Agencies are increasingly acting as entertainment studios, commissioning cinematic, star-studded films. But this raises a critical question: does this spectacle sell the brand, or just serve as entertainment regardless? The primary risk is creating spectacle over substance, where audiences remember the film but not the brand's message.The solution isn't to avoid entertainment, but to ensure it's built on a strategic brand truth that serves the product.
This strategy applies to brand experiences as well. For Google's Made by Google product launch, which also took an entertainment-first approach, the goal was to move past the traditional playbook. Instead of placing products on pedestals, our insight was to build an immersive sandbox of mini scenes that mirrored real-world environments, like a New York café to demo the Pixel’s low-light camera. These moments of tangible interaction provided the perfect backdrop for creators to produce authentic, engaging content that turned the physical event into a global digital moment.
ARE YOU DOING THE MATH ON YOUR MARTECH?
New research reveals a critical martech blind spot: not one of fifty Fortune 500 CMOs interviewed could clearly articulate the return on their martech investments. Leaders can fall into the trap of buying tech first without defining the specific use cases, making ROI impossible to measure. As our SVP of Data and Platforms, Jakub Otrząsek, told Mi3, this problem is amplified in markets where firms pay premium prices for US-scale tech but have a smaller customer base to extract value from.
After a summer of major data breaches, 59% of people now believe companies care more about collecting data than improving experiences. Marketers often fall into a hoarding mentality, seeing data as an all-you-can-eat buffet, which only increases their security risk. As Michael Neveu, our VP of Strategic Data Solutions, explains, privacy isn't an obstacle to loyalty; it's the foundation of it. The key insight is to shift from taking data to earning it by collecting data with purpose, limiting collection to only what's needed to deliver a specific value.
Agencies are rapidly hiring AI agent developers as AI becomes the focal point of brand investment. But for the brand, it’s crucial to know what kind of talent their agency employs. There’s a critical difference between junior creative technologists who handle R&D and senior, frontline-deployed engineers. This senior talent is essential for the last mile of practical implementation work on the ground, ensuring an AI solution can navigate a complex client organization and internal systems, not just exist as a standalone demo.
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