Indeed, the efficiencies and opportunities that AI enables can radically uplevel brand experience and output, though unlocking their true potential relies on understanding how to uplevel teams to use the technology effectively. Those who can fully leverage the power of AI and infuse it within every aspect of their business will dominate the market. But for those lagging behind, this is a Kodak moment: there will be no loyalty for businesses that are slow to deliver AI-powered experiences that make consumers’ lives easier.

Throughout this guide, we’ll showcase AI’s potential to transform marketing today and tomorrow, as well as the actions you can take right now to reap those rewards and lead in the new era.

It’s true that we’re at the peak of the hype cycle with AI, particularly generative AI. But this disruption is a significant one, one that has become a make-or-break moment for many in our industry. 

We’re not just bullish on AI; as a change agent in our industry, it makes our model inevitable. Automation has played a great role in helping us scale up our business and outmaneuver our more traditional peers since day one. Meanwhile, today’s rapid evolution of AI is reshaping the nature of the brand-agency in real time, along with how brands themselves can go to market. Winning in the new era requires a willingness to embrace all that AI has to offer.

Prior to the hype, generative AI sprung onto the scene about four years ago, and our innovation team quickly began to experiment with it by training our own models. One turned lines and doodles into foliage; another neural animation tool created original dance choreography based on simple input like stick figures. More recently, we made an entire short film with the help of AI at every step of the production process. These experimental prototypes anticipated a future in which AI would open a new world of creative possibilities—that future is now.

But AI will have other, far-reaching potential across our industry as brands set out on new paths to growth beyond just content creation; its rapid development signals the start of truly personalized digital experiences. Cookies are crumbling, and brands have taken that as a cue to recognize the people behind the numbers and provide a better value exchange for their data. Yet the tools that marketers have historically relied on have always failed to turn the ideal of 1:1 marketing across the customer journey into a reality. AI finally unlocks that ability—across content, data and digital media, and tech services—to build and deliver hyper-personalized, highly empathetic customer journeys at scale, and fast.

Some are wary of these tools, focused on the balance between augmenting human ability versus replacing it. That’s a noble and important conversation to have. But automation has always been crucial to the growth of our team, and we are confident AI will continue to lead to more and greater work for our people. As a tech-agnostic team of makers, one that has already enthusiastically adopted these tools across every part of our business, we are the best positioned to take advantage of the abundance AI enables.

There are incredible opportunities on horizon: making more with less, making marketing intelligence more intelligent, or even driving new value to intellectual property through the training of owned AI systems. Each possibility will challenge the role of a creative, data and digital media, or tech services partner to evolve—lest they be surpassed by any number of new startups and cottage industries that have cropped up designed around AI. We don’t shy away from the challenge; we’re poised and ready to lead in the disruption, because that’s what we’ve always been built to do.

Organizing content in a way that is easily navigable and actionable is crucial in developing a strong user journey—even more so for a corporate platform that exists to inform. “When it comes to companies that have so much existing content and information, how do you organize that massive number of things to say—and make it personalized and easy to find?” asks Group Creative Director Niels Dortland. The challenge lies not in representing the breadth of information available, but rather pushing users to the right content to act or purchase.

From microsites to enterprise platforms, our platforms team has worked with a wide variety of brands to implement new content management systems, design personalized journeys, and improve accessibility—and finding the right way to surface up key bits of content out of a massive library is key to each of those efforts. Here’s a look inside how the team did just that for Jacobs, an engineering company whose portfolio touches design, construction, consulting and maintenance across a wide range of industries around the world.

Overcome the homepage turf war.

What causes the content overload that is so common on corporate websites? “Everyone wants to say everything, so everything is on the menu,” says Fernanda González, Group Experience Director. That might be a welcome sight at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, but not so much when searching a website for information you need.

The maximalist approach is often the result of intra-political clashes between different business units. A company is a bundle of different teams with different goals and responsibilities, and it’s a reasonable expectation that each should be equally represented on the website. But the primary focus should be on understanding the different types of users who will visit the website and how to account for their needs. 

“What will get people to move forward, and how do we mix those things together into a good user experiences?” González asks, reasserting a user-led approach to content management. Our team’s solution: deliver dynamic content based on each individual’s needs, meaning no one is scrounging for homepage real estate.

Tap into off-the-shelf solutions to make content easily searchable.

One way to move past messy menus and overwhelming content feeds is to put search front and center, helping visitors access the content they need in just a few keystrokes and clicks. For Jacobs, we implemented an AI-powered search engine that greets visitors by asking what they’re looking for. The sophisticated language model lets users answer in plain English, rather than strings of SEO-ified keywords.

The model also made search far easier to implement than a traditional engine, as natural language processing bypassed the need to index and structure data across Jacobs’ existing content—a lengthy and meticulous process that can stretch development cycles across months. “Many other search engines on websites like this need to be very structured with keywords,” says González. “Instead of that, we implemented a smart one that learns to search for content as quick as possible.”

The team further sped up development by choosing an existing search solution, rather than build one from scratch. “Taking tech off the shelf is smarter for brands because it’s faster,” says Dortland, compared to the work of big consultancy firms who easily get tied up in assessments, planning and processes instead of execution. This resourceful method of spinning up solutions means we can make a difference to the user experience now versus a year down the line.

Not only that, off-the-shelf tools are also backed by dedicated development teams and robust documentation should the need for troubleshooting arise. And that’s just the beginning, because as users browse and search around, the platform becomes more aware of their needs, employing a feedback loop to help enhance the user experience with speedier, more accurate results.

Take a cue from social media to make content actionable.

Easily finding content is one thing, but what should users do with it once they’ve landed? “We realized that people want to save content, so we activated that in the user journey,” says González. As users browse content, they can save it to their favorites board—a lot like saving creative inspiration on Pinterest. 

“You can shape boards around different topics of interest, and this lets you use the website more as a utility to gather information,” González adds. In addition to letting users build their own boards, the platform also curates topic-specific boards that pull content from both the CMS and social platforms like LinkedIn that are always changing and always relevant to provide a unique experience for every user.

Put accessibility at users’ fingertips.

A social-inspired interface is one way to make content easily accessible to users. But platforms should also comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which a legal requirement in many parts of the world. Accessibility works best when it plays a key role in the design of an interface—not as an afterthought—and we went beyond Level AA compliance for Jacobs by also implementing a configurator that lets each user create the optimal viewing experience for themselves.  

Options include a reading mask—which creates a focus area on the screen that follows the user’s cursor, blocking out distractions—and the ability to turn off animations and motion graphics. The result is a platform that’s not only personalized in the sense that content conforms to a user’s interest; the interface itself adjusts to their needs. Both result in a more intuitive journey across the entire Jacobs brand story.

Keep up with solutions as technology evolves.

Building a state-of-the-art platform doesn’t mean spending years reinventing the wheel. Nor does trudging through a library of legacy content to make it easy for modern visitors to search and navigate. Rather, tapping into existing, modern tech solutions can help overcome hurdles that hamper the user experience—and do it fast.

As new technologies emerge—hello, generative AI—platforms and user journeys will continue to evolve, underscoring the importance of a partner who can identify the shortest path to success among them. Remember: platforms are always evolving, meaning there’s never a shortage of options to streamline user journeys and make content more accessible.

Together with Workato—a platform we leverage to provide automation solutions to our entire enterprise—we organized a hybrid hackathon and invited parts of the company to join virtually or in-person from our Buenos Aires, San Francisco and New York City offices. The event took place in Gather.town, a 2D metaverse. The aim of the game? To use Workato and Slack to automate anything they thought would be useful for everyday Monks. The challenge was to think beyond the simple notification bot. Been there, done that. There was no limit to the technologies teams could use. The tools they built were required to be completed within eight hours. In the end, every idea was judged based on its level of creativity, visual representation, tool use, execution and overall relevance. 

Besides the many innovative solutions that came out of this event (and absolutely blew my mind by the way), I also learned another important lesson: hackathons are a fantastic way to connect people from all different corners of your organization and the world, and bring them closer together. The formula is simple: just give a group of talented people a challenging task in a tight time frame, create the right environment, and they will not only come up with incredible ideas, but also have lots of fun and build lasting friendships in the process.

Bridging together our global hub of talent.  

Each person on our rocketship diversifies our skill sets and deepens our experience—to the benefit of everyone, not just one team. Because of our integrated business model, we can stimulate people to venture outside their lane from time to time and seamlessly cross-pollinate their skills and experiences. While pitches often spur unexpected collaborations—and still result in great success, thereby confirming the power of integration—I was happily surprised to see this hackathon also highlight how easily and quickly we can connect our global hub of talent. Josh McClauss, our VP of Marketing and one of the hackathon’s judges, says that the event truly reflected the beauty of our integrated universe of talent.

Safe to say, such great talent comes with great ideas and solutions. The creativity, innovation and collaboration amongst the people that participated was outstanding, which most likely has to do with the nature of the event that brought these teams together. According to McClauss, an interactive event such as a hackathon is very well-suited to exactly the types of people that Media.Monks attracts. Why? Because of the way in which this company was built.

We may be a 9,000+ strong company, but all of our cornerstone pieces still very much carry their startup spirit. “We may have new stakeholders and constituents to build this business around, but the power in what we’re doing is still and will always be about being nimble, flexible and creative and getting together in these moments to move beyond the competition—not only because we think about things differently, but because we do them differently,” he says. It’s experiences like these that capitalize on our talent and get them excited to be here long-term as we continue to realize what the next era of a marketing services partner looks like to the world.

Fostering light bulb moments.  

Judging from all the ideas the teams came up with, I can already tell this era is looking bright. It was very exciting to see each of them bring in their unique perspective and build something that’s going to be useful to the company and our clients—both now and in the future. 

One team, for example, developed a bot that searches Slack for previously asked questions to direct users to the right answers, whereas another team leveraged Slack as an interface to interact with Open AI and create AI-driven images for ad creative prototypes. “These are tons of options that can be applied to our business immediately,” says our SVP Global Media Melissa Wisehart, who also served as a judge. Such ideas can be implemented right now to not only increase efficiencies and build better processes internally, but also deliver stronger results for clients. 

As it turns out, the way to foster out-of-the-box and solution-based thinking is by setting clear boundaries, which stimulates people to not just think, but also realize their ideas by actually building the tools that solve their everyday challenges. “This entails both the boundary of what the end vehicle is and the boundary of the time frame that you have, that’s also very important,” says our Executive Operations Manager Nicole Chanlatte, who co-organized the hackathon. “Telling people to take this time, set it aside, and dedicate it to working on a specific problem or project—that in itself should unlock new paths.” From there on, it’s a matter of building on these ideas and solutions, while seeking ways to implement them across the business right away. “I believe that if we follow through on some of these projects, the impact could be huge to both efficiency and revenue,” McClauss adds.

Cracking the code for a successful partnership.   

Ultimately, this all goes to show that hackathons are a great way to spur collaboration and spark creativity. Besides all the fun and games—yes, I did a little virtual dance while presenting on stage—the teams came up with some incredible ideas and solutions. Needless to say, the Workato team played a pivotal role in bringing this all to life, providing a helping hand in support and assisting teams new to their tool throughout the event. 

The pleasure was theirs, too, says Gaby Moran, Workato’s Director of Customer & Partner Experience. “The hackathon event was truly phenomenal and so much fun. We have a lot of customers who do hackathons and this one had some of the most creative and impactful ideas I’ve seen in a while. So many of the automations created contributed to inclusivity and collaboration—it left me inspired!” And that's what happens when you connect a diverse team of global talent around a common goal.

10. Digital humans get more realistic.

Digital humans may have earned a spot on our list of trends last year, but we haven’t grown tired of traversing the uncanny valley to play with the technology. In fact, the recent explosion of conversational AI will likely inject new life into digital humans and transform the realms of customer service, entertainment and more. Whether used to hand-craft original characters or refine scanned-in digital twins, digital human creation tools are becoming increasingly complex to deliver lifelike avatars. 

“We’ll see more competition between Unreal’s MetaHuman Creator and Unity’s Ziva,” says Geert Eichhorn, Innovation Director. In fact, Media.Monks has used Unreal’s tool to create a digital double of our APAC Chief Executive Officer, Michel de Rijk. Because why not?

9. Motion capture becomes more accessible.

Last year, we released a Labs Report dedicated to motion capture and how its increasing accessibility influenced content production for both professional film teams and everyday consumers. New technologies available at consumer price points are helping to bring motion capture into even more people’s hands. Meta’s Quest Pro headset, which released late last year, features impressive facial tracking that will be key to expressing the nuances of human emotion in VR. Move.ai, currently in beta, enables 1:1 motion tracking with a group of mobile devices—no bodysuits, no markers, no extra hardware needed. Using computer vision, the platform allows anyone to make motion capture video in any environment.

8. Mixed reality and mirror worlds mature.

With smaller and more comfortable AR headsets shown off already at CES, we can expect augmented and mixed reality to become more immersive, accessible and practical over the course of 2023 (check out more of what we saw at CES here). The VIVE Flow, for example, includes diopters so that users can replicate their prescription lenses in the device, amounting to a more comfortable experience overall. 

But it’s not just about hardware. “One of the major advancements is not in the headsets, but in the software,” says Eichhorn, noting that VPS has the power to pinpoint a user’s exact position and vantage point in the real world. “They do this positioning by comparing your camera view to a virtual, 3D version of the world, like Street View.” We covered mirror worlds in last year’s trend list, but the development of VPS is now bringing this vision closer to everyday consumers.

While VPS currently works only outdoors, we’ve already seen the power of the technology with Gorillaz performances in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus in December 2022.

7. More enterprises embrace the hybrid model.

For many businesses the return to the office hasn’t been a smooth transition; while some roles require close collaboration within a shared space, others enjoy more flexible setups that support childcare, offer privacy for focus work or greater accessibility. Given the benefits of flexible work setups and the development of technologies that build presence in virtual environments, Luis Guajardo Díaz, Creative Technologist, believes more enterprises will embrace the hybrid work model.

Media.Monks’ live broadcast team, for example, built a sophisticated network of cloud-based virtual machines hosted on AWS to enable people distributed around the world to produce live broadcasts and events. Born out of necessity during the pandemic, the workflow goes beyond bringing teams together—it’s designed to overcome some of the challenges traditional broadcast teams face on the ground, like outages or hardware malfunctions. It stands to show how hybrid models can help enhance the ways we work today.

6. Virtual production continues to impress.

Virtual production powered by real-time become popular in recent years: the beautiful environments of The Mandalorian or grungy urban landscape of The Matrix showed what was possible by integrating game engines in the production process, while pandemic lockdowns made the technology a necessity for teams who couldn’t shoot on location.

Now, further advancements in game engines and graphics processing offer a look inside the future of virtual production. Sander van der Vegte, VP Emerging Tech and R&D, points to Unreal’s Nanite, which allows for the optimization of raw 3D content in real time.

Localization of content is one example. “In 2023 we’re going to see this versatility in the localization of shoots, where one virtual production shoot can have different settings for different regions, all adapted post-shoot,” says Eichhorn.

5. TV streaming and broadcasts become more interactive.

With virtual production becoming even more powerful, TV and broadcasting will also evolve to become more interactive and immersive. “Translating live, filmed people into real-time models allows for many new creative possibilities,” says van der Vegt. “Imagine unlocking the power to be the cameraman for anything you are watching on TV.” 

It might sound like science fiction, but Sander’s vision isn’t far off. At this year’s CES, Sony demoed a platform that uses Hawk-Eye data to generate simulated sports replays. Users can freely control the virtual camera to view the action from any angle—and while not live, the demo illustrates the power of more immersive broadcasts. The technology could be a game changer for sports and televised events that let audiences feel like they’re part of the action.

4. Metaverse moves become more strategic.

“2021 was a peak hype year for the metaverse and Web3. 2022 was the year of major disillusionment,” says Javier Sancho, Project Manager. “There are plenty of reasons to believe that this was just an overinflated hype, but it’s a recurring pattern in tech history.” Indeed, a “trough of disillusionment” inevitably follows a peak in the hype cycle.

This year will challenge brands to think of where they fit within the metaverse—and how they can leverage the immersive technology to drive bottom-line value. Angelica Ortiz, Senior Creative Technologist, says the key to unlocking value in metaverse spaces is to think beyond one-time activations and instead fuel long-term customer journeys.

A great example of how brands are using Web3 in impactful ways is by transforming customer loyalty programs, like offering unique membership perks and gamified experiences. These programs reinforce how the Web3 ethos is evolving brand-customer relationships by turning consumers into active participants and collaborators.

3. Large language models keep the conversation flowing.

With so much interest in bots like ChatGPT, the Labs.Monks expect large language models (LLMs) will continue to impress as the year goes on. “Large Language Models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence tools that can read, summarize and translate texts, and generate sentences similar to how humans talk and write,” says Eichhorn. These models can hold humanlike conversations, answering complex questions and even writing programs. But these skills open a can of worms, especially in education when students can outsource their homework to a bot.

LLMs like GPT are only going to become more powerful, with GPT-4 soon to launch. But despite their impressive ability to understand and mimic human speech, inaccuracies in response still need to be worked out. “The results are not entirely trustworthy, so there’s plenty of challenges ahead,” says Eichhorn. “We expect many discussions over AI sentience this year, as the Turing Test is a measurement we’re going to leave behind.” In fact, Google’s LaMDA already triggered debates about sentience last year—so expect more to come. 

2. Generative AI paints the future of AI-assisted creativity.

If 2021 was the year of the metaverse, the breakout star of 2022 is generative AI in all its forms: creating copy, music, voiceovers and especially artwork. “Generative AI wasn’t on our list in 2022, although looking back it should have been,” says Eichhorn. “The writing was on the wall, and internally we’ve been working on machine learning and generating assets for years.” 

But while the technology has been embraced by some creatives and technologists, there’s also been some worry and pushback. “These new technologies are so disruptive that we see not only copywriters and illustrators feel threatened, but also major tech companies need to catch up to not become obsolete.” 

In response to these concerns, Ortiz anticipates a friendly middle ground where AI will be used to augment—not erase—human creativity. “With the increasing push back from artists, the industry will find strategic ways to optimize processes not cut jobs to improve workflows and let artists do more of what they love and less of what they don’t,” she says. Prior to the generative AI boom, Adobe integrated machine learning and artificial intelligence across its software with Adobe Sensei. More recently, they announced plans to sell AI-generated images on their stock photography platform.

1. The definition of “artist” or “creator” changes forever.

Perhaps the most significant trend we anticipate this year isn’t a tech trend; rather, it’s the effect that technology like generative AI and LLMs will have on artists, knowledge workers and society. 

With an abundance of AI-generated content, traditional works of art—illustrations, photographs and more—may lose some of their value. “But on the flip side, these tools let everyone become an artist, including those who were never able to create this kind of work before,” says Eichhorn. This can mean those who lack the training, sure, but it also means those with disabilities who have found particular creative fields to be inaccessible.

When everyone can be an artist, what does being an artist even mean? The new definition will lie in the skills that generative AI forces us to adopt. Working with generative AI doesn’t necessarily eliminate creative decision-making; rather, it changes what the creative process entails. New creative skills, like understanding how to prompt a generative AI for specific results, may reshape the role of the artist into something more akin to a director. 

Eichhorn compares these questions to the rise of digital cameras and Photoshop, both of which changed photography forever while making it more accessible. “The whole process will take many more years to settle in society, but we’ll likely see many discussions this year on what ‘craft’ really entails,” says Eichhorn.

That’s all, but we can expect a few surprises to emerge as the year goes on. Look out for more updates from the Labs.Monks, who regularly release reports, prototypes and podcast episodes that touch on the latest in digital tech, including some of the topics discussed above. Here’s to another year of innovation!

Since its launch in 2021, Epic Game’s MetaHuman Creator, a cloud-based app for developing digital humans, has extended its range of possibilities by adding new features—such as Mesh to MetaHuman. Using Unreal Engine, this plugin offers a new way to create a metahuman from a 3D character mesh, allowing developers to import scans of real people. In other words, it makes it easier to create a virtual double of yourself (or anyone else) almost immediately.

Inspired by this significant update and following our tradition of enhancing production workflows using Unreal Engine, our team of dedicated experts decided to build their own prototype. Needless to say, they learned a few things along the way—from the practical possibilities of metahumans to the technicalities of applying motion capture to them. As explained by the experts themselves, here’s what you need to know about creating and unlocking the full potential of virtual humans.

Be everywhere at once—at least virtually.

If you ever fantasized about cloning yourself to be able to comply with all your commitments or complete your pending tasks, metahumans may be just what you were looking for. Virtually, at least. As digital representatives of existing individuals, metahumans offer endless possibilities in terms of content creation, customer service, film and entertainment at large. Sure, they won’t be able to do your dishes—at least not yet—but if you happen to be a public figure or work with them, it’s a game changer. 

By lending likeness rights to their digital doubles, any influencer, celebrity, politician or sports superstar will be able to make simultaneous (digital) appearances and take on more commercial gigs without having to be on set. As John Paite, Chief Creative Officer of Media.Monks India, explains, “Celebrities could use their metahuman for social media posts or smaller advertising tasks that they usually wouldn’t have the availability for.” Similarly, brands collaborating with influencers and celebrities will no longer need to work around their busy schedules.

The truth is, virtual influencers are already a thing—albeit in the shape of fictional characters rather than digital doubles of existing humans. They form communities, partner with brands and are able to engage directly and simultaneously with millions of fans. Furthermore, they are not stuck in one place at a time nor do they operate under timezone constraints. In that regard, celebrities’ digital doubles combine the benefits of virtual humans with the appeal of a real person.

A new frontier of personalization and localization.

Because working with virtual humans can be more time-efficient than working with real humans, they offer valuable opportunities in terms of personalization and localization. Similarly to how we’ve been using Unreal Engine to deliver relevant creative at speed and scale, MetaHuman Creator takes localization to a new level. As Senior Designer Rika Guite says, “If a commercial features someone who is a celebrity in a specific region, for example, this technology makes it easy for the brand to replace them with someone who is better known in a different market, without having to return to set.” 

But not everything is about celebrities. Metahumans are poised to transform the educational landscape, too, as well as many others. “If you combine metahumans with AI, it becomes a powerhouse,” says Paite. “Soon enough, metahumans will be teaching personalized courses, and students will be able to access those at a lower price. We haven’t reached that level yet, but we’ll get there.”

For impeccable realism, the human touch is key.

To test how far metahumans are ready to go, our team scanned our APAC Chief Executive Officer, Michel de Rijk, using photogrammetry with Epic Games’ Reality Capture. This technique works with multiple photographs from different angles, lighting conditions and vantage points to truly capture the depth of each subject and build the base for a realistic metahuman mode. Then, we imported the geometry into MetaHuman Creator, which our 3D designers refined using the platform’s editing tools. 

“Because Mesh to Metahuman allows you to scan and import your real face, it’s much easier to create digital doubles of real people,” says our Unreal Engine Generalist Nida Arshia. That said, the input of an expert is still necessary to attain top-quality models. “Certain parts of the face, such as the mouth, can be more challenging. Some face structures are harder than others, too. If you want the metahuman to look truly realistic, it’s important to spend some time refining it.” 

Once we got our prototype as close to perfection as possible, we used FaceWare’s facial motion capture technology to unlock real-time facial animations. While FaceWare’s breadth of customization options made it our tool of choice for this particular model, different options are available depending on the budget, timeline and part of the body you want to animate. Unreal’s LiveLink, for example, offers a free version that allows you to use your phone and is easy to implement both real-time and pre-recorded applications, but focuses on facial animations only. Mocap suits with external cameras allow for full-body motion capture, but with mid-fidelity, and recording a real human in a dedicated mocap studio unlocks highly realistic animations for both face and body. 

At the same time, the environment we intend the metahuman to inhabit is worth considering, as the clothes, hair, body type and facial structure will all need to fit accordingly. Naturally, different software may adapt better to one style or another. 

While this technology is still incipient and requires some level of expertise, brands can begin to explore different ways to leverage metahumans and save time, money and resources in their content creation, customer service and entertainment efforts. Similarly, creators can start sharpening their skills and co-create alongside brands to expand the realm of possibilities. As Arshia says, “We must continue to push forward in our pursuit of realism by focusing on expanding the variety of skin tones, skin textures and features available so that we can build a future where everyone can be accurately represented.”

Virtualization defines the transformation of digital.

As the world opened back up, an era of digital transformation gave way to the transformation of digital. By this, we mean virtualization: a set of new audience behaviors, cultural norms and technology paradigms resulting from 30 years of digital transformation, hyper-accelerated over the past five years. Virtualization, covered in our report earlier this year, marks a revolution in consumer behavior as people demand more from the digital platforms they engage with, which implicates the ways they look at digital experience, community, ownership and identity. For example, the design of ComplexLand, a virtualization of the hype-fueled annual event ComplexCon, was built around the insight that today’s fashion trendsetters are becoming just as invested in their digital identities as their corporeal ones.

The Social Innovation Lab, who explores up-and-coming trends in social, delved deeper into what motivates some of these behavioral changes in The Search for Meaning. By exploring how technology shapes the ways consumers find and make meaning in their lives, the Social Innovation Lab uncovers how brands can adapt to the new era in digital.

Experiments in the metaverse drive real success.

One of the biggest manifestations of the virtualization trend has been the rise of the metaverse, which many brands have experimented with this year to find their footing. Duolingo celebrated the birthday of its lovable (and persistent) mascot by hosting a game jam in Roblox and building larger-than-life public artwork in Decentraland. Logitech for Creators reinvented the awards show format by building the first music awards show in the metaverse, the Song Breaker Awards.

The fashion industry in particular has found a lot of success in the space. Liam Osbourne, Global Client Partner at the FLUX.Monks, our dedicated fashion and luxury team, shared with Vogue some insight on how the metaverse is an opportunity to become more inclusive. For brands exploring that question and more, the FLUX.Monks have authored a quick bulletin on why the metaverse matters.

As the metaverse continues to take shape, now is an excellent time for brands to continue experimenting in the space, which was a large part of a discussion shared between SVP Web3, Metaverse & Innovation Strategy Catherine D. Henry; Chief Innovation Officer Henry Cowling; and Mike Proulx, VP and Research Director at Forrester as part of our Meet Me in the Metaverse series. Eager to get started experimenting in the metaverse yourself? Our map of the metaverse can help you find the right home for your brand within this quickly evolving space.

Web3 and other emerging tech begin to mature.

In addition to the metaverse, other emerging technologies have fueled transformative digital experiences—most notably Web3. We showed up at NFT.NYC, the biggest Web3 conference on this side of the screen, with an immersive installation for Cool Cats that blurred the boundary between virtual and the real. Meanwhile, Gucci opened the virtual door to an immersive gallery space used to host an auction of NFT artwork.   

More than just a new tech infrastructure, Web3 marks a foundational shift in brand-consumer relationships, a topic covered in a bulletin we released in collaboration with Salesforce this year titled Web 3: The Future of Customer Engagement. For those wondering how to begin making moves in Web3, check out insights from our In a Monk’s Opinion series, which lays out everything you need to know about NFTs and the blockchain. One tip from the Labs.Monks: be sure to make your NFT projects sustainable.

Speaking of the Labs.Monks, our R&D team has continually released missives on the bleeding edge of tech throughout a year of innovation. Their most recent report on generative AI explores the potential of AI tools like Dall-E and Mid Journey that have captured creatives’ imagination (and people’s social feeds). One example of what the tech can achieve: unlocking efficiencies in animation and other production needs.

Creativity and media go hand in hand.

Throughout the digital era, it’s been tempting to focus attention on vanity metrics. But as CMOs invest more dollars into media (and face increasing budget scrutiny with a possible recession), they will benefit from transforming their approach to a more holistic strategy that blends media and creative to optimize their spend. Speaking to Digiday, Media.Monks Global Head of Media Melissa Wisehart unveiled how our integrated media pillar is designed to help brands make this leap.

Uni's relaunch campaign demonstrates this more holistic approach through the development of both the creative and media placement by one partner. With three creative variations and four measurement initiatives, we ensured the creative rolled out across today’s most relevant channels according to their purpose within the brand ecosystem.

When it comes to creative optimization, wellness brand Hatch found great success—and shared some of their secrets in an episode of In a Monk’s Opinion featuring Hatch’s VP Growth Marketing Holly Elliott. Many brands that rely on digital platforms for their marketing face a series of challenges: rising acquisition costs; a limited ability to manage their performance, attribution and audience targeting; and the risk of losing brand authenticity. Hatch assuaged these concerns by striking a balance between creative and performance. In the episode, Holly and our creative performance experts offer insight into how historical performance data can fuel further creative iterations.

Brands prepare for the oncoming privacy era.

While media optimization and performance may be top of mind now, budget conscious CMOs are also eyeing another obstacle on the horizon: overcoming their reliance on third-party cookies as attitudes in privacy shift and as Google aims to sunset third-party cookies with the Chrome browser. And speaking of cookies, VP of Data Services and Technology Doug Hall recently shared ways marketers can rethink cookie consent and management using the Privacy Sandbox platform.

Add to the mix that Google is sunsetting GA360 to make way for its new GA4 platform, meaning brands have plenty of adjustments to manage in the near future. Thankfully, GA360’s sunset was postponed to July 2024, meaning they have more time to perfect their migration strategy. Our data experts put their heads together to create a short guide on how to maximize your move to GA4 before the deadline.

We’ve also got some inspiration based on how other brands have future-proofed their data strategies with great success. We began our partnership with Molson Coors in 2021 with the goal to bring more of its digital media in-house. By taking an ambitious, holistic approach focused on modernization, we’ve since helped the brand future-proof with a robust, in-house digital media team: a data transformation that ranges from data acquisition, data activation and enrichment, and optimization.

And in the commerce space, leadership from Canadian retailer Reitmans shared the role cloud computing played in building a single source of truth throughout its entire organization, joining online consumer behavior with data from over 400 brick-and-mortar locations. Check out the episode of IMO to learn how a strong data foundation helped the brand adapt at speed.

Speaking of data foundations, emerging technologies like Web3 offer new ways of connecting with consumers and strengthening relationships. In an episode of Meet Me in the Metaverse, Ashley Muscumeci, our Director, Go-to-Market, sat down with Jordan Cuddy, Chief Client Officer at Jam3, and Avanthika Ramesh, Senior Product Manager, NFT Cloud at Salesforce, to explore how building a resilient data foundation will help brands get a head-start into the Web3 future. One key insight: despite being a new space, the same rules apply when it comes to user consent. “Even if you are bridging Web3 and Web2 data to bring all these identifiers about a consumer together, it’s really important that the user opts in and provides consent to merge these identities,” says Ramesh.

Commerce goes social and creators go virtual.

In recent years, creators have expanded their digital footprint into new spaces—like gaming and social audio—and have even adopted new content ventures to translate audience engagement into revenue for brands. So, what does the intersection of content, commerce and entertainment look like today? The Social Innovation Lab launched a report earlier this year, The Year of Digital Creators, to explore the state of the creator economy in depth, available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

One example of how creators have transformed the consumer journey is through the rise of live commerce, the subject of a recently released Social Bite from the Social Innovation Lab. Live commerce blends communities and real-time connection to offer entertaining, interactive and personalized experiences for audiences, and the short deck offers a glimpse into the live commerce journey and how brands can activate audiences every step of the way.

What’s next in the realm of digital creators? Expect more and more virtual influencers in the form of CGI-rendered fictional characters or avatar alter-egos of real people. With the rise of the metaverse and more accessible motion capture technology, virtual influencers are primed to become a more common presence in brands’ influencer marketing strategies—and if you’re curious about the role one could play in your own marketing, check out another Social Bite about how virtual influencers are coming alive.

Here's to a new year of innovating!

With so much innovation in the last year spanning experiences, content creation and optimization through data, there’s a lot to celebrate as we cap off 2022. Looking ahead into the new year, these trends will continue to shape brands’ strategies as they seek to engage with hyper connected audiences in the new digital era.

Where will you begin? Reach out to start your 2023 journey with confidence.

The marketing and advertising industry is united by the common goal to leverage technology in new, creative ways—not only to translate data into personalized campaigns, but also to enhance internal operations. This is where automation could come in, if it wasn’t for the fact that marketing is traditionally quite limited in using such technologies. Simply put, many marketing teams haven’t been exposed to automation beyond connecting CRM to email marketing, even though there’s so much more out there.

From business to advertising, development and production operations, digital process automation can help unlock efficiencies across the entire enterprise. There are ample automation solutions for digital operations that can provide support across a company’s content, data, media and tech efforts. While the positive impact of enterprise automation reaches far and wide—from enhancing digital ad operations to improving internal people services—the biggest benefit is the ability to free employees from repetitive tasks or unnecessary complexities in the workflow, so as to enable them to direct their attention and energy towards more relevant work. Especially considering the current economic headwinds, it’s crucial to make sure that your talent can maximize their impact. 

My team of Automation.Monks is specialized in enabling the workforce to embrace automation as a new way of working and realize its full potential. We encourage people to automate as much as possible, no matter how big or small individual tasks are—if a machine can do the work, we should probably let it. This requires us to rethink how we operate within a business and how we collaborate with both tech and each other. The team not only focuses on automating our internal people, operations and processes, but also on supporting brands in automating their enterprise. So, let’s take a look at how we aim to achieve maximum efficiency, visibility and connectivity with automation solutions built by our analytics practice.

Helping brands future-proof their business with GA4.  

Our bread and butter is helping brands automate their people, platforms and processes. The objective is to ensure that these work in ways that businesses can accelerate their digital transformation and prepare themselves for the modern era. One of our go-to tools for measurement is Google Analytics. As Google’s GA360 is scheduled to sunset in the summer of 2024, many brands are busy migrating to the new GA4 product to take advantage of the measurement platform of the future. Among many other useful updates, this tool helps brands collect website and app data to get a better sense of the customer journey by utilizing event-based rather than session-based data. It also includes privacy controls and behavioral and conversion modeling that help fill the gaps in your data caused by the cookieless future.  

GA4 adoption requires collaboration between departments across an organization, and is therefore a change management process as much as it is a technology solution. The flatter, richer insights from GA4 data can help brands deliver more value and achieve faster competitive advantages—particularly when the adoption process is planned, communicated and managed to promote knowledge-sharing and digital maturity growth. Many brands have benefited a great deal from automating their business processes. Let’s take a look at the positive impact experienced by some of our key partners.

We’re supporting a global CPG brand that strives to increase their business revenue YOY by 3%, with a media objective of 3% ROI growth—ambitious, but certainly possible. As its partner for global content production, we advised the brand to focus on the efficient use of first-party data, while also establishing the use of connected data collected from across the customer journey. We pitched GA4 as the obvious solution, keeping in mind our pillars of quality, speed and value. Using custom built in-house automation, we helped the brand rapidly deploy 169 GA4 properties in minutes—all the while managing the shift to GA4 and maintaining top quality first-party data during the adoption. The results were impressive: through our collaboration, this brand has been able to unify its marketing efforts and metrics across 37 brands in 150 countries, ultimately realizing a growth of more than 70% in global ROI since 2017.

Another major brand that we were able to help automate at scale is Diageo, the multinational alcoholic beverage company. Diageo has made the ambitious commitment to increase their market share from 3% to 6% in FY 23. In order to realize this, the brand needs accurate tools with actionable insights. Once again, we presented GA4 as the straightforward solution. Considering the planned sunsetting of GA360, we immediately started planning the GA4 adoption process. Diageo’s scope covered as many as 150 brand websites, including 39 D2C sites (and counting) where we collect transactional data, which is a large-scale task. We leveraged custom Google Tag Manager templates for the GA4 tagging as well as our in-house automation tool to automate the GA360 rollout for the GA4 deployment in minutes versus what would normally take a team weeks to accomplish.

Deploying a common data layer taxonomy, harmonized across all brand sites, allowed for true apples-to-apples data comparison. On top of that, it was pivotal to delivering high-quality, privacy-first, consented first-party data. As a result, the team was able to both save over 200 hours of work and assure quality and reliable repeatability. Moreover, any future updates to measurement are consistently applied across all brand sites using the same solution—and align with Diageo’s overall strategic goals.

Designing the future of Media.Monks with clients in mind. 

Automation is critical to driving your enterprise into its next phase of digital transformation. Though solutions are largely technology focused, it’s important to be aware of the fact that automation can only truly succeed at scale and have a significant impact on your operations if it’s spread across and woven into every facet of your company culture. By incorporating many new, exciting and innovative tools into the tech stack and empowering your people, you can lift your business to the next level of operational excellence. For example, my team is currently working on productizing cloud-based “starter kits” that can easily deploy within a company’s tech stack and seamlessly integrate with existing or modified operational processes. CMOs can leverage these tools to connect their media efforts to the rest of the organization, which allows for better visibility, data interoperability, and measurement in aligning media efforts to business objectives. This is just one of the many ways in which automation can help organizations become more efficient in reaching their marketing and advertising goals.  

No matter the size of your business or the industry that you’re in, enterprise automation enables you to both streamline your people, processes and operations and enhance the output of different teams. In other words, it allows you to do more with less. Our advice? Start building an automation-first company culture now. Recognize where the biggest pain points are in your workflows and thus where your workforce needs to level up with new skills. When it’s deployed in line with your business goals and objectives, automation will maximize your existing talent and set up your business for future success. However, since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for enterprise automation, the key is to start now.

The impressive output of generative AI has led some to voice concerns about whether their livelihoods are in jeopardy. Creativity, after all, has long been considered a strictly human skill.

But creatives aren’t about to lose their jobs to robot overlords who can spin strings of text into pixelated gold. To the contrary, these tools—which rely on human input and some level of artistic aptitude to really shine—are unlocking creative potential and helping people bring their concepts to life in new ways. This outlook prompted the Labs.Monks, our research and development team, to explore how generative AI can uplevel the work of our teams and our clients.

“We’ve been playing with this technology for a while, and after it began to trend, we’ve been getting more and more questions about it,” says Geert Eichhorn, Innovation Director and Head of Labs. For instance: a lot can be said about the future of content creation aided by AI, but how could today’s tools integrate into a present-day production pipeline? 

Looking for an answer, the Labs.Monks collaborated with animators and illustrators on our team to develop a prototype production workflow that blends traditional animation methods with cutting-edge AI technology. The result is an animated film trailer made using a fraction of the time and resources that a typical, frame-by-frame animation of its length would require.

Learn to live with the algorithm.

Ancestor Saga is a 2D-animated side project focused on a central question: what if people in the Viking Age realized they were living in a simulation? After learning that their purpose in life is to entertain the gods, will they accept their new reality, or put an end to the world by bringing about Ragnarök?

The theme might feel familiar to anyone trying to make sense of the increasingly algorithmic world we’ve suddenly found ourselves in. “We wanted to tell a story that could integrate with the tech we’re using: virtual worlds and virtual people,” says Samuel Snider-Held, Creative Technologist. Associate Creative Director Joan Llabata takes this thought further, citing some of the challenges faced when humans and AI don’t quite connect. “There’s some space where we need to find the best way to communicate with the machine effectively,” he says.

When using generative AI, a bespoke approach is best.

That challenge of getting humans and AI to play nice demonstrates the need for a team like the Labs.Monks to experiment with the tools that are available. While off-the-shelf tools are great for empowering individual creators, integrating them into team pipelines requires a more custom solution.

AI is designed to do specific tasks very, very well. Projects that involve multiple capabilities and phases call for a workflow that can integrate a variety of generative AI to fulfill different goals throughout. With an animation project, this means plugging into creative concepting, storyboarding, sound and of course animating the visuals.

In our case, says Snider-Held, “We wanted to explore how AI could allow us to do the work we really want to do, even if the time or the budget isn’t there.” He found that while our animation team loves classic, frame-by-frame animation, the method is often overlooked because it is slower to produce and less cost-efficient than other ways of animating. 

Now the team had a clear goal: orchestrate an AI-based workflow that could output a frame-by-frame animation in record time, without compromising quality. They took inspiration from rotoscoping, a method used by animators like Ralph Baskhi, in which an artist traces images over existing footage. This task of translating an existing recording from one style to another was ideal for image-to-image generative AI. In addition, the team used AI technology to develop background designs and read out the animation’s voiceover.

Generative AI isn’t a radical departure from tradition.

The team began by recording a 3D character model in a virtual setting, capturing a variety of poses for an illustrator to trace over. These visuals were then used to train the AI model on how to draw the character in different movements. “If you draw about five frames, you have enough to teach a neural network how to paint the others,” says Snider-Held, noting that it’s important to select frames that are different from one another so the AI can pick up on various forms, shapes and poses.

In addition to rotoscoping virtual production, the team also experimented with live-action stock footage. Being able to use two different types of visual source material baked extra flexibility into the process; teams could mix and match the different methods according to their specific needs or abilities. Fantastical creatures might be captured more easily in virtual production, while a team lacking in their ability to animate lifelike movements may prefer using live-action film as a base. “You get better acting from footage versus a 3D model, but the visual output is ultimately the same,” says Snider-Held.

Much like how that process emulated classic rotoscoping by hand, other ways of integrating AI followed a traditional animation process, albeit with some additional steps here and there. For example, the storyboarding phase is important for visualizing which types of shots or animations are needed for a specific sequence. In addition to pondering that, the team also planned which kinds of AI would be best for generating this or that shot.

Using Stable Diffusion—a kind of generative AI that translates a text prompt into an image—allowed the team to create a large volume of backgrounds that they could swap in and out to test how they looked. “You can explore a lot in this phase,” says Snider-Held.

As for developing backgrounds in particular, “It’s like describing the shot you want to a director of photography,” says Llabata. He was able to test hundreds of different environments, camera angles, artistic styles, lighting and more, all with relative ease.

Unlock efficiencies and long-term gains.

The findings above hit on perhaps the biggest gain that a generative AI-powered workflow can provide: greater flexibility throughout the life of a creative project. Being able to generate 60 frames in one minute—rather than one frame in 60 minutes—makes it incredibly easy to pivot or change things up in the blink of an eye.

It doesn’t require a sophisticated hardware setup either, further making content creation accessible to teams of all sizes. “You don’t need a giant server or cloud computing,” says Eichhorn. “A reasonably good gaming PC can churn out assets like backdrops quickly.” Still, more complex uses of AI like rotoscoping may require more power.

The flexibility unlocked by integrating generative AI into a team’s pipeline continues to pay dividends beyond the life of a single project. “If you have a project whose scope is really big, the effort and money you spent in that R&D is compounded in value over time,” says Snider-Held, noting that whether a brand wants to make 10 animations or 30, the steps to lay down an AI-powered foundation will be roughly the same.

Experiment to find an approach that suits your needs.

Tools like stable diffusion aren’t meant to replace those in the creative field. “An AI will not achieve anything by itself,” says Llabata. Instead, these products will give teams the ability to chase more ambitious projects with fewer constraints in time and budget. Just consider how closely the creation of the Ancestor Saga trailer follows a traditional animation process, just with more efficiencies baked in. 

Such flexibility afforded by generative AI can go well beyond traditional animation.

Whatever your use case for generative AI, understand that while building tools from scratch can be challenging, the result is extremely powerful. “Our approach is that if an off-the-shelf tool is mature enough, use it. If not, create it yourself,” says Snider-Held. In addition to ensuring a tool is calibrated for their specific needs, teams who go the bespoke route will also be better poised to future proof as the technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace.

So, think you’re ready to explore what generative AI means for your field? Learn more about the ins and outs of the technology in the latest Labs Report exploring the rapid evolution of digital creation.

In this Labs report, we'll uncover how Generative AI is impacting digital creation today, and will explore how to keep ahead of where the tech is going next.

In this Labs report, you’ll:

• Learn what Generative AI is and what’s currently available
• Understand how the tech works
• See the technology in real-world action
• Peek into what the future holds
• Learn how to harness its power now

Generative AI supercharges production for higher quality creative output.

In this animated trailer for an original series called "Ancestor Saga," we demonstrate how Generative AI can be applied to film production. This prototype leverages Stable Diffusion AI for generating background scenes and custom Img2Img neural networks for AI-based rotoscoping of virtual characters.

See our findings about the benefits of using generative AI, including time and labor reduction in production, in the report.