Decoded Joins S4 to Crack the Integration Code

In the past year, we’ve had the chance to partner with brands and help them show up for audiences in meaningful and creative new ways. Now, we’re carrying that momentum into 2021 by announcing a new member of the S4Capital family: Decoded Advertising, a truly integrated creative, technology and media agency that bridges the gap between meaningful storytelling, data-led optimization and commerce.

With Decoded joining S4Capital just before MediaMonks celebrates its 20th anniversary, we stand at a pivotal moment to integrate our unitary offering with new efficiency. The move accelerates our pursuit to deliver more impactful creative across the customer decision journey (CDJ)—driving brand relevance beyond advertising to evoke emotion and entertainment wherever people look.

 Maximizing the Integrated Approach

In building S4Capital, Sir Martin Sorrell set out on a bold vision to align the “holy trinity” of first-party data, content and programmatic media under one unitary structure. The benefit to this end-to-end model is data informs content, which is then distributed through programmatic media for greater effectiveness. Combine this with an integrated strategy that spans across the full CDJ—commerce, social media, OOH, virtual events and more—and brands have a content engine that fuels insight-driven, fit-for-purpose creative across the digital landscape. 

While S4Capital has scaled up its content, creative and media capabilities over the years, Decoded has delivered on the integrated promise since its inception. Among Decoded’s first clients was Dollar Shave Club, a visionary DTC brand that changed the retail landscape forever. But while it’s easy to be a small disruptor, true success comes with a partner who can help you scale and grow. By aligning its data and creative practice, Decoded’s multidisciplinary team helped scale the DTC mindset and catapult Dollar Shave Club and its many other recognizable brands to great success.

While Decoded began in the advertising environment, combining with MediaMonks offers an opportunity to extend beyond that and add a fresh perspective to creative experiences of all kinds. “Since day one it’s been our goal to explore every strategic, creative and media lever at our disposal to build better brands and deliver better performance results,” says Matt Rednor, Decoded’s Founder and CEO. “In S4Capital, we’ve found a group of like-minded collaborators that immediately expand our ability to disrupt the industry with a more modern approach to creativity.”

Creative and Media Align to Deliver Performance at Speed

Decoded has grown deliberately to deliver performance across the entire customer experience. The foundation of its strategy is an understanding that creativity and media are two reciprocal forces that define advertising effectiveness. Often, a brand will rely on multiple vendors for each, but aligning both together at the outset results in stronger deliverables. For example, conceiving creative around the media plan is essential to building fit-for-format creative. 

MediaMonks has long operated at the intersection of technology and creativity, translating data and insights into culturally relevant content that moves the needle. But Decoded isn’t just data-driven; everything the team sets out to do is designed to create data that further inform design paths in a never-ending feedback loop. This flywheel of data and creative content working in tandem results in smarter, more effective creative throughout the CDJ, and showcases what brands can achieve when the holy trinity of data, content and programmatic media truly work in concert with one another. 

A New Partner Model for a New Era

Beyond offering greater relevance, a stronger end-to-end structure also breaks down the silos that inhibit a brand’s ability to pivot and overcome challenges at speed—an all-too-common scenario for brands over the past year. At MediaMonks, we take a people-first approach to marketing that we call “feeding the feeds,” in which brands drive cultural relevance by inspiring people to act and engage with brands through activations and creative content.

But succeeding in that strategy requires maintaining a wide-angle view of the customer, understanding the way they behave across different channels and touchpoints, both online and off. Brands must also feel confident in giving some of the narrative control to consumers, in which reacting to audience input at speed becomes essential to protecting the brand. In this respect, meaningful storytelling that fuels earned media and social proof for a new era demands that brands join content, data and the media plan together for maximum effectiveness. 

“The past two years have seen us increasingly working for clients across our data, creative and digital media practices,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “The expertise and experience Matt and his colleagues bring us will heighten our ability to deliver a truly unified offer.” At the start of a new year and decade, the possibilities for creative excellence are endless—and with Decoded helping guide S4’s integration we’re accelerating our unitary promise to brands around the world.