Unleashing a lifestyle.

When people think of the Monster Energy brand, they think of power, intensity and excitement. Known for being the world’s hardest-working energy drink, Monster Energy has grown its brand not through traditional advertisements, but by sponsoring people working to achieve their best: athletes, artists, fighters, musicians and gamers. Monster follows its achievers around the world, covering more than 1,500 events annually and sharing accomplishments across social media, YouTube and the Monster website.

Phillip Kauffman, Monster Energy’s Senior Director of Digital Asset Management, spent much of his early career embodying the creative spirit of Monster. He has created award-winning airbrush designs for all types of vehicles and travelled worldwide acting as a photographer and designer for major promotions and brands. In his current role, Kauffman combines his creative talents with years of experience working with business and technical teams to efficiently deliver quality content to audiences.

“There’s so much that goes into making a brand stand out,” says Kauffman. “A lot of it comes down to consistency. If you look at the iconic Monster logo, it has a very specific green gradient. If the colors aren’t the same on print, packaging, websites, videos and branded gear, then it doesn’t look like Monster anymore. We want to easily share assets so people can find the right versions at any time.”

With audiences demanding more engagement, leadership tasked Kauffman with transforming their content supply chain, to help teams collaborate more efficiently, find and reuse assets, and meet the growing appetite for coverage of Monster Energy athletes and events. Kauffman and the IT team led a six-month exploration where they mapped out the current state of content creation at Monster and compared it to the company’s goals. One of the biggest pain points involved reviews and approvals with a dispersed workforce.

By integrating Frame.io into the existing Adobe Premiere Pro video workflows, teams working anywhere in the world can give feedback and help deliver video that makes fans excited about the Monster brand.

Feeding a growing appetite for video content

Monster publishes about 3,000 videos a year across marketing channels, with another 1,000 videos for internal use. That’s a 200% increase over the past three years. The majority are short clips around a minute or less posted to social media, although some can be up to 10 minutes. Monster teams create many of the clips while working on the road as they follow international sporting events. As a result, video reviews and approvals typically involve remote collaborators.

Previously, video teams uploaded video for review through streaming or file-sharing services, but video often skipped or lagged. Frame.io changes things. The creative team shares videos for review with a click. People anywhere in the world watch high-resolution versions of videos and add their comments, right down to drawing directly on a frame for clearer feedback. Stakeholders even watch video on a mobile device – a huge productivity boost for busy executives and other frequent travellers.

“Working with Frame.io saves creative teams over an hour per day per person,” says Kauffman. “We’re reducing time to market by 50% while giving teams more time to be creative and deliver videos that get our audiences’ attention.”

Collaboration is key for creatives at Monster, with multiple teams working on video reviews. The next step involves turning Frame.io into a repository. Once established, videos will be carefully categorised, tagged and uploaded to Frame.io so that teams across the company can quickly find the clips that they need.

Winning creativity with speed

While video plays a big role in Monster Energy’s engagement strategy, Monster the brand continues to rely on a wide range of media to reach audiences wherever they are. With Adobe Creative Cloud, design teams can find the apps they need to deliver quality results faster to keep up with growing demand.

Video teams use Premiere Pro and After Effects, and other designers frequently use Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for work ranging from websites to in-store promotional displays to product and packaging design. Monster plans to start using Substance 3D Collection to create the 3D models and virtual photo shoots used for products on e-commerce sites, which will enable the team to quickly deliver eye-catching product photos from multiple angles at low costs. Monster also recently migrated to Adobe Creative Cloud Pro Plus, giving designers the full power of Adobe Stock.

“Anything we can do to help our teams be more creative is important,” says Kauffman. “Adobe Stock has huge potential to help our teams focus on polishing original content without worrying about b-roll or background images.”

Generative AI is also where Kauffman sees potential to save time. “I could see Adobe Firefly as a big help to enable creative teams to spend less time creating mockups or storyboard videos,” says John Martinez, Vice President of Creative at Monster Energy. “Teams will be able to iterate faster and experiment with new looks. And with Firefly powered by Adobe Stock, we’re reassured that we can trace content and know that we have rights to it.”

Kauffman is excited to see what the future will bring for Monster with Adobe. “When you work with Adobe Creative Cloud, it’s fast and easy to add a whole new dimension to the workflow with something like Frame.io,” says Kauffman. “With the power of Adobe Creative Cloud, we help our creative teams keep fans coming back to see the new excitement Monster Energy brings.”

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