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.”

Many might think that broadcasting is very traditional, loosening its grip on the cultural current as people turn more and more toward immersive, interactive experiences like gaming and the metaverse. But the IBC Show is anything but traditional, and this year our Monks on the ground (and on the stage) explored the broadcasting’s transformation in the virtualized era, from capturing new kinds of content to showing off workstreams that unlock incredible, new storytelling opportunities.

If it’s not interactive, it’s broken.

Video killed the radio star—and with the rise of the metaverse and an increasingly digital culture, is TV next on the chopping block? Smithingham opened the second day of the event with a keynote talk, “Step Into the Metaverse,” in which he set the stage for a new era of multi-dimensional, interactive media. The central thesis: traditional, flat media is less relevant today’s Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences. “A core undercurrent across all of this is if something is not interactive to younger generations, it feels broken and disconnected,” says Smithingham, showing how live sports viewership is down and that most of the discussion surrounding the Super Bowl is about the halftime show instead of the game.

Still, Smithingham doesn’t want to discourage the industry; rather, now is the time for broadcasting players to take an active part in driving culture forward. “Broadcasting is culture. It’s the vehicle by which culture spreads,” he says, making the case by illustrating how text messaging volume directly correlated with American Idol viewership throughout the aughts. Likewise, broadcasting can embrace emerging technologies and behaviors—like livestream commerce—to connect more closely with today’s audiences and tap into new storytelling possibilities. For example, we partnered with Logitech to break out of the exclusive, VIP-focused awards show format with the Song Breaker Awards, making it more accessible and interactive for audiences in the metaverse. 

To Rob McNeil, VP of Live at Media.Monks, these immersive experiences will become complimentary to more traditional broadcast experiences. “It will coexist. Certain people will gravitate toward certain kinds of content,” he says, noting how he personally would rather watch sports in VR rather than on a TV. While he sees a future in 180- or 360-degree movies and TV shows, music performances and sports seem to be the use cases that make the most sense right now. “These are natural areas for immersive experiences,” he says, noting how music in particular takes advantage of spatial audio in the Meta Quest 2.

The lesson for brands and broadcasters? Break out of the traditionally one-way conversation of broadcasting and instead create a multidirectional ecosystem: a halo of virtual worlds, social content, streaming content, creator channels, podcasts, audience interaction and more. “It’s about feeding an audience that’s always on,” says Smithingham. “We have to evolve how we tell our stories.” You can learn more insights from Smithingham in the IBC interview below.

Esports points a way forward.

Marketers and broadcasters looking for examples of multidirectional ecosystems can turn to the esports space, which is taking some learnings from traditional sports while also establishing best practices of its own. Esports are a fast-growing industry, with 29.6 million monthly esports viewers this year—an 11.5% increase over 2021, according to Insider Intelligence. Funs Jacobs, our Gaming Category Lead, shared the stage with Nicolas Bourdon, CMO at EVS, and George Pratchett, Production Manager at Promod Esports, to discuss the new frontier of esports as they become increasingly mainstream.

Jacobs notes that most of the revenue earned in esports comes from sponsorships—but the number of esports games per year pale in comparison to, say, your average FIFA league, which amounts to less opportunities for sponsorship overall. That’s why in addition to hosting more games and tournaments, Jacobs encourages competitive gaming developers, leagues and teams to explore fan engagement on new social platforms. In addition, there is a new opportunity to strengthen their communities with blockchain-enabled technologies like NFTs, as brands can now cultivate a sense of ownership with their fans.

Teams like FaZe Clan and 100 Thieves have done well to expand beyond tournaments into video content—FaZe Clan has four YouTube channels and 8.66 million subscribers to its main one—apparel, NFT drops, podcasts and dozens of channels run by individual content creators and pro players that have signed onto teams. 100 Thieves is even in the early stages of developing a game of its own. 

The variety of digital content offers not only new opportunities for sponsorship and revenue, but also different options for fans and viewers to engage as they see fit. “One thing we can learn from streamers is the level of accessibility,” says Jacobs. “These creators are so accessible despite being so far away in terms of lifestyle and skill level.”

Cloud-based workflows unlock new storytelling opportunities.

Broadcasting of the future requires new ways of working, and Smithingham joined Samira Bakhtiar, Director of Sales, Media & Entertainment at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to give conference attendees an inside look at our global, AWS-based virtual production team. While broadcasts are typically produced by an on-the-ground team tangled in wires and packed in a truck, our cloud-based setup unites personnel who are working across several different locations. 

Here's what it looks like. We put together a rack of gear, coders, monitors and uninterruptible power supplies. We then send two or three people to a location who take the rack, power it up and plug it directly into AWS via a network connection. “This is a direct connection outside of the internet, so we’re not susceptible to interferences, says Patrick Jones, Senior Director of Engineering, Live/Broadcast and Creative Solutions at Media.Monks. “We don’t have issues like outages from local ISPs.” 

Anywhere from 36 to 40 virtual machines are connected in the cloud, ranging from graphics servers, audio servers, playback servers that enable instant replays, and more. The cloud also connects dozens of people throughout a distributed team. “A director in Florida can collaborate with a tech director in England and audio people in New York,” says Jones. And despite the distance across teams, latency is negligible and just a matter of milliseconds.

Still, any live broadcast comes with a series of factors that may present the need for redundancies, whether that be extra equipment or multiple recording backups. “We’re the department of redundancy. It’s what we do: continue to make sure we have multiple systems in place to protect us,” says Jones. He notes that while traditional broadcasting trucks also have redundancies built in, things break, and having two of every piece of equipment isn’t practical. “If you’re in a truck, you may not have the ability to get another computer in. But in the cloud, we can quickly pivot to spin up another system or backup.”

Beyond the added efficiencies in stability and collaboration, one benefit of the AWS-powered workstream shouldn’t go unnoticed: it greatly reduces the carbon footprint of a broadcast, which would traditionally involve flying out an entire fleet of professionals. “We just have three people flying in for a typical production, and everyone else is in the cloud,” says Smithingham.

Broadcasting continues to evolve and innovate.

“Two years ago, we didn’t have some of the tools in the cloud that we have now,” says Jones. After exploring the showroom floor, he applauds the level of innovation at IBC. “Seeing all the people that are innovating, we advanced by maybe three years in six months. The pandemic forced a lot of companies to up their game, and we’re all reaping the benefits of that.”

We showed off our own innovation at the booth for RED Digital Cinema, who is disrupting the film production scene with camera equipment that is more affordably priced than more traditional names. At the booth, we shared a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Post Malone’s Twelve Carat Toothache VR performance, viewable on Meta Quest devices captured on RED’s cameras. Our team built a way to live-stitch the footage to accommodate VR viewing in a 4K resolution, streamed directly to Quest headsets as the footage is captured.

The shooting-to-viewing pipeline is important because advanced imaging isn’t just a learning curve for production crews; it forces performers to engage with the camera in new ways, too. “The camera’s movement is often limited, due to naturally occuring motion sickness,” says McNeil. “For artists, that’s challenging because they have to come toward the camera, rather than have the camera come to them.” Throughout the Twelve Carat Toothache shoot, the crew could let Post Malone inhabit the viewer’s perspective in between performances, influencing his stage presence.

To bring the same experience to the demo booth, we had headsets on hand capturing live footage of the conference floor. “As people create content with technology like this, we become desensitized to it, but people experiencing it for the first time were like, ‘This is simply stunning—absolutely amazing,’” says Jones.

The demo between team Media.Monks and team RED demonstrated more than just the potential of new technology. It also showed a spirit of partnership that permeated much of IBC this year. “You saw a lot of people going from booth to booth—not like an upstart going to the industry giants to get their foot in the door, but rather a lot of established names wanting to work together,” says McNeil.

To say that the world has changed since IBC’s last in-person conference in 2019 would be an understatement. But this year’s edition showed how the broadcast itself is in a state of evolution—one that will show no signs of slowing down soon. “We need to virtualize everything from our culture to how we do our work,” says Smithingham. From expanding content across different formats, to learning from emerging industries like esports, to exploring entirely new workflows, IBC 2022 offered several looks into the future of broadcasting—and it’s looking bright.