Media.Monks on Thursday became the latest company to rebrand in an effort to better engage its clients, dropping “Media” from its name as part of a larger effort to streamline its offerings. The operating brand of Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital will also transition its services into two separate but synchronized marketing and technology services.
“It’s really evolution of the branding and evolution of the organization,” Sorrell told Marketing Dive.
Monks better speaks to the current marketing landscape and the company’s capabilities that go far beyond traditional and digital media. About 65% of the company’s business is in the creation and distribution of content, 25% is around data and 10% is technical services. Including “Media” narrowed the company’s identity and appeal.
“We work with CMOs, CSOs and CIOs,” Sorrell said. “Going to Monks unifies it.”
S4 first established its unitary brand by merging its MediaMonks and MightyHive companies into Media.Monks in 2021. The new name more accurately represents a global team, expertise and diverse communities, Monks CMO Kate Richling added in a statement.
The evolution of the organization, which Sorrell stressed was not a “reorganization,” seeks to focus the firm’s nine capabilities into two practices. Marketing captures media, social, studio, experience and brand performance, while Technology includes platforms, formula and data, with consultancy linking both practices.
“We think it’s really important to simplify our offering to clients, make everything we do accessible to them,” Sorrell said. “We touch the marketing, sales and IT functions, and in fact go beyond marketing in the digital transformation work that we do.”
An AI-powered future
The Marketing and Technology practices will also be joined through the use of Monks.Flow, a professional managed service powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that launched at CES in January. The proprietary suite unites AI specialists, tools, software and microservices into automated workflows and seeks to help marketers reduce costs, integrate organizations, build business intelligence and maximize impact
Monks putting Monks.Flow at the center of its pitch to marketers is in line with an industry focus on AI. Major ad holding companies including WPP and Publicis have built growth plans around investment in AI, with the latter seeking to become “the industry’s first AI-powered Intelligent System.” AI touches three of the four principles that S4 was founded on — purely digital; data-driven; faster, better, cheaper — and Sorrell sees the technology as a competitive strength, crediting it as the reason it recently won big in General Motors’ recent agency roster shakeup.
“What distinguishes us is a deep knowledge of the area and a deep technological capability that’s shown by what we are able to do,” the executive said.
Despite the widespread adoption of AI throughout the the marketing, media and tech worlds, numerous concerns remain around legality, data privacy, reliability, accuracy and bias, to say nothing of rising job uncertainty among marketers. With AI, Sorrell takes a long view, comparing the rise of AI to the introduction of the steam engine and the digital revolution.
“With change comes pluses and minuses,” he said. “In visualization and copywriting, there will be a squeeze. In personalization at scale, there will be an explosion of opportunity.”
S4 Capital has looked to disrupt the legacy agency model but has faced its share of challenges. The company reported an 11.7% revenue drop in the first quarter, attributing the decline to macroeconomic conditions and client caution, especially among technology clients. For Monks, AI — along with the rebrand and evolution of its offerings — could provide a way forward.
“Clients are demanding agility and access,” Sorrell said. “They’re looking for people understand first-party data because of the deprecation of third-party cookies and the IDFA rule changes. For those reasons, having a much more simplified organization makes huge sense.”
