Hace poco, los premios FIAP dieron lugar a cuatro días de charlas, rondas de preguntas y hallazgos sobre publicidad y comunicación.

Si no estás familiarizado con FIAP (Festival Iberoamericano de Publicidad), es uno de los eventos creativos líderes en Latinoamérica, llevado a cabo en Buenos Aires donde se encuentra una de nuestras oficinas. La edición de este año se destacó por varios oradores, como Sir Martin Sorrell de S4 Capital y el fundador de MediaMonks, Wesley ter Haar.

Uno de los temas recurrentes a lo largo de la conferencia fue las dificultades que las marcas enfrentan a la hora de usar data de manera efectiva, creativa y económica. Si esto te suena conocido, ponte al día con estas grandes ideas sobre las posibilidades que la data te brinda.

Los presupuestos son ajustados, y la necesidad de contenido sigue aumentando.

“Hoy en día necesitas más por menos. Hay una demanda constante de contenido, pero los presupuestos se están reduciendo”. – Wesley ter Haar

En su charla, cuyo título en inglés, “Ten Techtonic Trends”, suena a trabalenguas, Wesley ter Haar mostró que los presupuestos de marketing tuvieron su auge en el 2016, y el año siguiente comenzaron a caer. A pesar de los presupuestos estancados y limitados, la necesidad de contenido sigue creciendo, así como la necesidad de brindar experiencias más personalizadas y customizadas. Y si eso no suena lo suficientemente difícil, el reto se magnifica por una explosión de nuevos medios: experiencias de realidad aumentada o virtual, videos en vivo, videos de 360 grados y más. Quienes temen quedarse fuera de la próxima gran plataforma pueden llegar a buscar, apurados, contenido para cada una, pero esto puede ser difícil; tanto para organizar como para costear. Cuando se produce tanto contenido para tantas plataformas diferentes, es fácil que todo se sienta un poco desconectado. Por eso es importante cambiar tu mentalidad y marco de referencia (entérate cómo más abajo).

Desarrollar recursos a escala es un modo de saciar el hambre de contenido. Es un proceso y un marco de referencia creativo que implica desarrollar cientos, miles y/o quizás millares de piezas únicas; destinadas a segmentos hiperespecíficos en tu mercado con sólo un puñado de piezas de contenido. Pero ¿cómo pueden las organizaciones hacer esto de un modo económico? La respuesta está en cambiar su modo de pensar, lo cual nos lleva a nuestra próxima gran idea:

Las marcas deben integrar data y métricas a lo largo del proceso creativo, no sólo al final.

“La data es información, y la información es poder. Lo que hace la diferencia es interpretarla y saber cómo usarla… y usarla como base para crear algo”. – Eva Santos

Santos mencionó una idea clave del FIAP: que relegar la data y métricas al final del ciclo creativo es obsoleto. Al contrario, las agencias deben incorporar data en todos los pasos del proceso creativo. Sir Martin Sorrell tuvo un mensaje similar cuando dijo que “La data va a sustentar lo creativo y va a dictar la planificación de los medios. Los van a mejorar, no a empeorar”.

Sir Martin Sorrell usó el ejemplo de las recomendaciones de Netflix, que destacan los posters y trailers dinámicos hechos a la medida para las preferencias únicas de la audiencia. Es fácil ver cómo esto vuelve irresistible el contenido, pero también es un modo inteligente y económico de generar un montón de entregables con una cantidad pequeña de piezas: con tan sólo 115 escenas y 3 animaciones de intro, puedes crear casi 1.5 millones de piezas de contenido.

Pero esto también requiere repensar un poco tu estrategia. Los recursos a escala dependen de los marcos de referencia de contenido provistos de variables dinámicas. Así que en vez de desarrollar una pieza de contenido diferente por segmento o por interés, simplemente desarrollas un marco de referencia que puedes utilizar para testear, escalar y crear más contenido sin costos adicionales.

La demografía ha muerto; vivan las preferencias.

“La información demográfica no nos da nada, todo está en las preferencias de los usuarios.” – Wesley ter Haar

Malas noticias: los datos demográficos como geografía, edad o género han muerto. Buenas noticias: con la tecnología de hoy, brindar servicios basados en las preferencias del usuario ha ganado terreno. Ter Haar elabora sobre la idea en su charla al darnos un ejemplo. Supongamos que una chica joven en la costa oeste ama Breaking Bad. Tiene muchos más gustos en común con otros fans del programa—como un hombre más grande en Kentucky que también está obsesionado con él—que con otras chicas en su comunidad que odian el programa.

El próximo campo de batalla es la personalización y el contexto, lo cual significa que tanto las marcas nuevas como con legado deberán revisar sus estrategias de data para mantenerse en la cima. Y las apuestas son grandes: Adobe pronostica que $800 billones irán tan sólo al 15% superior de las empresas que logran acertar la fórmula. Eso hace que sea más importante ahora que nunca tener una estrategia de data efectiva.

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.

To say that 2018 has been a big year for MediaMonks—or the industry in general—is an understatement.

New platforms have emerged, the role of partners is ever-changing and we’ve even invited a true British Knight into the Monks’ order. It’s a lot to digest, but stopping there would just be putting a cap on the tip of the iceberg. That’s why we’re taking a breather to reflect on some of the biggest moments on this wild ride of a year.

Making the List

It’s not the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but Main Monks Victor Knaap and Wesley ter Haar are among good company on Ad Age’s 2018 list of Creativity All-Stars. Rubbing elbows with the likes of superstars and important social movements like March for Our Lives, we’re perhaps most excited to be recognized on the same list as Gritty, the Phildelphia Flyers’ mascot whose unapologetically unconventional manner made him into cultural internet icon. But we’re also keen to say “hi” to our new San Francisco neighbors on the list like Quip and Slack. Let’s grab lunch together sometime—we’ll go Dutch.

We Had a Little Help from Our Friends

We’ve long been a creative partner to some of the biggest names in tech, and this year we continued to strive to make the industry better through that work. This year, we tackled one of our most visible creative projects yet: celebrating Google’s 20th anniversary with a birthday Google Doodle. The lengthy doodle chronicled top queries from around the world over the past two decades in different styles. Arguably the most important and influential page online, we were proud to showcase a diverse body of work there.

But that wasn’t our only collaboration that had us starry-eyed: at the 2018 Cannes Lions festival, we worked with Ogilvy to produce two immersive experiences for Google’s new ARCore platform, which breathed new life into two old campaigns. Having had the chance to celebrate the existence of such an influential company and present our work together at the festival of creativity, we can strike a few items off our bucket list.

Busy as Bees

We’re all abuzz in welcoming MightyHive to the S4 Capital family, which grew rapidly over the course of the year. By working together and cross-pollinating our capabilities, we’re both better equipped to navigate our partners through a shifting media landscape with end-to-end solutions from start to finish. The state of advertising today is “about defining the core concept,” says ter Haar, “and then executing the very best creative in a way that’s contextual to the touch-point and channel it’s being seen on.” This means MediaMonks and MightyHive joining forces is a deal that’s sweet as honey for everyone.

Saying ¡Hola! to Mexico

We started the year on a good foot by taking a step below the border to our Mexico City office. Opening right on the lush, sun-soaked Amsterdam Ave in the heart of hip and trendy La Condesa, our current home is actually the third to house our Mexico City team, which grew faster this year than anyone anticipated. With the new-found ability to produce more authentic content for the region, we celebrated the Day of the Dead in collaboration with Mexican beer brand Victoria through a beautiful reimagining of Aztec mythology. Our short film depicted a descent to the underworld with beautiful, dreamlike choreography and was the first native-language TVC to air in Mexico. Here’s to many more firsts in the next year. ¡Vamonos!

We Walked a Mile in Others’ Shoes

We’re honored whenever we’re given the opportunity to contribute our efforts to important social issues, and we’re proud to say that this year we launched a few. One is the Uncensored Playlist, an important project that fights censorship by translating news stories into music, which is then distributed on major music streaming platforms. We made another powerful project in collaboration with Santander and Heading Home, an organization providing support for the homeless in the Greater Boston area. In Someone Else’s Shoes uses augmented reality to put viewers face-to-face with the reality of modern homelessness, in which one of every four homeless people are employed. AR is usually championed as a way to allow for fun or collaborative experiences that were never possible before; with this project, we were able to explore the technology’s potential to build empathy and understanding with a unique interactive performance.

Welcome to Our (Not So) Secret Lab

It’s every kid’s dream to reign over a lab like a mad scientist, so we made our own. Shortly after our merge with S4 Capital, we donned our lab coats and put together MediaMonks Labs, a research and development team designed to prototype and explore emerging technology before it goes mainstream. While a lot of the work is strictly hush-hush, we can share at least one cool project with you: we worked with UNICEF to develop a large-scale hologram display at the 73rd UN General Assembly. Following the story of a young girl seeking to build a brighter future, the 3D animation projected mid-air left an unforgettable mark in viewers’ minds.

We Did It, Reddit!

One of our most well-received projects this year is a digital, 3D car configurator that lets users build and customize a Genesis G70, then see their changes rendered in real-time. Having impressed one of the toughest crowds online (Reddit was highly impressed with the level of detail—who thought opening a glove compartment could bring about so much delight?), we’re proud to invite you to take this one for a spin. Once they’re finished experimenting, users can request a quote and have their configuration saved to the Genesis back-end, allowing for a simple purchase while generating leads for the dealers. It shows what happens when you marry live data, business logic and cost-efficient global production to realize a project from start to finish.

We Had Lots of Fun

With so much work to do over the year, we set aside some time to let loose and have some good, clean fun. Just in time for football season, we worked with Wieden+Kennedy to lather up a custom-built football stadium made from 3,000 liters of Old Spice foam. Broadcast live to YouTube and Twitch, our slippery Foamzone gameshow challenged contestants to overcome six wacky obstacle courses. We also trapped ghost hunters in Winchester Mystery House, the largest haunted mansion in the US, to produce a live and interactive horror film directed by acclaimed director Jason Zada and streamed over Twitter and Periscope. And just in time for the holidays, we elfed ourselves—and you can too with our new Elf Yourself selfie lens made in collaboration with Office Depot. Happy holidays!