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.

Together with Workato—a platform we leverage to provide automation solutions to our entire enterprise—we organized a hybrid hackathon and invited parts of the company to join virtually or in-person from our Buenos Aires, San Francisco and New York City offices. The event took place in Gather.town, a 2D metaverse. The aim of the game? To use Workato and Slack to automate anything they thought would be useful for everyday Monks. The challenge was to think beyond the simple notification bot. Been there, done that. There was no limit to the technologies teams could use. The tools they built were required to be completed within eight hours. In the end, every idea was judged based on its level of creativity, visual representation, tool use, execution and overall relevance. 

Besides the many innovative solutions that came out of this event (and absolutely blew my mind by the way), I also learned another important lesson: hackathons are a fantastic way to connect people from all different corners of your organization and the world, and bring them closer together. The formula is simple: just give a group of talented people a challenging task in a tight time frame, create the right environment, and they will not only come up with incredible ideas, but also have lots of fun and build lasting friendships in the process.

Bridging together our global hub of talent.  

Each person on our rocketship diversifies our skill sets and deepens our experience—to the benefit of everyone, not just one team. Because of our integrated business model, we can stimulate people to venture outside their lane from time to time and seamlessly cross-pollinate their skills and experiences. While pitches often spur unexpected collaborations—and still result in great success, thereby confirming the power of integration—I was happily surprised to see this hackathon also highlight how easily and quickly we can connect our global hub of talent. Josh McClauss, our VP of Marketing and one of the hackathon’s judges, says that the event truly reflected the beauty of our integrated universe of talent.

Safe to say, such great talent comes with great ideas and solutions. The creativity, innovation and collaboration amongst the people that participated was outstanding, which most likely has to do with the nature of the event that brought these teams together. According to McClauss, an interactive event such as a hackathon is very well-suited to exactly the types of people that Media.Monks attracts. Why? Because of the way in which this company was built.

We may be a 9,000+ strong company, but all of our cornerstone pieces still very much carry their startup spirit. “We may have new stakeholders and constituents to build this business around, but the power in what we’re doing is still and will always be about being nimble, flexible and creative and getting together in these moments to move beyond the competition—not only because we think about things differently, but because we do them differently,” he says. It’s experiences like these that capitalize on our talent and get them excited to be here long-term as we continue to realize what the next era of a marketing services partner looks like to the world.

Fostering light bulb moments.  

Judging from all the ideas the teams came up with, I can already tell this era is looking bright. It was very exciting to see each of them bring in their unique perspective and build something that’s going to be useful to the company and our clients—both now and in the future. 

One team, for example, developed a bot that searches Slack for previously asked questions to direct users to the right answers, whereas another team leveraged Slack as an interface to interact with Open AI and create AI-driven images for ad creative prototypes. “These are tons of options that can be applied to our business immediately,” says our SVP Global Media Melissa Wisehart, who also served as a judge. Such ideas can be implemented right now to not only increase efficiencies and build better processes internally, but also deliver stronger results for clients. 

As it turns out, the way to foster out-of-the-box and solution-based thinking is by setting clear boundaries, which stimulates people to not just think, but also realize their ideas by actually building the tools that solve their everyday challenges. “This entails both the boundary of what the end vehicle is and the boundary of the time frame that you have, that’s also very important,” says our Executive Operations Manager Nicole Chanlatte, who co-organized the hackathon. “Telling people to take this time, set it aside, and dedicate it to working on a specific problem or project—that in itself should unlock new paths.” From there on, it’s a matter of building on these ideas and solutions, while seeking ways to implement them across the business right away. “I believe that if we follow through on some of these projects, the impact could be huge to both efficiency and revenue,” McClauss adds.

Cracking the code for a successful partnership.   

Ultimately, this all goes to show that hackathons are a great way to spur collaboration and spark creativity. Besides all the fun and games—yes, I did a little virtual dance while presenting on stage—the teams came up with some incredible ideas and solutions. Needless to say, the Workato team played a pivotal role in bringing this all to life, providing a helping hand in support and assisting teams new to their tool throughout the event. 

The pleasure was theirs, too, says Gaby Moran, Workato’s Director of Customer & Partner Experience. “The hackathon event was truly phenomenal and so much fun. We have a lot of customers who do hackathons and this one had some of the most creative and impactful ideas I’ve seen in a while. So many of the automations created contributed to inclusivity and collaboration—it left me inspired!” And that's what happens when you connect a diverse team of global talent around a common goal.

From day one, we set out to build a company committed to providing fresh viewpoints, doing social good, and helping people—both employees and members of our surrounding communities—grow both personally and professionally. We wanted to build something more valuable than business, something that had the potential to change the heart of our industry. The existing agency model was broken and we knew there had to be a better way.

So we created an agency built on strong values, solid partnerships, and a one-team culture of integration built on transparency, flexibility, and collaboration—a disruptive “embedded” model—that would break down traditional agency barriers and lead to higher-quality work. It was something other agencies weren’t doing, and it immediately resonated with our clients.

Over the next years our company grew to several hundred people working in seven offices spanning three continents. But we knew that to best serve our clients, we needed to scale. So we went in search of a partner who was aligned with our vision of disrupting the existing agency model to deliver speed, quality and value to our clients. A partner who could help us expand globally, offer our clients complementary capabilities and service offerings, and provide our people enhanced opportunities for career growth—all while maintaining our values and people-centric culture.

We’re excited about the recent launch of Media.Monks, our unified brand that unites 24 founding companies and nearly 6,000 digital-first experts under one (digital) roof. We’re building on existing equity from the most recognizable and established brand in the group and our new name represents our people, our shared values and our unique capabilities, and leverages the power of our collective brands.

We brought together many teams, individuals and resource groups all with the intent of ensuring inclusivity is at the core of our new brand promise. And while our family is growing, we remain a people-first company—we’re just adding access to global talent, expansive reach and a breadth of new capabilities. We’re extremely excited about what the future holds. Here’s what our people and our clients can expect moving forward.

Our New Journey

The wonderful thing about our new family at Media.Monks—and what sets us apart—is that the model leverages the best of each founding organization. Every company brings something different, and we all complement each other to bring more value to our clients. Founder buy-in is an important part of the formula. New businesses merge in a structure where the entrepreneurial co-founders retain ownership and influence over how we all build and grow our shared business into something wholly new. We’re all synched for the long haul and saying the same thing: Let's be disruptive, let's be different than all the other agencies out there, but let’s always remain true to who we are.

“Through the whole integration process and with all the new agencies that are joining the fold, the first thing that I noticed is that we’re like-minded people,” says Michiel Schriever, Senior Executive Creative Director.

In truly integrating our people both as a culture and in our operations, we’re able to deliver content, data and digital media and technology services to our clients under a single P&L across 33 countries—something no one has ever been able to achieve before. For our clients, it means they keep the same day-to-day team they love but with seamless access to a deep pool of specialized talent and a much broader geographic reach.

What You Can Expect from Our Bigger Family

While our family has grown, our clients can expect the same service and relationships they’ve grown accustomed to. And we’re going to continue to foster our environment and culture. I recently spoke with one of our first employees, Laura Davis about this very topic.

What we bring with us is all that makes us unique and everything that we started at Firewood: our highly collaborative embedded model of client partnership; our business acumen and operational expertise in digital marketing; and our values, our sense of family, and the importance we place on the employee experience—all of which makes for better work, better output and better results for our clients.

“Firewood is a people-centric organization. And when I say we’re focused on people, I mean our employees, our team and our clients,” says Amy Michael, Chief Client Officer. “Firewood culture and organization is structured around client empathy and partnership—and that’s what we bring to our new organization, we aren’t in business if we aren't delivering excellence for our clients.”

“I really believe in all that we built at Firewood—what we do, how we treat our people, and how we move forward in the industry with our clients—we’re doing something right,” says  Maridette de Guzman, Managing Director in San Francisco. “And we are bringing that part of our Firewood heritage to build a better work environment, a better employee experience, and a better place for everybody—all of our people and our clients—to exist.”

Looking Forward

New adventures can be rough and sticky at times, especially when building something that hasn’t been built before. We’re changing the landscape and there will be bumps in the road, but Juan and I couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds.