How MEC's New Content Division Will be Making Waves

As consumers we navigate an ever increasing ocean of content and we see the dawning age of ad blocking. As marketers we know it’s never been easier to create content or more challenging to ensure that it finds the right audiences or delivers a real business outcome.

MEC Wavemaker has been designed from the ground up for this new landscape; not simply to make content but to understand what content needs to be made, and to craft and deliver it to where it can make a game changing difference. Without this understanding brands are at risk of making content without purpose and without a plan, adding to the global glut of content rather than unlocking the value that it can bring.

MEC are the acknowledged experts in understanding purchase journeys. Our thinking, our planning tools, our research approach and our measurement and optimisation systems have the single objective of helping our clients find the most effective times, places and ways to use their budgets to improve their outcomes. Building content around the purchase journey means building and distributing content with a clear understanding of the behaviour we want to change and clear evidence of why content is able to drive the purchase journey more powerfully than any other use of that budget.

MEC is ranked A+ by RECMA for our planning tools and services and MEC Wavemaker makes full use of this unique advantage whilst breaking new ground in its own right. Over the past 3 years we have independently surveyed over 250,000 consumers in 55 categories and 34 markets to build MEC Momentum. Our planners and our clients now have unparalleled access to deep and specific insight of how people move around the purchase journey from being passive to being purchasers. To this unique tool we’ve now added the new GroupM Live Panel, launched earlier this year and already the world’s largest and most integrated view into real consumer media behaviour and itself uniquely integrated into Kantar and BrandZ data. Collectively these give us incredibly rich data based insights that we use to advise brands on where content can help them win and where the competition can be most decisively defeated.

Knowing where to win isn’t enough, you need to know how to win. If you create content the way that you create advertising then you’ve missed the opportunity to design specifically for platform and for format. We’ve analyzed hundreds of content campaigns that we’ve created or distributed globally and have seen how thinking platform and format first can increase effectiveness by as much as 7x.

Content isn’t a campaign, it’s an enduring opportunity to have a meaningful connection with consumers whenever the moment is right. This makes it an always on activity rather than a hit and run. The right parallel isn’t with a ‘fire and forget’ TV execution but with the detail and attention of an always optimized and always learning digital campaign. We’ve reported on, tweaked, listened, analyzed and improved thousands of content campaigns and in doing so we’ve regularly realized up to 10x improvements by minor edits and with multi-variant creative testing.

Content has been a guessing game. That game is over. World class analytics tools sit behind every part of the content planning, creation and delivery process. Together they power the MEC Wavemaker Evaluation System, our proprietary measurement system that delivers end-to-end evaluation of how content has contributed back to the business, from seeing, to sharing, to shopping.

MEC Wavemaker brings together in one integrated capability the very different people and skills required to make this possible: Strategy, Production, Partnerships, SEO, Analytics, Tech and Distribution. At a global scale. The tide has turned in content creation, it’s time to get serious.