy content.

Set a foundation for flexibility at scale.

“Our homepage was designed to mark special moments in time, like a turning point for the company or when something is trending industry-wide that we have a strong point of view on,” says Vinicius Araujo, Creative Director. One recent moment was the release of The Transformation of Digital, our report detailing how consumer behaviors are shaping a new era of virtualization. To celebrate the launch of the report, our homepage took a new look: a unique color scheme, a curation of thematic content and an animated logo that represents the report’s visual identity.

Such an overhaul to the homepage may seem like a significant investment of time and resources, though the flexibility baked into our CMS made it a simple overnight change. Easy-to-update components and customizable fields also ensure that bespoke designs are scalable into the future. “It’s always ready to be updated in a heartbeat,” says Araujo. “And it’s ephemeral: it’s only there for a week, and then it’s gone.”

On the flipside, the flexibility baked into our website keeps our content timely while ensuring we can authentically represent the breadth of our capabilities. At the same time, brands following a similar approach can iterate experiences that support the different needs of diverse audiences. “In curating the content for the virtualization takeover, one thing we considered was: How do we get someone who doesn’t want to digest the whole report to understand what this is?” noted Gardner, who gathered a wide selection of content that make virtualization tangible while also representing the diverse skills of our team.

Collaboration enables new ways to shape and expand content.

With our homepage takeover, it was important to build an experience that felt distinct right from the jump—not exactly separate from the other content on the website, but something that commanded attention as soon as people landed on the website.

The first thing viewers saw when loading the page was a reanimated Media.Monks logo that leverages the bespoke identity crafted for the report—all built around a design language of four quadrilateral shapes that represented key themes of the virtualization report: ownership, identity, community and experience. These adapting shapes interact with each other at different frequencies throughout the report, keeping the audience focused on the insights. “It was important to create a wrapper that wouldn’t alienate the audience,” says Benjamin Tuffy, Design Director, noting that using iconography like VR headsets or futuristic environments could either limit virtualization’s scope, overwhelm non-technical readers or simply feel irrelevant for those who aren’t engaged in those channels.

But the shapes are just one kind of graphical element that made their way from the report to the homepage design. In discussing the role that bespoke experiences can play in enhancing the original source material, Tuffy spoke about a collaborative approach between design, copy and growth teams to pull the content into previously unforeseen directions.

Curation breathes new life into legacy content.

In addition to finding new ways to visually represent content from the report, our virtualization-themed homepage takeover also provided an opportunity to highlight ways that virtualization impacts different categories and audiences. “Leaders across different regions are bringing the story out to their teams,” says Tuffy, and viewers could see this play out through the content we curated to substantiate the report’s claims.

This highlights another purpose to building around key marketing moments: breathing new life into some of your existing content. In our case, this meant further drawing lines and connections between our multidisciplinary team. “We saw we had some content from Jam3 and a recently published piece by Chief Diversity Officer James Nicholas Kinney, both of which spoke to the purpose of virtualization from two different directions,” says Gardner, noting that the content helped showcase how we’ve been grappling with these ideas long before the report’s release.

Our special-edition homepage sought to leverage our CMS’s flexibility to deliver custom web experiences as new moments arise. Brands seeking to build bespoke, scalable web experiences can follow a similar approach by thematically curating and remixing new or legacy content, while also enhancing it further through added fit-for-format design elements. The result? A differentiated digital experience that never overstays its welcome and dazzles audiences with something new every time they visit.

Because they are a direct reflection of a brand’s values, products and services, platforms should embody the brand identity in their look and feel. Above all, they should strike the perfect balance between functionality and impact. That, however, may be easier said than done. The process of developing, implementing and maintaining great platforms calls for a high level of subject-matter expertise—and here are some of our learnings from years of building brand legacies in this space.

The brand impression is determined by the digital ecosystem.

Digital platforms have evolved from playing a supportive role in the customer journey to becoming one of the main destinations in the brand’s ecosystem. That means that the experience they get will dictate their impression of the brand. “I like to say that we need to design for the ‘first date,’ because in that initial encounter, the interface is the brand,” says Creative Director Niels Dortland. "If a dotcom is flat and unremarkable, consumers will extend that perception onto the brand."

As opposed to other channels in the ecosystem, dotcoms offer a fully ownable space. Because of this, astute marketers strive to make them the number one place where consumers interact with the brand. “You can’t be certain where the consumer will land within the digital ecosystem, but you can make sure your dotcom is the one they choose to come back to,” explains Dortland. “Investing in platforms that offer a great digital experience is investing in relationship-building with customers and business growth.” 

While simplicity and clarity are great attributes for a platform to have, it doesn’t stop there. To stand out in a sea of sameness, we need to add another layer to the experience. Here’s the secret: the key to uniqueness lies in the brand’s identity.

Use your brand’s truth to rise above the noise.

Digital platforms are part of a broader ecosystem, and each one of these touchpoints should reflect the brand’s identity while serving a strategic purpose in the customer journey. “The way in which we add texture to an experience and make it truly authentic is by finding the brand’s truth and designing around it,” says Dortland. “If every platform is branded around that truth, that means they will be completely different to that of their competitors.”

On The Climate Pledge platform, which we built in collaboration with Amazon, content comes to life through interactive elements and rich textures that fit WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. When landing on the home page, visitors first see an animated intro video that spreads the optimistic ambition of the project, making for an impactful first impression. On Toblerone’s D2C platform, meanwhile, users are not only captivated by the stunning color palette, but also by the interactive features that allow them to create personalized gifts. Because they reflect the brand’s identity and tone of voice, both of these platforms are widely different, yet equally memorable.

Of course, what visitors find impactful is always a moving target. With people seamlessly jumping from offline to online and into digital spaces where everything is customizable, expectations are high for what a bespoke user experience should look like. There’s a higher demand for creator-led experiences and personalization—which spurs brands to leverage the user data in ways that benefit consumers. 

First-party data elevates the potential of digital platforms.

The brand truth dictates the look and feel of your digital platforms, and data should also inform the design. Platforms facilitate interactions like product search and the purchase of goods and services, providing brands with new information about their consumers. In that process, any data collected should be used to offer experiences that are tailored to people’s needs, interests and even personalities.

What’s more, when the value exchange for someone’s data is clear, brands can establish a healthy feedback loop where they are providing a great service and gathering more information in the process. “The key to designing the right experience is listening to people’s behavior as they interact with the digital ecosystem,” says Dortland. “Our value lies in using data for customer understanding, which will ultimately help us design experiences that elevate brands, drive conversation and growth.” The more engaging the experience, the more data it will generate in return, meaning platforms can become increasingly more effective.

Platforms are more successful in a consistent brand ecosystem.

Essentially, platforms are key to enabling consumers to interact and transact with brands. They host digital experiences that optimize the customer journey and drive consumers’ loyalty. However, platforms are part of a larger brand ecosystem that needs to be consistent.

If these touchpoints can’t be disconnected, neither should the teams that focus on each one. Working with partners that can develop an app from the ground up, create content for your brand’s social media or even deliver branded activations leads to a more cohesive narrative—a single truth that manifests itself across channels.

All of these considerations will help you forge deeper connections with your audience—and while building the perfect platform may not be easy, the good news is they are fully under your control. The customer journey never looks the same, but one thing is certain: behind every meaningful interaction is a bespoke platform strategy connecting the dots between people’s needs and a brand’s offering.

On occasion, people’s particular interests grow into communities, and these communities evolve into subcultures. These subcultures come with beliefs, codes and languages that challenge the status quo and stoke the fire of societal change. But how do brands participate in this cultural transformation, and how can they authentically engage with them to resonate with society?

In the second edition of Social Bites, a series of quick explorations on various social media themes, the Social Innovation Lab delves into subcultures and how they can be woven into brands’ overall social marketing strategy. You can find the issue of Social bites here, along with some of our key findings below. 

Feeding Culture

While subcultures tend to begin in niche communities, they are quickly bleeding into the mainstream in society’s constant pursuit of novelty. The younger generation in particular is very welcoming of new ways of being, as they are more open to new identities and values that can help shape their own. 

Subcultures often break into the mainstream by permeating fashion, aesthetics and entertainment. Drag culture is a great example of this. With ideals of diversity and inclusivity, its values transcended marginalization and paved the way for a new era of fluid identities and entertainment—think RuPaul’s Drag Race and innovative beauty tutorials. In connecting with those subcultures, brands need to look at the values and ideals that come with it, as they offer a glimpse of shifts in societal values and cultural concerns. The goal is not to appropriate these subcultures; it’s supporting their ideals with authenticity.

Powering Communities in Social Media

Today, subcultures are born in social media and powered by it. Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and Tumblr play a fundamental role in community building, as they provide the digital spaces for people to connect with others. On these platforms, a subculture may even merge with another and form hybrid communities—a phenomenon prompted by the accelerated trends of the hyper-connected digital world and the app algorithms that connect the two with the same audience.

For brands, this serves as a guide on how communities are built and how novelty leads to excitement. While weaving these learnings into their cultural strategy, it’s important to remember that it’s not about trying to predict what subcultures will emerge; rather, it’s about cultivating them by being an active participant in today’s cultural scene. 

Achieving Social Cultural Insertion

To become a valuable player in social culture, brands need to acutely read their audience. The rise of a subculture on social media can be fast, so there’s no time to waste in becoming fluent in upcoming trends. The latest Social Bites report includes information on how brands can identify the rituals, habits and overall feel of a subculture to build a stronger cultural strategy that authentically supports those at the bleeding edge of culture. In this era of hyper-connectivity, brands can expect countless benefits from adapting fast to the evolving culture, as long as they approach their audience with transparency and purpose.