Media.Monks is launching Experience.Monks, its first dedicated experience offering, combining teams from Jam3, the experience design shop it merged with two years ago, and its capabilities in experiential, events, metaverse, gaming, livestream, VR, immersive web and AR.

Formalizing the combined efforts within Experience.Monks was part of the initial goal when Jam3 and Media.Monks joined forces in 2021, according to Jordan Cuddy, who was previously partner and chief client officer for Jam3 and will lead the group as executive VP, global head of experience at Media.Monks. 

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Experience.Monks “can surface applicable uses of nascent technology to our strategists and to our creatives,” said Cuddy, which, she said, “opens up what those end results or deliverables could be.”

“We dabbled in all those areas, but [we didn’t have] the deep subject matter expertise,” Cuddy said. “We were not creating new cloud broadcasting software to replace hardware. We were not up on the newest features of Roblox. Now we have those people and those talents side by side.”

Formalizing the offering is meant to allow the company to be less singular in how clients understand Media.Monks’ capabilities. Rather than thinking of tech-driven work it can execute, Cuddy said, Experience.Monks is “making it more about the end user, more about the consumer and what they’re seeking, and then using tech to enable whatever that experience is,” she said. “It’s just having more simplification in our [own] story.”

Experience.Monks will service Jam3 clients such as Adidas, Sonos and eBay, along with Media.Monks clients Google and Meta.

“We don’t want to be prescriptive in what clients need, or we don’t want clients to think that they have to know exactly what they need when they think about experience for consumers,” said Cuddy. “We really relish briefs that are like, ‘We don’t want to build a retail store. We want to build a cultural institution. Can you help us do that?’”

The experience group, she said, “can surface applicable uses of nascent technology to our strategists and to our creatives,” which “opens up what those end results or deliverables could be.”

The new offering will combine more than 350 employees globally. Cuddy said 150 of those employees are from Jam3, and 200 are from “legacy Media.Monks.”

Cuddy will report to Wesley ter Haar and Bruno Lambertini, co-CEOs of Media.Monks’ content practice. Adrian Belina and Pablo Vio, both previously co-founders and chief creative officers at Jam3, will lead global creative for the Experience.Monks offering. Florencia Courtaux, previously head of production at Jam3, will lead operations as senior VP, global head of operations. Media.Monks’ Executive Creative Director Alex Fittipaldi, Senior VP of Experience Rafael Fittipali and Senior VP, Innovation Lewis Smithingham will round out the group’s leadership team.

AI and more

Cuddy said the new discipline will be investing in AI to build brand loyalty for consumers.

“When I think about AI it’s kind of like the undercurrent, and then how can it service a consumer journey and any touchpoint, let alone how can you use AI and audience data to create new consumer touchpoints or more hyper-personalized touchpoints,” Cuddy said. “I know we have a whole other team that’s working on the synthetic AI pipeline, which is super cool, but that’s more assets at scale. We are thinking more about AI branded or AI-driven brand experiences.”

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An example of this is a Media.Monks campaign for Adidas that launched last month. It used OpenAI and ChatGPT to create an AI chatbot that emulated soccer legend Alessandro Del Piero and was fueled with historic knowledge of the UEFA Champions League. Users were encouraged to add the chatbot to their WhatsApp group chats during the UEFA Champions League final.

Through a social push that included other famous athletes, the brand garnered 320,000 consumer interactions on WhatsApp, according to Media.Monks. Thousands of messages were processed in just a few seconds, and the average time spent by consumers on WhatsApp with the chatbot was 10 minutes, according to the agency.