Extend the Value of Your Creative Idea with Integrated Production

While traditional advertising was once the go-to strategy for driving awareness and large reach, the one-size-fits-all approach to creative is no longer effective for maintaining a close relationship with today’s digital audience. Because consumers crave personalization and relevance, brands that are truly customer-focused realize the need to tailor their content for specific formats and channels in which they engage.

Look at it this way: just a single piece of creative limits your ability to impact a wide audience that comprises a diversity of needs, or to provide distinct cultural relevance across many markets. For example, a celebrity ambassador might be perfect for one market, but virtually unknown in another; alternatively, markets may celebrate holidays unique to their culture.

Accounting for these variables requires brands to rethink the way they produce content. Many brands are still quick to implement a project-based approach that can result in inefficiencies to rework, transform and adapt—sometimes ending up with a disarray of many vendors, disconnected campaigns and an inconsistent consumer experience. But even those that have already begun with a traditional “big idea” can extend its value by adapting it into a fit-for-format digital campaign without simply cutting things down.

Instead, a more integrated approach begins by pulling together strategy, media planning and creative ideation from the start, aligning brand and partner on the same page. This empowers both teams to produce versatile, format-ready deliverables capable of accomplishing each campaign goal with just a few shoots done in a week or less, rather than scheduling several shoots a month or getting bungled up in rework.

Format-ready digital content also gives brands the opportunity to learn what type of messaging is most effective for their audience. “The outcome is much more measurable,” says Brett Stiller, Creative Monk at MediaMonks. “The brand can see what’s most effective.” These learnings can be applied to tweaking the assets the brand already has, or can inform the next campaign to make it even stronger.

Iterating the Fit-for-Format Story

Philadelphia Cream Cheese is well-known and deeply loved by many, but the product’s wide appeal and versatile reach means there’s a lot of ways to enjoy it; different countries each have their own favorite cream cheese-based snack, and while a bagel is a staple of American breakfasts, it just won’t cut it in England. Aiming to provide a mouth-watering message, Philadelphia needed a partner capable of adapting a selection of hero TVC scripts that could appeal to a variety of regional appetites.

Putting its extensive global knowledge to the test, the team was able to deliver over 900 assets from one week of shooting, enabling the brand to broadcast just 14 weeks after briefing. We achieved this by taking careful consideration of the many touchpoints that exist along the consumer journey—aiming not just to build awareness, but to direct consumers through the purchase funnel and across digital platforms. For this purpose, it’s important that a creative partner truly understands user behaviors for each format and is able to help your brand influence key decision moments for consumers.

Brands can take a similar approach to expanding their traditional campaigns into digital. Too often, the tactic that some brands use is cutting down their existing creative and trying to force it within the different social formats. But when Calvin Klein sought to expand the reach of a traditional campaign for their Eternity for Men fragrance, they knew they could provide a more meaningful and authentic message to consumers by building a social campaign from scratch, with thematic ties to the original creative.

This also offered an opportunity to refresh the brand, ensuring the digital campaign’s extension in reach would make an impact. “It nodded to the brand, but wasn’t fully ‘Eternity’ as you’ve known it before,” said Stiller. “Part of the work was updating that ethos, aesthetic and tone—extracting the stories from it and letting it reach into the right space.”

For example, while the original TVC focused on Jake Gyllenhaal, the digital one followed influencers as they reflect on the different roles they play in their lives, and how each affects their concept of masculinity. “The influencers are easier to identify with, as their lives are more attainable than a traditional celebrity,” said Sara Tunstall, Senior Content Producer at MediaMonks, “While celebrity fits the context of a TVC well, this approach is more natural to social.” Focused on what makes each subject unique, the campaign offers several opportunities for audiences to connect.

Planning and Trust are Key

The integrated production method can help brands extend the value of their core message and combine reach with added relevance, but the hyper-efficient process succeeds best when campaign needs and KPIs are carefully planned out at the start. Trust is key for any partnership, and careful communication and planning ensures that the creative team has the freedom to adapt a message in all the ways that make sense for the channels in which it lives, while easing any anxieties the brand may have.

For example, we understand that brands may feel overwhelmed by the need to review the high volume of assets made available with integrated production, which is why we’ve made tools in the past to streamline that process for them. If the brand is already well aware of elements or messaging that resonates best with their audiences through iterative testing, establishing those insights early on can ease the need for rework.

Integrated production offers a great way for brands to meaningfully expand their ideas and drive impact. Breaking down the “big idea” offers several possibilities to relate to audiences no matter their interests or channel of choice, helping to augment a brand’s goal to extend reach. With strong collaboration and trust between parties, brands can enjoy a much more efficient process for producing content that provides value to their audiences and achieves a faster time to market.