“The companies on this list stand out to their employees. They have open-door policies where employees feel heard, offer flexibility that supports work/life balance, and provide opportunities for professional development, promotion and recognition—to name a few,” to use the words of Nancy Cooper, Newsweek’s Global Editor in Chief. 

This recognition goes to show that our mantra—empathy, transparency and diversity—has paid off, and there’s no doubt that these goals will continue to guide the efforts of our global and local leadership in providing a space for all our people to thrive and feel pride in their work. It’s safe to say that this is one of the greatest moments in my time at Media.Monks, especially as this past year hasn’t been an easy one. 

We’re here to help our people overcome obstacles. 

From a people perspective, our organization—and many others with us—has been met with various unexpected and very difficult social challenges these last couple of years. While strict lockdowns as a result of the pandemic kept several of our teams in Asia-Pacific homebound, our people in Ukraine were suddenly forced to flee or take shelter due to the ongoing war. At the start of this year, we were also deeply saddened by the disastrous impact of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. More than anything, these tragic and unforeseen events have made it abundantly clear that taking care of our people, which means making sure they are safe, satisfied and happy, should and always will be our top priority. 

Meeting our people’s needs and caring for them is not something that can be done in a couple weeks—it must happen in the present. That’s why we practice what we preach every single day, and if I may speak on behalf of our global People team, we are very proud and honored that our efforts to establish a clear vision and direction for the health, wellbeing and happiness of our people hasn’t gone unnoticed. Now, let’s take a closer look at what exactly we do to support our talent. 

Paving the path for our people to thrive. 

Beyond providing the basics such as health insurance, caregiver leave and paid vacation days, I believe that building a workplace where our 8,700+ people worldwide feel at home is about culture, belonging and representation, and making sure this is in line with everyone’s unique needs. 

Before we dive into this, it’s important to highlight that as an organization with presence in every part of the world, we always have to make sure our efforts and initiatives account for the many jurisdictional, regulatory, cultural and demographic differences that constitute our global footprint—what may be a mandatory diversity policy in one country, might be legally prohibited in another. That’s why we not only prioritize data-driven analysis of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion challenges to support more localized approaches, but we also encourage and facilitate employee-led community groups and initiatives in all our offices. 

In establishing a company culture where everyone can flourish, our initiatives are aimed at fostering an environment of DE&I and belonging. From supporting women in tech to taking action to realize diversity, these initiatives include community groups—think of our Melanin.Monks, Pride.Monks or AAPI Community Group—cultural and heritage-based events and celebrations, and local coalitions to support near and dear creators and businesses. 

Besides fostering a safe and inspiring environment, most of the above initiatives facilitate peer-to-peer learning, which is just as important in building a solid company culture. And if we encourage our talent to educate themselves and others, then we should also provide space and opportunities for growth. That’s why we have initiated a range of educational programs, including our Women Leadership Program and the S4Capital Fellowship. Furthermore, next to offering bespoke online training on various topics, from foundational DE&I principles to managing a team with empathy, we’ve recently launched our first-ever global professional development program: Accelerate.Monks. Featuring internal subject matter experts, this initiative is all about upskilling and knowledge sharing between our talented colleagues. 

The golden thread in all of this is our insatiable curiosity, creative spirit and can-do mentality. To better understand the experience of our talent, the People team has deployed net promoter scores and found that many of us have dreams way beyond our daily work and want more purpose-driven jobs. These insights have ultimately shaped our operating model of creative-first and “break it and make it.” I believe that creativity breeds creativity, and long-lasting culture is all about constantly reinventing yourself in art, culture and business—that’s why we give our talent the tools they need to always rise to the moment. 

Another accolade closer to our mission.   

Despite our size and relative infancy in this industry, our mission is to become an industry force, and raising extraordinary talent is essential to this. That’s why I’m so thrilled that Media.Monks has received this honor, as it’s testament to our efforts and proof that we’re on the right track. As a top 10 Cannes Creative Company of the Year, Webby Production Company of the Year, and the owner of the most FWAs ever, I believe there’s no doubt about our creative chops. But as the Global Chief People Officer, entering Newsweek’s Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces just hits different, because this tells me that our talent not only creates outstanding work, but they feel appreciated, valued and cared for in doing so—and right now, that’s all that matters.

NextUp.Monks offers emerging talent from our 8,900-strong multidisciplinary team the opportunity to continue to cross and push boundaries—and reaffirms our commitment to support them along the way. With our people spanning 57 talent hubs in 32 countries, this internal initiative is the perfect way to bring our talent closer together and provide them with a platform  to shine on a global stage. The first edition turned out to be such a great success that there was no other option but to bring it back in 2023. 

“Our ambition is to transform the industry. We want to change the work, what the work can do, and who does the work—and that change starts with us, right now,” says Jouke Vuurmans, our Chief Creative Officer. “NextUp.Monks is one of the ways we work towards this goal, as it gives our up-and-coming talent the chance to be bold, think outside the box, and ultimately thrive both within our company and on the global stage. What we saw last year is that it’s not just about professional development, it’s also about personal growth. Through this competition, participants get to meet and mingle with like-minded and equally ambitious colleagues from every corner of the globe.”

Connecting talent from across categories and capabilities 

As the aim is to give people the opportunity to thrive within our company and the industry, the main rule of NextUp.Monks is that everyone can join—as long as you have seven years or less of industry experience and are not in a managerial position. If you check those boxes, you are good to go find a partner to team up with and get to work. 

The competition consists of three categories, each of which is designed to highlight specific strengths, skill sets and interests. Teams are invited to participate in any category, regardless of their current role within Media.Monks. 

First up, the Innovation.Monks are future-facing visionaries. They’re adept at sniffing out innovative ideas and turning them into reality using the latest in emerging tech and formats, resulting in groundbreaking experiences and new possibilities.

Second, the Film.Monks deliver cinematic stories for screens of all sizes. They’re an inclusive bunch of thinkers that have a knack for original concepting, scriptwriting, visual treatments, film treatments, shooting, directing, editing, VFX, post—and everything in between. Together, they believe that film has the power to connect people and tell stories that we’ve never seen or thought about before.

Third, the Interactive.Monks are driven to build creative experiences that go beyond the mundane. They put the audience at the heart of every moment they craft, giving them the opportunity to immerse themselves within compelling, transformative digital experiences that build lasting memories.

Sparking boundary-pushing ideas  

For this year’s edition, we teamed up with a world-renowned global brand to develop a unique creative brief for each category. Our aim was to get people to flex their creative muscles and give shape to the craziest and most mind-bending ideas. 

The brief, “VR for Good,” challenged participants to think about VR as a vehicle for change and to find ways to excite Gen Z consumers about the potential of this technology. Through each category, teams were tasked to demonstrate VR’s transformative power to positively impact areas such as medicine, sports training, and emergency response—and ultimately change people’s minds about VR as a device solely intended for gaming.

If you ask Steve Latham, Head of Learning at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, all participants understood the assignment. “After last year’s success, our team couldn’t wait to continue to work with Media.Monks on this groundbreaking initiative and breathe new life into our shared goal to spark boundary-pushing creativity,” he says. “Once again, our minds were blown—just when I thought the bar couldn’t go any higher, their talent raised it. Massive shout-out to everyone who participated, because the level of future-forward thinking, creativity and craft was outstanding. Now, it’s time to meet the winners at Cannes Lions 2023!”

And the winners are… 

With so many incredible submissions, we had to be very diligent and detail-oriented in reviewing all the work. So, we established an esteemed jury of internal Media.Monks employees and industry experts, who reviewed the work in a blind judging process using the following judging criteria: the creative idea (40%); the insight and strategy (20%); the relevancy to the brief (20%); and the execution (20%). The jury selected bronze, silver and gold winners across each of the three categories. While the silver and bronze winners received a personalized trophy—plus eternal bragging rights—the creative minds behind the gold-winning work earned an all-inclusive ticket to Cannes. 

Those going down in history as the 2023 NextUp.Monks gold medalists are Anna Zhang and Yazad Dastur in the Innovation category, Vasyl Ilba and Mykyta Zolotoverkhyi in the Interactive category, and Jorene Chew and Ashwin Paul in the Film category. Out of these teams, the judges crowned Anna Zhang and Yazad Dastur the ultimate winners. This means that in addition to their trip to Cannes, they have also been admitted to the prestigious Creative Academy at Cannes—which will welcome a mere 30 people from around the world this year. 

“I still feel like I’m dreaming,” says Anna Zhang, Junior Designer. “Two months ago, I went to a little happy hour mixer for the NextUp.Monks competition and met Yazad. I didn’t really think I would enter the race, but Yazad told me that his best trait is his personality—and I was sold. We may have started as partners, but through this competition, we have become great friends. We come from totally different backgrounds, career paths, and even parts of the organization, but we got together with one common goal: to create something that feels true to us and, most importantly, to have fun!”

“Something that really made the difference when Anna and I decided to do the competition together was that we developed a rapport before we got to work, and really got to know each other as people and understand where the other was coming from—both creatively and personally,” adds Yazad Dastur, Junior Copywriter. “Becoming friends allowed us to tap into a deep emotional place and insights, and I think that’s what made it so much more important for us to give it our all. To find a partner who is willing to stay up until 6:00 am to finish a project is rare, especially one that does not guarantee an outcome. So, I think the fact that we told each other ‘let’s have fun and give this our best’ made this process an experience that we are truly proud of. I’m absolutely grateful for Anna—we completely pushed each other whenever one of us was faltering, doubting or even falling asleep.”

Bridging cultures and crossing borders

As much as the winning pitch, the NextUp.Monks initiative itself is all about creating strong connections, both across our organization and the globe. Not only did this internal competition garner interest from more than 600 employees in 25 countries, with a striking 350 people actually participating in the race, the top three teams are based in completely different places—from Los Angeles to Poland to Malaysia. 

This circles back to the fact that NextUp.Monks helps our emerging talent grow professionally as well as personally, as this initiative—within the context of our unified business structure—allows our people to work with peers from different countries, categories and capabilities. 

“Being a global team, we rely on an agile, flexible framework that lets people be themselves while staying keyed into the emerging opportunities and challenges that brands and our industry face. We’re a unified organization, but everyone is given the space to let their distinct voice and personality shine through—and our NextUp.Monks initiative only reinforces this spirit,” says our Chief Marketing Officer Kate Richling. “The competition opens up a myriad of possibilities for our up-and-coming talent across the globe to work together, no matter their location, expertise or job description.” 

Nothing Cannes stop our winners now

All that’s left for the winners to do is pack their bags, hop on a plane, and enjoy their time in Cannes—and if we have to believe Noelle Mayasich, our Senior Creative and last year’s winner, this will be the easiest part. 

“The amount of knowledge my partner and I gained from Cannes Lions has been so valuable to the way I look at creativity in my daily work—the workshops and keynote speeches have honestly molded me into who I am today,” says Mayasich. “We saw many notable speakers, including heads of large agencies, industry-wide influential figures, and even Ryan Reynolds, who talked about his break into the industry. Some of the speakers made us cry, and many others made us laugh. What truly stuck with me were the following lessons: be ambitious and humble at the same time. Create value for people of the world, not fluff. Sometimes we fail and sometimes we win, but having that freedom gives us the power to be creative.”

But Mayasich’s biggest takeaway from this experience was that the creative people in our industry really do care about the good of humanity and social, cultural, environmental and societal issues. “While our creative work reaches so many people on a daily basis, we don't often get to see this impact because we have to move on to the next project. This festival made me realize that my work is so much more impactful than I thought it was, and we’re the living proof there’s a fighting force behind it,” she says.

“It’s every advertiser’s dream to go to Cannes, so to say we’re excited would be an understatement—I’m actually still in shock,” says Dastur. “What makes me the happiest is that people saw potential in our idea and understood what we were trying to convey: that there’s a promise to the future of AI and VR. When utilized responsibly, these technologies have the power to bring people closer together.”

As we continue to provide our talent worldwide with diverse opportunities for growth, who knows where they will be in their careers next year—it might just be the French Riviera. As Media.Monks Co-Founder and Executive Director of S4Capital Wesley ter Haar says, “This year's NextUp.Monks was amazing. Great to see so much fun work and boundary-pushing thinking from teams across the globe, which is the result of our exciting partnership with Cannes Lions. I’m sure we'll see some of this year’s participants back there in the foreseeable future.”

Picture the scene: a creative brief lands on your desk that requires the slow-motion drip of coffee, a chocolate vortex, or the perfect drop of foundation on glowy skin. Cue a producer’s concerned frown, because the type of filmmaking that can capture these specific motions in astounding detail—known as tabletop—requires specialized knowledge. It’s a very particular nook within advertising and marketing, and that’s why there are only so many people who (can) do it. 

Case in point: our Film.Monks team in Amsterdam, which is one of our global film hubs, is one of the few (say, handful) players to offer tabletop services in Europe. On top of that, we have our own robotics in-house, which we need to test ideas and do the actual shoots. This also means we’re in the fortunate position to be able to lower the threshold of entering this field, which is typically hard to get into. That’s why we’ve been welcoming up-and-coming talent into our studio to let them have a taste of tabletop.

Making a tough field to break into more accessible. 

First, let’s back it up a bit and take a look at what tabletop is exactly. This term typically refers to the shooting of objects—think of food and drinks, beauty products or other liquids—in great detail. When you are this close up to a product, storytelling becomes focused around colors, shapes and textures. In practice, it’s all about getting the objects to behave in whatever way you want them to, so that their movements tell the story or create character. Naturally, there are some nice pieces of equipment to help you do the job. 

As a tabletop creative and director—which allows me to be a stunt coordinator, a mess maker, a prop eater or even an explosion specialist every now and then—you have to think deeply about the dynamics and qualities of products, in more detail than you would even think is possible. For example, let’s say we’re creating a commercial for a coffee brand that aims to spotlight the different strengths of its new line of coffee beans. This means we not only have to think about how to communicate the brand voice and product range, but we also need to consider what consumers want to be told, what would catch their attention, and what appeals to their taste. So, what we would do here is bring in color and shape signifiers, like a rounded, soft yellow for the mildest bean and a bold, sharp purple for the strongest flavor, to visualize these slight differences. 

Working creatively within such a narrow scope may be frustration-inducing for some, but highly satisfying for others, and apparently I am the latter type of person. I discovered this when I was given the unique opportunity to explore the world of tabletop—I started as a tabletop director’s Personal Assistant, working as his producer of sorts. After spending many long days assisting on set with no real idea what was happening, writing treatments and even acting in an ad, I finally thought: hang on, I reckon I can do this! Getting such an extensive chance to discover this profession doesn’t come by often, and that’s exactly why we’ve decided that we actively want to make the field more accessible for promising talent.

Carving out a niche for up-and-coming talent and ourselves.  

Let’s zoom in on the how. For a while now, we’ve been involving juniors—including both early career employees and temporary interns—in our tabletop work wherever and whenever we can. Our aim is not only to share knowledge and experience and enable our up-and-coming talent to learn by doing, but also to pass on our passion for the profession in all its messy glory.

From ideation to execution, we make sure to include our rising stars in every step of the tabletop journey, while always taking into consideration where their specific strengths and interests lie. Whereas special effects (SFX) interns might like to know how to get products to move in different ways, junior creatives would need to learn how to flesh out ideas so that the camera team understands what they want. By bringing up-and-coming talent from different disciplines together in one studio team, we allow them to learn a range of new skills within and outside their specific field of interest. For example, how to write and develop short-form storytelling, how to operate cameras, how to train your eyeballs to see in high-speed vision, or how to engineer explosions of chocolate nuts (and many other special effects). And guess what? My fellow experienced Film.Monks and I learn a lot from them, too. 

The secret to discovering talent? Let them show you what they’ve got. 

One of our most successful shared learning experiences so far has been our ongoing Emotional Eats series. This internal initiative, which we started at our tabletop studio in Amsterdam, revolves around producing fun and quirky short-form content that presents the feelings behind your food. Since there is no client pressure, we thought it would be a great way to get our juniors involved.

So, on a bi-weekly basis, we organize a test-and-learn day with the aim to scope out new rigs and develop new technologies. We consider it an opportunity to not only improve our creative development and craft, but also hone the creative conceptualization and directing skills of our entire studio team, including juniors, through regular “experiment and play” time. It’s important to highlight that, while we aim to provide creative and technical guidance, we make sure we give our juniors free reign and full autonomy to do what they want. 

Thus far, the Emotional Eats series has allowed us to educate our up-and-coming talent on the engineering behind this beautiful profession and show them how far you can push emotional storytelling in tabletop through light, movement and sound design. In turn, our juniors have taken this time and used this space to experiment, ask questions and take note, coming up with many groundbreaking ideas along the way. It’s not about simply getting interns to help us out—instead, it’s about building a culture of learning and experimentation, while helping them take the next step in their professional journey.

Ultimately, our main goal is to give those who are still at the dawn of their careers, but show great promise, a chance to explore new avenues in the advertising industry and take a peek into our tabletop processes and projects. More than just a way for us to put the feelers out and see if people would want to join our tabletop team by letting them experience the work, initiatives like our Emotional Eats series are a means to raising our talent internally by allowing them to expand their palate and grow both vertically and horizontally—safe to say, it’s a win-win for everyone involved.