Our goal was pretty simple when we started Mighty & True 7 years ago. Find ways to help technology marketers create high-performance and low-hassle assets and content. We’ve shown repeatedly that the creative use of content for brand storytelling helps our clients get noticed, drives more engagement, and helps connects brands to customers in more memorable ways.
This mix of brand storytelling and digital tech has only become more critical as technology and the expectations surrounding it have only increased. We expect all our technology to just work. And even more than that, our expectations of what technology can deliver and delight us with is off the charts. Brands that can provide creative stories in the channels and technologies consumers use the most will win.
We often get asked for the most common ways to use this combo of story + tech to help brands win. Here’s a quick roundup of where we are digging into these days and some thoughts on where things are headed.
Using motion capture to create brand experiences
We see tremendous potential to use Disney-like motion capture for brand marketing and related experiences. Motion capture allows a human actor to be placed into a virtual / gaming environment to become anything we want them to become. This has the potential for brands to engage customers with brand avatars in some very unique and inventive ways.
We’ve worked with some of the top creators in motion capture technology and here are just a few ways we see motion capture as a viable and unique opportunity for brands.
Avatar Performance: Using a human actor to perform in real-time as a 3D brand avatar on screens and digital events. Our recent event marketing play at the Tesla CyberRodeo was a great example of using creative content to drive engagement and interest among a technical audience.
Building virtual worlds with immersive web tech
While we are still using traditional web design and related technology in many ways for brands, we see a growing trend in using immersive web tech for very unique 3D / virtual experiences that customers can view on a standard web browser or mobile phone.
The use of 3D gaming technology to create virtual worlds that customers can explore, interact with, and customize and purchase products directly from their browsers has become a reality. New advances in pixel streaming (hats off to our partners, PureWeb) allow brands to tell stories in real-time, one-on-one immersive environments to create exceptional branded content and experiences.
As this technology matures, these “without the VR headset” experiences will continue to make the vision of the metaverse a reality.
Using nascent data assets to create connected content
With the amount and speed of data coming at all of use these days, it’s really hard for brands to keep up with how to leverage it all for the benefit and entertainment of our customers. The problem is so pervasive that many CMO and brand leaders throw up their hands at the thought of data-led experiences. Still, we have found many ways to take nascent data resources owned or purchased by brands and turn those data into valuable assets for brand storytelling through connected content.
Connected content includes any content whose primary story can be expressed and exposed through data. This data storytelling is a real passion at M&T, and we’ve found many ways to use data and technology to make unique stories and insights come to life. A great example of this use of data and storytelling at scale is the work we performed for NTT at the Indianapolis 500.
The most common thing we see from brand leaders is that they haven’t yet seen their platform, customer or other acquired data as an asset for brand storytelling. We do find that with a bit of prodding and creating thinking, we can almost always find ways to turn data that’s been ignored into insights and experiences for customers that delight and engage.
Hyper Personalization (ABM / Connected TV)
Advertising and creative campaigns will always be one of the go-to ways that brands tell stories. And even using these very traditional means, some platforms allow for the hyper-personalization of content based on what we know or don’t know about each consumer.
One of the unique ways we leverage personalization technology is through AdTech. For our B2B clients, ad personalization platforms like Rollworks allow us to create account-based marketing plays for (literally) each company that our brands are targeting. This allows us to create one specific, branded storyline for target A while also serving up another personalized storyline for target B.
Like Blue Yonder below, our clients have benefitted from truly 1:1 account personalization that create unique ads for each one of their global target accounts.
Connected TV is another data-led technology that enables very engaging personalization at scale. Using the connected TV ecosystem, we’ve launched personalized storytelling that targets different ads for different homes based on Google’s connected TV targeting technology… something that never could have been done in traditional broadcast advertising.
Connected TV advertising gives us the best use of traditional advertising but with hyper-targeted versioning at scale and had proven to be an excellent platform for storytelling + tech.
What’s Next
For today’s brand leaders, the mission shouldn’t be to use cool technology for technology’s sake. There has to be a reason behind the tech.
Keeping centered on the story is the key. A great story has to be told no matter the medium. But, as most of us interact with technology our every waking moment, the combination of story + tech is increasingly a good one.
For M&T, we continue to invest in our ability to create content in these innovative formats in ways that are easy for our clients to implement and maintain.
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