“We are overjoyed and grateful, as we couldn’t have done it without our partners and clients, who have wholeheartedly embraced our approach and placed their trust in us,” says Sergio Escamilla, who leads our team in Mexico as Managing Director. Indeed, a partnership grounded in trust is instrumental in bringing the wildest ideas to life—which is ultimately what leads to big accolades like this one.

A perfect example of such unwavering support is our partnership with KFC, who received the Advertiser of the Year award at the same event. Together with the American restaurant chain, we crafted a series of campaigns including The Battle of the Chickens, which secured a gold medal in both the Best in Show and Content for User Engagement categories. The secret sauce? A social-first approach that encompassed various platforms and a simple yet accessible concept for all.

An integrated team is the cornerstone of a cohesive brand experience.

While the Agency of the Year recognition stems from our people’s work for the Mexican market and is bestowed by the local chapter of IAB in Mexico, it’s safe to say we couldn’t have done it without an integrated team that works across offices, continents and time zones to make things happen at scale and at speed.

Rather than providing partners with a variety of disconnected assets, offering marketing solutions that cover the entire customer journey is necessary to foster customer loyalty—and also paves the way for the next phase, which involves revolutionizing these relationships through AI.

To that end, leveraging diverse talent from around the globe proves to be a significant advantage, as it provides a perfect blend of local insights and world-class expertise. Take, for instance, the rapid and viral launch of The Battle of the Chickens, which aimed to promote KFC’s new Kentucky Chicken Sandwich. “We wanted to do something meaningful and relevant for music fans, and we found an opportunity in freestyle,” explains our Creative Director Mango Marín. “In Spanish, freestyle rap battles are called rooster battles, which aligns with a chicken-centric brand like KFC. We wanted to leverage this opportunity, so we came up with a dynamic where users who participated in rap battles would receive special promotions. The campaign gained momentum across various platforms and exceeded our expectations.”

Cultivating authentic connections through a social-first campaign.

While Marín attributes the success of the campaign to its inherent simplicity, there’s nothing simple about driving interest from the audience—let alone creating an emotional connection with customers. It requires a profound understanding of their interests, values and even subcultures to create real meaning. In this case, it involved delving into Mexico’s hip-hop and urban culture to create a campaign that resonated authentically.

“There is so much talent and cultural richness in the younger generations in Mexico,” says Creative Director Francesco Vicenzi. “They are breaking boundaries and defying the status quo. That is what we wanted to represent with this campaign.” Featuring freestyle star Aczino, The Battle of the Chickens presented an entertaining concept that got everyone sharing their best rhymes in restaurants, drive-throughs and social media. 

In the end, the campaign amassed over a hundred million views on TikTok, which inspired professional rappers to join organically—creating a snowball effect that turned KFC into a three-day trending topic. This, in addition to winning Agency of the Year, further solidifies the notion that, as Escamilla says, “Embracing an end-to-end approach to culturally relevant and meticulously crafted content is truly the path forward.” With this recognition as a driving force, we are fueled with even greater determination to help brands in making a lasting impression. 

We did it for KFC, and we can do it for you too.

You can’t beat the impact of sound.

Call me biased, but I consider sound to be an essential part of integrated production. It has the power to fully immerse people in any type of environment. By emphasizing different moods, sound design and music can guide the attention of the listener, create a sense of anticipation, elicit emotions, spur (inter)actions, or simply bring a lot of positive energy into a room. In any case, sound can leave a big impact—sometimes it’s even the only thing that people remember from a piece of content.

Through our 2023 sound reel, which captures some of our most outstanding work for the world’s biggest brands, we aim to convey the unrivaled experiences that sound can bring. In essence, it’s a compilation of the most exciting, extraordinary and even unexpected projects that not only stuck with us, but also struck a chord with our clients and audiences. 

We unify composers, musicians and sound designers across the globe.

Our sound team is spread across Argentina and the Netherlands and consists of an eclectic mix of composers and sound designers who come with a wealth of experience. Whether you need a custom composition, lively sound design, or an immaculate mix, we got you covered. As wide-ranging as sound itself, our team not only houses a diverse spectrum of skills, but each member also has their own expertise. On top of that, we have many talented musicians on board, from gifted violin players to hard-hitting drummers. 

Even though our team is split across two locations, with a massive ocean in the middle, everyone is completely attuned to each other and used to collaborating on projects across continents. This comes in handy when you work with clients around the world. When one workday ends, another’s still in full swing, which allows us to leverage the benefits of covering multiple time zones in meeting tight deadlines. 

For integrated production, it takes two (or more) departments to tango. 

Not only is our international team able to work together effectively, despite the distance and time difference, we also love to join forces with other departments—and it so happens that our internal Films, Post and Animation people are just a few desks away. One especially stunning outcome of these collaborations is the 2022 animation reel, a project that’s very close to our hearts. We composed original music and got to record it with the world-renowned Metropole Orkest at their homebase in Hilversum, which was a mind-blowing experience in and of itself. 

Throughout composing this piece, our Senior Music Composer & Sound Designer Gabriel Barredo, who is based in Buenos Aires, worked closely together with the animators to ensure perfect alignment with all the visuals. He told me that he was very impressed by the music brief. “It had conceptual and technical depth and the music references were awesome,” Gabriel said. “Also, the sound team provided a lot of ideas and feedback so that I could keep improving the piece. It was a great experience because everyone was so involved in the process. It became abundantly clear that we all love what we do, and everyone on the team is willing to share their knowledge, experience and ideas—even if we are thousands of miles away from each other.” 

Hereafter, our Senior Composer Pim van den Heuvel took over as music supervisor, creating scores for every section of the orchestra. He also attended the recording session and consulted with the orchestra and its conductor. Finally, he took on the daunting task of mixing everything together—if you’re curious to see how he managed, make sure to take a peek behind the scenes. 

More recently, our sound talent across the globe collaborated on a major project for Hulu’s History of the World Part II. To promote the highly anticipated release of this hit series, Media.Monks designed, animated and developed an interactive game for mobile, web and Xbox. Users can spring into the silliness of the show as they’re guided through hilarious historical recreations, such as “The Big Burp” that created the universe. As we were responsible for the music, this project required all our sound design experience, composing power and time zone flexibility. The experience features a massive soundtrack consisting of 11 tracks in wildly different styles. As players progress, the music seamlessly moves from one style to the next and pulls them into new eras. Moreover, the aim of the sound design was to make each environment truly come to life. This required close collaboration with our creatives and developers, as we produced nearly 600 sound files and VO lines—some done by Mel Brooks himself!—on top of the entire music system. 

Sound is the heartbeat of every production.

Needless to say, having sound in-house as an integrated part of the team has many perks. The biggest benefit of them all is that tighter alignment with our creative and other teams automatically results in a more cohesive end product. Whether we are sound designing for an interactive experience, composing a catchy tune, recording VO in different languages, or mixing for the big screen, we always work in close collaboration with our directors and creatives to deliver our best work possible—which you’ll hear when you tune into our 2023 sound reel.

Among our foundational environmental, social and governance goals, we aim to become a climate-neutral, environmentally conscious business—and a catalyst for change in our industry, leading by example and helping brands become more sustainable themselves. So while programs like carbon offsets are steps in the right direction, the key to meeting sustainable goals is to design operations that limit carbon emissions to begin with, and our live remote production workstream fits the bill.

Sustainable workstreams shouldn’t be a tradeoff.

Sometimes the road to being green can feel like making a series of concessions, but working sustainably often means working smarter. When reliance on digital grew throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we adapted by designing a remote broadcasting workflow that limited the number of people needed on location. This production pipeline, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its backbone, did more than help us deliver incredible, live digital experiences to people everywhere—like immersing audiences in a VR Post Malone performance that transforms the experience of listening to an album. It also significantly reduced our carbon footprint.

Our live remote production connects teams to broadcasting software, eliminating the need for gas-guzzling broadcasting trucks on location. It also cuts out the need for specialized talent to travel to shoot an event: we’ve reduced our number of on-site broadcast talent by 83%. Adding to those benefits, our primary workload is based out of the AWS Northern Virginia region, which was powered by over 95% renewable in 2021.

Who wouldn’t want to trade lugging around energy-intensive equipment prone to breaking down—be careful not to trip on a wire and shut down the whole show!—for the cloud? This pipeline recently earned us the coveted Sustainability in Leadership award at NAB Show, the leading conference dedicated to the evolution of broadcast.

The benefits extend to talent as well. Gone are the long, grueling hours spent on set. The ability to collaborate remotely broadens our talent pool, ensuring the best person is cast for each job, even if they’re working across the country—or in a different one. Our experiential team has also developed a suite of tools like LiveXP that furthers the connection between audiences and the action beyond the screen.

One key benefit of live remote production is risk mitigation. First, the greatly diminished environmental impact reduces the social risk of a brand missing their pledged environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments. Second, cloud-based tools are also more reliable. Traditional broadcast production teams have only a finite set of equipment that may break down. In the cloud, we can plan for redundancies and quickly spin up a new virtual machine should something happen to an existing one. You can learn more about what live remote production looks like on Amazon’s blog. 

Let sustainability be the byproduct of innovation.

Sustainability and innovation go hand in hand, and our low carbon, live remote production uniquely enables compelling virtual and hybrid experiences—filling a crucial whitespace in broadcasting as the culture shifts to more immersive and creator-led channels.

“Broadcasting is culture. It’s the vehicle by which culture spreads,” says Smithingham. Increasingly, culture is happening within immersive, interactive spaces like gaming, social feeds and metaverse worlds—behaviors that are challenging broadcasting to adapt. “A core undercurrent across all of this is if something is not interactive to younger generations, it feels broken and it feels disconnected.”

Look at award shows for example. Exclusive and invite-only, viewers must watch the fun from a mediated distance, chattering in backchannels like social media. We flipped the script by partnering with Logitech For Creators to host the first music award show in the metaverse—The Song Breaker Awards—which invited everyone to not only attend but actually become part of the show in Roblox.

What about hybrid experiences? When it comes to sharing an esports experience with audiences around the world, you’d be forgiven for using traditional sports broadcast as a blueprint. But with sports facing a decline in young viewership, it’s clear the formula is worth shaking up. In celebration of Valorant’s first anniversary, we translated the game’s rich lore into a recognizable IRL environment, then pit attendees against livestream viewers in a challenging bout. Viewers could frustrate on-site players by sharing hashtags in the chat that triggered traps—setting a new precedent for gamified broadcast experiences.

Both experiences were designed to connect with consumers in ways that weren’t possible before. If an experience calls for disruptive ways of working, why not use that as a forcing function to move a part of the operations to a low-carbon approach?

Live remote production balances efficiency and sustainability.

By leveraging live remote production, our experiential team can deliver interactive experiences that drive culture and ROI with incredible efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process. The best part? Those benefits contribute directly to brands’ ESG goals and industry mandates. This is a win-win as we connect with consumers in innovative ways, contribute to carbon reduction goals, and reduce risk along the way.

As consumers increasingly demand sustainability from the brands they engage with, offering environmentally friendly solutions becomes an urgent need. And because sustainability challenges us to accomplish our goals in new or different ways, it can unlock innovative ways of reaching audiences. So, whether it’s a matter of saving the planet or simply saving consumers from boredom in fresh ways, we’re down for the challenge.

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.”

In the field of tabletop, which typically refers to the shooting of objects in great detail, products such as food, drinks, cosmetics or other liquids serve as the actors. But because they don’t live, talk or respond to our cues, we need our technicians on set to make the products move in the ways that our tabletop directors want them to. Using specialized equipment, our engineers can work their magic on said strawberry to not only let it wiggle, but do so perfectly timed and in focus. In other words, every day we have to fight gravity on set to keep our actors in control—all to tell a tasty-looking story that resonates with the audience. Let’s take a look at how.

Appealing to the audience takes tickling the right taste buds.

For the purpose of this piece, let’s focus on the shooting of food, keeping the strawberry in mind as the hero of our campaign. It all starts with defining the taste appeal of a brand and its product. With every client, our team’s goal is to help them translate their brand strategy into food imagery with the aim to create distinctive taste appeal—and there are various routes to arrive at this destination, each with their own expressions and associations. 

“We help brands build recognizable and earnable taste appeal, for instance through tools such as movement,” says our Film Director Catherine Millais. “Should the product move in an explosive or elegant way? Should it breakdance or do ballet? Should it jump, hop or only ever fall? When you’re thinking about how you’re going to present the food to a consumer, those are the types of questions that you have to ask, so that you can start defining a set of visuals for your design, sonic rules for your sound, and behavioral rules for your product.” 

It’s important to keep in mind that food is inherently cultural, social and emotional. As such, the visual language of food products is constantly in flux—it reacts to geography and changing sociocultural attitudes, to what’s happening in popular culture, and even to technological advances. As filmmakers in marketing and advertising, it’s crucial to be sensitive to the changing aesthetics of food and the different ways in which taste appeal can be delivered. In fact, it allows us to view taste through new lenses. Above all, it helps us understand how our clients can establish their own take on deliciousness.

Enter the scene: our toolbox of taste, which we’ve developed for our clients to understand how we can play with various elements to determine the taste appeal of a product. Various tools help us define this, such as movement, camera speed, sound, setting, or even food styling, just to name a few, all of which we have readily available at our studio. Our first job is to sit down with the brand’s marketers and make sure we translate the brand voice and creative brief into a commercial that’s in tune, impactful and tasty-looking. 

The main challenge is how to stand out in a sea of deliciousness. The first thing that will make your commercial distinctive is the creative concept. The second is how you leverage the tools at hand—and this is where our SFX specialists come in.

Need to cause a controlled explosion? Just call our SFX team.

The special effects are a critical part of a tabletop shoot. Our SFX specialists control the motion of the objects we are filming, like the automatic release of liquids or the explosions of products—all with millisecond precision. Each movement has to happen in the exact same place each time so that it’s always in focus. Try telling that to the strawberry that’s meant to jump onto a creamy bed of yogurt.

Before our specialists can start testing and setting up any effects, they first need to understand the director’s vision. Our SFX Specialist Jesse Dermout tells me that “a director’s idea can be quite abstract, which can make it hard for me to understand what exactly they’re after. Once we’ve talked it through and we’re aligned, it’s a matter of finding the right tools to get the desired effects. For slow movement, for instance, I would use an electric motor that’s programmed to do very precise steps, while for something more explosive, I would use pneumatics, which is pressurized air to blow stuff away with.” 

In essence, our SFX team provides support to our directors and other engineers on set, like our robot operators, which makes the special effects work both creative and technical. “Though my role is mostly technical, the creative side of it is thinking about how to make effects work in a ‘film’ kind of way, meaning that it has to be maneuverable, the movements have to be very small, and there can’t be too many things in frame,” says Dermout. In other words, SFX is about getting past the boundaries that film itself poses, like lighting, the set, the frame and so on—all the while making sure the effects work. 

The way to realize this is through rigorous testing. Once the director’s creative brief is locked and loaded, our SFX specialists do test after test after test—then conducting stress analyses, creating rigs in modeling software, 3D printing prototypes and testing out the physical version of a rig—until they finally get the director’s brief to work in practice. Safe to say, it takes not only a solutions-oriented mind and an eye for detail to be an SFX specialist, but also lots of patience.  

Robotics, the strawberry on top.

Without specialized equipment, such as our custom-made rigs to move materials in specific ways and our high-speed cameras, tabletop wouldn’t be possible. But there’s one more tool that our team can’t do without: our robot. Tabletop requires you to get each element under control, and motion control is key. Mo-co refers to computer controlled motion and can be used to move the camera, the object you are shooting, lighting or all of the above simultaneously. In tabletop, this gives us repeatable and precise accuracy and speed, which helps, since it often comes down to the millisecond. A robotic mo-co arm can travel smoothly at a speed of 1 meter per 0.5 seconds, meaning that you can repeatedly follow your wiggly strawberry and move the camera around the fruit as it falls. 

A human hand will never drop something in the exact same place and at the exact same time. So, you have to limit all your variables to not only achieve a certain effect, but do so in focus, in the right way and at the right moment. You're engineering a product to do something that it wouldn't naturally do, which is a challenge in itself. But people in the field say the real challenge is fighting gravity, because tabletop is where creativity and physics meet. Fortunately, our team of food creatives, directors, engineers, editors and producers is tight-knit and trained to work closely together, from exploring taste identity with a brand’s marketers, to using high-end equipment to deliver delicious and distinguishable commercials—and all the messy moments (literally) in between.

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.

What does this mission mean to us? It’s not just about being a Digital Partner of Record and delivering top-notch productions and services, but also prioritizing our responsibility to take care of our people and the planet. In light of this, our Labs.Monks have spent weeks creating a comprehensive report on sustainable production. With its results-oriented mindset, this R&D team plugs into categories across the business to help them understand and tap into emerging technology. Next to tackling and testing new innovations, the Labs.Monks consistently deliver fresh, exciting and delightful experiences that push the boundaries of what is possible—including sustainability goals. 

So, the team poses a pivotal question: how can we reduce our digital carbon footprint? The Labs.Monks share their ideas, processes and guidelines with one main goal in mind: inspiring others to help make digital greener. If you haven’t read the Sustainable Production Report yet, here are some insights into key challenges and chances to get you started. 

To Make Great Strides, Measure Environmental Impact 

On the road to achieving sustainability goals, what’s currently blocking our way? While raised awareness around digital carbon footprints is a step in the right direction, companies need to become more transparent. This ties into a fundamental challenge that the industry, Media.Monks included, is facing: the current lack of reliably accurate, coordinated carbon calculators is clouding our understanding of progress. We know that digital developments around the world are increasingly power-hungry, but how much more energy do they require? Though there are various carbon calculators out there—such as Audits.Digital, GreenFrame, Carbon Trust—these are all based upon different criteria and thus often produce completely different results, making it difficult for businesses to calculate their carbon footprint and determine if they are meeting sustainability guidelines.

So, we need to develop a coherent and coordinated carbon calculator that is endorsed and used by every company in the industry in order to create standardized outcomes in measuring and comparing environmental impact. Much like all marketing and business efforts, it’s basically impossible to gauge whether your business is on track to reach its targets or not without reliable data measurement instruments—and this is no different when it comes to sustainability efforts. In turn, implementing such tools and practices helps increase transparency around the digital industry’s environmental impact and lead the way towards a more sustainable future, because progress starts with tracking where you are now. 

Designing The Sustainable Future 

While establishing benchmarks for measuring the environmental impact of the digital industry is still a work in progress, we already know certain practices that will help reduce your company’s digital carbon footprint. Sharing success stories, best practices and lessons learned with other players in the industry is the key to effective collaboration—and let’s face it, you can’t save the planet by yourself. So, in the spirit of spreading the word, let’s shine a spotlight on one important opportunity that the digital industry should collectively seize: we are in the unique position to design and develop products and platforms with sustainability at their heart. 

The decisions that companies make during the production process ultimately influence consumer behavior. As such, these decisions do not only impact their own digital carbon footprint, but people’s global carbon footprint in general. As such, we should always be on the lookout for changes in the production process that are more sustainable to provide environmentally friendly options that people had otherwise not thought of choosing.

For example, our Film.Monks now focus on green filmmaking, actively tackling the issue that film production uses a lot of energy and generates tonnes of waste. Besides switching to renewables to power the studio grid and replacing diesel generators with hybrid and solar solutions, they are working on providing clients with additional ‘greener’ services, think of impact reporting, strategies to determine mutual sustainability KPIs, and storytelling around a client’s sustainability efforts. Such initiatives not only inspire people to go for a greener alternative, but also increase awareness around the importance of meeting sustainability goals. 

In short, there are multiple roads to becoming a more sustainable business. When you follow the right directions—raising awareness, being transparent about carbon footprint, making ethical decisions—it stimulates other companies across the value chain to speed up their own sustainability journey.  

Caring For The Planet, A True Collective Effort 

The digital revolution has left major positive imprints on our planet—and it continues to give rise to new ideas, innovations and opportunities every day. While there are very real concerns about the carbon footprint of our industry, we believe that sustainability goals shouldn’t have to slow down the digital revolution, but can instead become part of it. Teams across the board are not only working hard on developing and adopting more sustainable technologies, but also on translating these into useful guidelines for the digital industry. While we’re still figuring out how to best measure our progress, the Sustainable Production Report is an important step in the right direction, as it echoes our commitment to being transparent, sharing knowledge and fostering effective collaboration. Above all, it emphasizes our belief that altogether we can take care of our planet.