Video Game Company Unity Names Media.Monks its First Media AOR

Unity Technologies, one of the world's leading video game software companies, announced today that it named Media.Monks as its first media agency of record. Monks won the business after a competitive pitch that began in February. The brand and agency have already begun work together. The software company is well known in the tech space, having most recently landed a multimillion deal to provide its digital twin technology to the U.S. government. Its other customers include Meta, which tapped Unity in 2016 to develop its Facebook gaming platform. Unity is consolidating its media mix with the Martin Sorrell-backed agency. "It's a really big step for us. And in the past we did a lot in-house. A lot of the media strategy and the buying, even the platform evaluations, were all done by my team," Heather Sutherland, vp of growth marketing at Unity, told Adweek. Before it tapped Media.Monks, the Unity team occasionally tapped specialty or local agencies to help with SEO or smaller tasks but never outsourced holistic or scalable projects. Now, Media.Monks takes on the brand's media strategy, planning and buying and measurement. It also oversees Unity's SEO and Unity's Google Marketing Partner tech and servicing. A competitive pitch Agency search consultancy Tenx4 led the pitch process and initially presented Sutherland and her team with "a continuum" of possible agency partners—from large b-to-b specialty agencies, boutique b-to-b account-based marketing agencies and ecommerce agencies. The group narrowed the list down to seven agencies when Unity put out the RFP. By April, it selected four to formally pitch. Unity asked agencies to craft advertising approaches for two different business areas—its core games business and its real-time 3D digital twin technology offering. Advertising digital twin technology posed a challenge for the brand, which is well known in the gaming space but is now building brand awareness in the real-time 3D space. Unity must increase market awareness of digital twin and simultaneously sell the tech. "How do we address this within a specific media budget to handle both driving demand for our sales team while building a brand for Unity within these these spaces, and in a space that's not even really well defined or codified?" said Sutherland of the digital twin marketing challenge. Monks' emerging tech expertise Media.Monks wooed Unity with its deep knowledge of gaming, VR, web3 and the metaverse, according to Melissa Wisehart, global head of media at Media.Monks And it had a few more stipulations: Unity's ideal agency would have vertical expertise across manufacturing, automotive, healthcare and high-end luxury goods. It also needed a partner that understood ecommerce, since one of Unity's core products transacts online, and it also runs an asset store where developers purchase game-making assets like SDKs. Media.Monks' single P&L global business model allowed the pitch team to tap into expertise across its ecosystem that helped meet Unity's specific needs. "We were able to go and pluck a lot of different subject matter experts to come to the table that you wouldn't normally be able to pull into a media pitch," Wisehart said. Those experts included its real-time creative division leader Tim Dillon, UX professionals, business consultants and even Media.Monks' creative developers who already use Unity technology to create digital experiences for other clients. One of those experiences is the AR app Anne Frank House: The Bookcase for Tolerance that Media.Monks and Innocean produced. It won a bronze Cannes Lion in the Digital Craft category. First-hand knowledge of Unity technology turned out to be a boon for Media.Monks. “Real-time 3D is now a foundational part of our digital toolset. We’re using real-time 3D technology on countless projects across a wide range of verticals—it’s our go-to for creating interactive experiences, new ad formats and, yes, the metaverse,” said Dillon in a statement. Why Media.Monks Is Merging With Tech Consultancy TheoremOne