Zemoga Joins Media.Monks to Build Groundbreaking Customer Experiences

Founded in 2002 with offices throughout Colombia and the United States, Zemoga complements the existing capabilities of enterprise clients with groundbreaking design and technologies that improve lives and build businesses. Representing a significant fortification of our technology pillar, and reinforcing the “holy trinity” of data&digital media, content, and technology services, they design and engineer better digital products at speed—managing everything from front-end and back-end mobile engineering to product design and UX strategy.

Zemoga is neither an agency nor a software factory. Just like us, they thrive at the intersection of disciplines, working under an integrated model for an integrated market. Bringing together the best-in-class digital talents in Colombia and the US, this diverse group of problem-solvers builds and maintains digital transformation tools working as a true extension of their clients’ teams. Their model is based on the belief that great partnerships create strong, respectful and lasting relationships with their clients—which include Bridgestone, Sony and Morningstar.

Our Monks+ Welcome a Powerful Addition

In today’s always-on marketing environment, brands grapple with the challenge of delivering innovative experiences that have real impact. To that end, traditional agency relationships are limited, while purely in-house teams can lack flexibility or the expertise that the cross-pollination of diverse digital skill sets provides. 

The rise of in-house agencies is proof positive that an embedded model can offer brands the best of both worlds. Working as a true extension of their clients’ teams and granting seamless access to their “squads”—customized talent groups—Zemoga has played a major role in amplifying brands’ power with velocity and expertise. Under the core values of transparency, communication and collaboration, they assume each brand’s goals and standards as their own—reinforcing a true spirit of partnership.

Having a model that fully immerses team members in their clients’ business and culture spurs a deep sense of satisfaction and personal stake in the brand’s success. Zemoga’s embedded model resembles that of our Monks+ category team, which specializes in amplifying our client’s capabilities by getting involved in strategic conversations further upstream and executing through flexible, custom partnerships. Through the integration of Zemoga and Monks+, our existing clients in LATAM, the US and globally will benefit from a true end-to-end offering with a single, flexible team of deeply engaged multidisciplinary talent.

One of Zemoga’s strongest partnerships to date is with financial services firm Morningstar. Over the course of five years, their relationship with the brand evolved from a small engagement with a big focus on front-end development into a long-term partnership that supports Morningstar in defining, designing, managing and enhancing all types of B2B and B2C products for multiple business units. Today, Zemoga’s teams are fully integrated with the brand’s, going well beyond the traditional notion of partner-vendor relationships with a shared workspace in Bogotá. Resembling Morningstar’s look and feel while being consistent with Zemoga’s existing office, the space is designed to ensure both the client and the Zemoga squad feel at home.

Stoking Digital Innovation With Full-Scale Technology Services 

As brands seek to build and scale the customer decision journey, there’s a strong urgency to consolidate marketing, data and technology services to meet consumers with greater velocity and effectiveness. In that regard, Zemoga’s agile methodologies throughout the entire software lifecycle (planning, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring and maintenance), will support the efforts of our technology pillar, augmented by our content and data&digital media capabilities housed under one unitary structure. 

As Wesley ter Haar, Media.Monks Co-Founder and S4Capital Executive Director, explains, the bridging of these capabilities will supercharge brands at a global scale. “Our focus has always been to build the very best creative and content on top of the foundational technology platforms that now connect companies to consumers,” he says.

This is already working. Our most recent project with Ace Hardware, for instance, exemplifies the benefits of having one partner to develop the front-end user experience and back-end data and analytics architecture in unison. To create an entirely new mobile platform from the ground up, integrated teams worked together on a loyalty app that offered a more relevant and personalized experience to customers—all on an accelerated project timeline. With the understanding that technology, data and creativity feed on each other to optimize and strengthen the customer journey, Zemoga will complement our offering with digital product development, platform support and maintenance. 

A Partnership to Watch—Literally 

While Zemoga’s range of expertise spans myriad services, where the team truly excels is in OTT (over-the-top) streaming solution development. In entertainment, OTT refers to the practice of streaming content to customers directly through on-demand platforms—a service that registers high adoption rates in the most mature markets, mostly through CTV (connected TV) devices.

To reach the highest level of proficiency in OTT, Zemoga’s streaming engineering team grew from senior leads in cross-functional areas. From front-end developers to QA experts, they established a structure that covers TV app development across multiple devices, web engines and platforms. Additionally, Zemoga’s state-of-the-art Device Lab provides access to 150+ test devices across every desktop, mobile and OTT platform in the market—a facility that rivals those developed by Silicon Valley tech companies and reduces the chances of encountering bugs, defects and performance issues with both high-end and low-end devices. 

Streaming-savvy and armed with the drive to transform business needs into technical solutions, Zemoga will supercharge our growing capabilities in the entertainment vertical and beyond. With linear TV losing ground to streaming, CTV offers brands unparalleled reach and more meaningful ways to engage with audiences, including both cord cutters and cord nevers. Moreover, Zemoga’s combination of savvy engineers and expert designers grant them the power to balance technology, design and usability—three key elements in the development of an impactful OTT experience.

One Team, a Million Digital Experiences

With our shared vision and values, Zemoga and Media.Monks have embarked on a mission to deliver transformative digital experiences for brands and their consumers—powered by an integrated team with uninterrupted access to cutting-edge capabilities across the entire digital spectrum. With a special focus on native, web and hybrid technologies, our partnership with Zemoga is another step toward a new way of working in today’s marketing environment.