The new Wave covers CMOs’ need for integrated digital marketing solutions. “…As C-suite demands for growth and cost effectiveness rise, some enterprise buyers are seeking integrated and orchestrated solutions to unlock value across marketing campaigns, customer experience (CX), and commerce,” writes the report’s author, Forrester Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall. The Forrester Wave(™): Global Marketing Services, Q3 2022 evaluates partners’ abilities to meet each of these needs, helping CMOs identify the one that suits them.

Measured us among our industry peers, Pattisall wrote, “Media.Monks is a good fit for CMOs wanting to push the boundaries of digital (and partnership) with end-to end creative, production, analytics, and activation services.” This is the ambition we hold ourselves to in a time of intense transformation and the cusp of a new era of virtualization, in which insight into consumer behavior are key to unlocking compelling digital experiences and broad transformation.

Hyper-accelerated adoption of consumer behaviors and seismic shifts in the privacy landscape are putting marketers under pressure to deliver differentiated creative experiences. Those who aim to meet virtualized behaviors today require a partner who puts their own skin in the game, takes bold risks and helps them gain confidence to do so—all by seamlessly integrating a suite of services and expertise that shortcut to impact.

A new era calls for a growth partner of record.

A key insight surfaced by the Wave is how the need for integrated marketing services has erupted in recent years. “A recent COMvergence report for new business in the US shows that integrated agency reviews increased fourfold from 2020 to 2021,” writes Pattisall. “And according to Forrester’s Q1 B2C Marketing CMO Pulse Survey, 2022, 31% of B2C CMOs at organizations with 500-plus employees intend to integrate creative and media assignments to boost marketing impact.”

While integrated services are increasingly desired by brands, we’re proud to note that we were the first to bring the unitary idea to the market. Building a foundation in digital freed us from the baggage that beleaguers the more traditional names as they adapt to a new digital era. In a 2020 article, Pattisall told Campaign, “The industry is quite literally trying to move on from the shadow of its advertising heritage to better future proof itself.”

Meanwhile, we believe our newness gives us an edge over the nine other providers evaluated in the Wave when it comes to integration. “Like all others in the category, Media.Monks pursues a strategy to pair end-to-end marketing services, although its newness and mergers/acquisitions make the goal more achievable,” writes Pattisall.

This successful combination of services allows world-leading brands (and future household names) to focus their attention on outcomes that drive growth—not getting lost in a tangle of random acts of digital strung together by a group of competing partners. By bridging together expertise across four pillars—creative content, data, digital media and technology services—we can identify the quickest path to success and iterate toward longer term, broad transformational goals.

Reinventing the model, inside and out.

 “[Media.Monks’] esoteric vision to ‘win the decade’ speaks to its company’s artistic bravado,” Pattisall writes in the report, and achieving this goal relies on growing a new generation of digital technology experts. “Media.Monks’ moxie derives from its strong culture, talent, and EX, marked by an emphasis on upskilling employees, diversity, and programs for social justice and supporting employee 'side hustles’ to stoke creativity." Our Punk.Monks initiative is an example of how we do this. By spotlighting a different member of our community every other week, the series showcases the creative endeavors, businesses, charities and passion projects helmed by our talented team.

Such initiatives demonstrate a trademark of our people: we act like owners, and this foments a shared sense of trust and responsibility in our approach to collaboration. A consultancy may give you something top dollar but not exceptional, because their primary commitment is to their own brand. But truly remarkable results come from a consultative approach that brings work to life—not only consultation and strategy, but also execution derived from a maker’s mindset.

And that also means giving brands themselves greater ownership and control—something the traditional model has withheld for too long. Whether to provide ownership of data, oversight into media optimization and control over how the budget is allocated, a significant part of our service is to help brand marketers become more self-sufficient with unconstrained access to top-tier talent who can scale their ambition to new heights.

True disruption calls for strategic risk.

While the brands and technology platforms we partner with have a verve to shake up their respective industries, we’ve found that in our own market, that same eagerness to agitate is rare. Legacy setups may guarantee success for their clients by eliminating risk, but this conservative approach fails to help brands who need to become disruptive leaders in their own right. With the recent additions of TheoremOne and Zemoga to our team, our technology services pillar continues to rapidly evolve to help brands transform to a new era.

Strategy also plays a key role in balancing risk and reward. While unbridled risk can be problematic, we welcome a level of controlled risk to amplify creativity with intelligence. This helps generate unexpected outcomes for brands, particularly as the hyper adoption of new consumer behaviors challenge the tried-and-true strategies that marketers have leaned on in the past. Following this challenger’s mindset, creative briefs aren’t built just to resonate and perform, but to also generate new qualitative and quantitative data that open opportunities to co-create with audiences.

Success in this new era calls for reliable partnerships built on radical transparency and a shared desire to disrupt. Through cultivating a strong global culture of diverse digital experts with a high level of ownership, we’re committed to helping brands find the best solution—or invent new ones where they previously didn’t exist—to their needs. That’s the strength of a partner who can do it all, and we’re up to the challenge.

The goal of the report is to help marketers “looking to produce imaginative, growth-oriented, and efficient marketing” assess the most significant service providers in the market. We are ranked among 12 other providers based on 17 criteria, including current offering, strategy and market presence. We believe these rankings paint a portrait of growing concerns in the transformation of digital and a new frontier for growth, and insight into how well-equipped partners are to help brands adapt.

Demand for growth fuels new priorities in marketing.

Forrester’s evaluation of marketing creative and content services in a single Forrester Wave™ is new this year, and reflects brands’ need for a partner who can combine a portfolio of services to build impact across the full customer journey. In the report, author Forrester Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall notes, “…As C-suite demands for growth and cost effectiveness increase, some enterprise buyers are seeking integrated and orchestrated solutions to unlock value across marketing campaigns, customer experience, and commerce.”

In particular, the report recognizes the “providers that matter most and how they stack up,” and we’ve noticed that those with strong abilities to integrate strategy and creativity to resonate with audiences scored highest. Our view is that those who can iteratively build, test and tweak content—and drive impact with highly efficient media spend—in this way are best able to fuel brands’ desire to achieve greater ROI, especially as hyper adoption of new channels and behavior accelerates.

Insight into evolving consumer behavior is key to transformational success.

The digital transformation marketplace is estimated to be worth $600 billion, growing at a compounded rate of 20% over the next 10 years. 80% of that growth comes from lifestyle mobility, social innovation and other virtualization adoption. Add in the cultural revolution enabling a complete reinvention of the internet, estimated to add over $1.5 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and the largest growth opportunity for brands in the history of digital is up for grabs: virtualization.

Contrary to the pipes, plumbing and integration that defined the digital transformation era, virtualization is defined by 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. We believe this focus on behavior will define the winners of the new era.

In the Forrester Wave™, Pattisall affirms the importance of consumer insights for CMOs today. “Converting consumer insights into compelling content is paramount to persuading consumers to buy. Thirty-four percent of US online adults agree that they are more likely to purchase from brands that share content that interests them, according to Forrester’s Media And Marketing Benchmark Recontact Survey, 2022.”

From our perspective, offering this high level of relevance across the customer journey will demand brands and their partners to break free from the silos that often inhibit broad business transformation. This in turn calls for a new kind of model built from the ground up to enable collaboration between teams and different expertise.

Brands need a new approach for a new digital era.

In our own vendor profile, Pattisall notes that our “ambitious vision to ‘own the decade’ by preparing clients for the coming era of virtualization is backed by diverse digital talent, digital production strength, and a ‘can-do’ attitude that enthralls clients.” That can-do attitude is thanks in part to how we’re built differently, organized around an API-inspired model designed for seamless collaboration across disciplines and time zones.

We’re proud of what our teams have been able to accomplish under this model, like aligning broadcast and experiential expertise to earn the #1 spot on the Eventex 500 list of top event organizers at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Fast forward to a year later, and we’ve similarly brought together the brightest minds in digital to launch Making the Metaverse, a report that aims to demystify one of the industry’s biggest buzzwords and help brands find their footing in the immersive internet. Subject matter experts across the business built a foundational perspective on the metaverse when others were just waking up to the space. Our leadership in the space continues with Meet Me in the Metaverse, an ongoing video series exploring a variety of metaverse concepts, which recently featured Forrester VP and Research Director Mike Proulx.

The API model also enables the “land and expand” strategy, in which client relationships organically grow and evolve by quickly aligning emerging needs with new services and offerings. "It's a second-by-second appraisal of what you're doing and is a far stronger way of building the relationship," S4Capital Founder and Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell told Marketing Interactive.

Unlocking growth at speed calls for a foundationally different partner.

As we enter a new era in digital, marketing priorities are evolving with consumer behavior. This is prompting CMOs to seek out meaningful transformation and growth at incredible speed. While others are named as leaders in the Forrester Wave™, our perspective is that virtualization will further challenge strategies built around big ideas preferred by some, and that the traditional holding company model that others find themselves within will impede the broad transformations brands will seek to remain competitive.

Alternatively, a digital-native team integrated from start is ideally suited to move the needle. “Often a brand will ask, ‘What’s the best way to help us grow?’” says Joe Olsen, Chief Growth Officer. “By gathering subject matter expertise across creative, media, data and technology services in a single P&L, we can quickly identify opportunities for the quickest path to value.” In other words, we’re built to help brands ride the wave of a new era.