Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to the MCA podcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising and production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising for the future and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to the legend that is Wesley ter Haar, the co-founder of Media.Monks in 2001 and board member of S4 Capital alongside Sir Martin Sorrell. He founded MediaMonks to wage war on mediocre digital production. He’s the European chair and board member of SODA, the Organization for Digital Founders, innovators and Disruptor, served as the inaugural president of Canline Digital Craft in 2016,  Inducted into the ADCN Hall of Fame in 2018 and named an Ad Age Creative All-Star part of the Ad Week 50 executives leading the way in transforming the industry.

He’s spoken all around the world at virtually every major creative conference, including Cannes, AdobeMAX, CES, Advertising Week and many, many more, and last year, Media.Monks was named AI agency of the year.

Wesley, that’s a lot of people you’ve obviously paid off! Welcome to our humble podcast.

Wesley ter Haar
Yeah, I was just going to say we need to use AI to shorten the bio.

Pat Murphy
It’s a very good idea. I might do that. Welcome to this podcast!

Wesley ter Haar
Yeah, thanks, Pat. Happy to be here.

Pat Murphy
You co-founded Media.Monks back in 2001 with your business partner, Victor. Having been a production manager at Vodafone, I believe!? Tell us about that transition.

Wesley ter Haar
Well, that was an internship. My most important job was getting paperclips for people with actual important jobs. So I dropped out to start Media.Monks, or at least get into what we then used to call the internet and sort of the excitement of a new channel. And then after about a year and a half we ended up founding Media.Monks. And then after about a year and a half we ended up founding Media.Monks. So it was very much from internship to Media.Monks, which was an interesting transition.

Pat Murphy
Tell me a bit about the challenges you faced in those early years of Media.Monks.

Wesley ter Haar
Well, we founded it in 2001, which was, for many reasons, not a great year to start anything in digital although we didn’t really call it digital back then but to an extent, I think those first let’s go three to four years of wilderness, to a large extent, I think, gave us a baseline to grow when it started to bounce back a bit. So it allowed for a lot of experimentation, allowed for a lot of figuring out our point of view on good work and why things were, I think, channel speci fic yeah, what’s a story or what’s a narrative or what’s an ad in these new spaces? So, yeah, it gave us time to experiment, which I think was really valuable.

Pat Murphy
Now, in 2018, Media.Monks merged with S4 Capital to create a new model for the future. How has this merger influenced the way you approach now the integration of data, media and creative content production? How was that process at the time?

Wesley ter Haar
Well, it was really interesting because at that time we built the company into a global footprint. I sort of started broadening our services to clients to be, I think, more of a strategic partner and not just an executional partner. But at that time it wasn’t that difficult to see where the industry was headed, and I think we see a lot of that at real sort of speed now. It was heading towards some type of consolidation moment where it’s more and more difficult as a brand to turn up for your consumers in meaningful, interesting ways if you’re not making content that in some way is driven by data and you don’t have the flexibility to activate in media quickly and you can’t create feedback loops between those sort of I would almost say pipelines, which is very sort of current now that we talk about AI a lot. So it was clear that that was going to happen. I think you don’t have options to try and build that organically or try and find amazing talent and teams and like-minded people.

And we managed to have the opportunity to do the second version and there, and still to this day, honestly there is a real feeling that if you look at the industry, it’s dominated for very good reasons by what we would call the big six, and they have lots of things they do really well, but these are organizations built for a different time. So it felt like the perfect moment to sort of build the next version of something like that that just is foundationally a bit different, organizes a bit different, has a different… Well, it has no legacy! Really. That creates drag back. So that was an amazing opportunity. But, yeah, data, media and content integrated was a huge part of that go-to market.

Pat Murphy
And what’s it like being partnered up with SMS: Sir Martin Sorrell?

Wesley ter Haar
I used to call the first few years – that’s my MBA: Martin’s Business Advice. Yeah, it’s amazing, I think, the ability to tie the macro to the micro. And it’s honestly amazing to see it sort of happen in real time where you can go from a conversation about global politics into who the VP is at this company and what their background is like, the ability to tie those types of let’s call it both memories and experiences together. You get why he got to where’s he’s at. Let’s put it like that.

Pat Murphy
Has the culture changed much from prior to the merger and to where it is now?

Wesley ter Haar
Well, I think a lot of work has been about building the culture. I think we’ve done quite well, but there’s always things to do better. You start bringing together lots of amazing talent and teams. Everybody has a very similar goal. But to get to those goals everybody has built their sort of little flag wave. Everybody wears the shirt.

I think in our industry everybody is extremely special but also very similar and we sort of celebrate the incremental differences as massive differences , right. Everybody sort of does versions of the same thing. People move from company to company, but then we have to take the 5% or 10% difference and make that your whole sort of company personality. So it takes time to bring those teams together and reframe that through a single culture. I think we’re in a decent spot. We’ve done, especially in the last year and a half, a lot of work on that. I think the first few years there were still… because we did, I think, more than 30 acquisitions. There was a lot of sort of figuring it out, but then last year and a half we were able to really embed it and, I think, also add a bit of additional structural change. That I think made it easier.

Pat Murphy
I remember when I came to your office in Hilversum it felt like there was a lot of very young people kind of hanging out and having a lot of fun. Almost like a student union! Does that replicate itself into all of your other offices around the world now? How do you keep control of that?

Wesley ter Haar
So what I’m quite impressed by, I think there’s a relatively coherent feeling. If you travel region to region and office to office and I’ve seen that, having a history with working production for agencies. I was always surprised that Agency X in London, the culture between London and Amsterdam, or Amsterdam in New York or New York in Singapore, often felt very different. It didn’t feel like the same company or organisation. I’m always quite impressed by how there’s a cultural feeling and vibe that’s, I would say, quite consistent, like we don’t want to top-down mandate it because I think culture has to grow from the people on the ground. But it feels more coherent than I’ve seen it at a lot of other businesses.

Pat Murphy
It is a tough thing, just as any business that grows. You have a really good culture when it’s a particular size, but when it gets larger and larger, it’s very, very difficult to keep that flowing as the size gets bigger.

Wesley ter Haar
Super tough and I think some of that is also like we have the work from home sort of change, which I think it’s been probably more difficult to create, that coherence for people that are relatively new to the business, because they’re not necessarily going through the same experiences, right, they have a different sort of level of interaction maybe with senior leadership or with colleagues. So that for me or for us, was probably quite difficult to go to… How do you go from a company that really is sort of almost a culture machine to having to scale that but then also having to maintain it without… the office was almost the holder of a lot of that culture, right? So how do you get that done? But working on it. It can always be better.

Pat Murphy
As the European chair of SoDA, the digital society, what kind of things do you conjure up behind closed doors there with your digital mates?

Wesley ter Haar
So I’ve been part of that organisation for a long time. A little less involved now than back in the day. SoDA – it’s a collection of small to medium-sized agencies that are often at the coalface of where the industry is headed right, because they can either move a bit quicker or pivot a bit sooner, but they’re probably also seeing some of the downsides of the industry earlier, because there’s a little less…  contracts tend to be a little less locked in and all those types of things. So for me, you’re always trying to bring those teams together, to be very open and transparent when it comes to sharing information and honestly for anybody listening that isn’t part of SoDA and might be thinking about it. That, I think, is an outlier in the industry. The level of transparency and honesty and support from entrepreneurs and founders amongst each other is key and we always try and foster that first and foremost. A place where you can sign up and go ‘I’ve had a really shit year’ right, because nobody does that normally, but you can actually do it in those types of situations. So fostering of the community and the honesty has always been key there.

Pat Murphy
Love that idea. It’s a bit like people posting on LinkedIn. How often do you ever see people saying negative things on LinkedIn? ‘I am so great’. You never see the negative stuff.

Wesley ter Haar
Even the negative stuff is a bit performative. So, this is the anti-LinkedIn is probably a good way to position it.

Pat Murphy
Exactly.

I’ve been going through some of the transcripts from the panel that you were on last summer in Cannes for us – it was the virtual production panel, and you mentioned there about the possibilities of bringing virtual production and AI together and how that could be so immensely powerful. Tell us a little bit more about that. I’ve seen virtual production really kind of take more of a kind of a mainstream in commercial production in the last six to eight months.

Wesley ter Haar
Yeah, we actually just did a test for one of our clients who described their current workflow as ‘we do virtual production, at least we shoot in a virtual studio, but then we’re still spending a massive time on set, changing backgrounds and maybe making changes that still feel quite cumbersome’.

When it comes to statics, we really don’t need to do that anymore. Our ability to shoot talent and product real and then do everything else synthetically, that’s a solved situation, if you want to solve it. We’re not quite there with moving backgrounds, although I’m sure some of the listeners have seen some of the recent progress being made when it comes to video output, text-to-video. So you can predict… we’re probably not more than I’m gonna say 12 months, but it’s probably six months away from being able to do that with AI as well.

So virtual production it starts sitting in this sort of weird space where we use it to solve something, but we were solving some, a traditional version of the industry where we’re where we want to do less travel and less, uh, spend on sets and just less, less, less. Let’s, let’s build a version of what we are doing. Only we’re doing it in a virtual production studio. But AI is just a completely different way to produce, and we’re now at that point where it’s coming together. But you also have to start asking questions. Maybe a few years from now, if virtual production was really just an in-between?

Pat Murphy
I was going to ask you that question. Virtual Production is obviously used a lot right now for a lot of things that my clients are working on but… really? A year or two around the corner? That’s going to be a thing of the past isn’t it? So next question actually, is what do you see as the tech platforms coming around the corner? And we’re in a particular phase right now, but what’s going to be next? That’s going to drive the way that we make advertising.

Wesley ter Haar
I think there’s a rule that you have to say AI on any podcast at least 10 times… we got there!

But the reality is we’re looking at like AI isn’t a product in and of itself, but it is to an extent like depending on where you want to put it on the scale of sort of human progress, that it’s a fundamental shift in how work gets done and that means that in every line of work in our industry there will be an AI empowered one, or maybe an AI infused one, or maybe a replaced by AI one. And I think when we think about film shoots or photo shoots, like we have physical production and then virtual production, was sort of ‘hey, there’s stuff here that isn’t ideal and we can solve some of that stuff with virtual production’, but it was quite incremental, the solve. We’re sort of looking at what I would call synthetic production, where we are already doing quite a lot of good, high-end, high craft production work in that space for clients. But it needs massively specific talent to get that to the level of craft that you needed, because the technology, for all of its moments of magic, is still super clunky. That’s going to get easier and easier and easier and we’ll see more heavy R&D productised into easy-to-use interfaces. So an explosion of content production, clearly at much lower cost.

I think so many questions around what that means for advertising. Right, if the amount of content goes up and the baseline of that quality goes to something that we now think looks quite good, but two years from now we’ll probably feel as extremely generic. What does that mean? How do you stand out in those spaces and that’s probably where creativity and craft sort of if not completely re-emerges gets a new value proposition. Right? Because the baseline goes up and the cost of that goes down. Where does high-end craft and talent live? It probably just means reinventing it, and then you’re constantly trying to reinvent where that line sits because the technology catches up.

Pat Murphy
What does that mean for creatives, producers, storytellers people coming into the industry now? What’s your big advice to them about – what is the craft that they need to learn? Is it being great at being a prompt engineer for AI? Is that something that’s going to be the new craft? What’s your advice for them?

Wesley ter Haar
Yeah, like I worry about, because there was a lot of messaging around that. Well, actually prompt engineering is probably one of the easiest things to replace with AI.

There’s two parts to that. One is – I see that almost daily in our teams, the quality and craft that specialists can get from the machines is way ahead of what just somebody, an everyday user. So I actually think the craft differential, like the baseline, goes up for what anybody can create, but the craft differential is still massive. We just suddenly get used to a higher baseline, but what real talent is able to do is insane.

What do you need to learn? I think you still need sort of a deep understanding of taste and culture and just the ability to synthesize what you think is interesting work. But I think understanding more deeply how the machines work – I think does become a skill set, and we used to talk about this. It’s honestly a continuation of what we used to say 10 years ago. We would say ‘if you’re a creative, try at least to get an understanding for coding. We’re not expecting you to be a great developer, but it’s really meaningful to understand the machines that have to translate your craft and creativity’. I think it’s the next version of that. Only you’re not being asked to try and understand coding. You’re, to an extent, being asked to try and understand a new language, whether it’s sort of a new paradigm for production and output.

Pat Murphy
You say that, but when Elon Musk was interviewed in London – end of last year, I think it was – he said there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want one, for personal satisfaction only, but AI will do everything. What does that mean for us? If you think about it, what do you tell your kids to go and learn?

Wesley ter Haar
Yeah, I get that question a lot, like what should my kids do? So I was in Sweden a week and a half ago at an AI association for our clients and the question came up and I was like ‘we’re in Sweden so I can just say universal basic income and you’ll be fine’. That’s going to be a lot more difficult than many other locations.

There’s two components to this which is, we have seen automation and automation to an extent, AI is sort of automation for a different type of job, and what’s quite interesting about automation, I think, is there’s an investment to it. So automation really only happens when the ROI on the investment is positive enough and certain enough to replace the people, which means I don’t think it’ll distribute very evenly across the globe.

So if you go to a big factory here in the Netherlands, you’ll see five people and a million robots, and if you go to a big factory, often in Latin America, for instance, there’s still a lot more manual labour because the ROI based on salary costs versus automation costs doesn’t really make sense.

So what’s interesting about the technology? I think AI will go through a similar cycle, so I think it will be unevenly spread, will unevenly impact jobs across the globe, depending on the cost of those jobs.

I think the other piece and Elon Musk has been a bit of a doomer, as we, I think, call it about AI, not necessarily wrong he’s been very forward in the sort of societal risk. I think it exists, but I think the technology will be ahead of the implementation by three to five years in that space because it’s such a ontological shock and it’s so difficult to actually change businesses to work in ways that make sense for AI that I think it’ll happen slower than it probably could and that’s going to give people a bit of time and maybe, hopefully, the sort of job market and the economy a bit of time to balance out against it.

Pat Murphy
Are you an optimist?

Wesley ter Haar
I’m always an optimist. You have to be, I think, if you’re running a business. I’m not sure if you followed some of the stuff that came out yesterday with the new launch of Claude and Gemini 1.5 a few weeks ago. Like every time a new model launches, it changes the understanding of the current use cases and it pulls the timeline forward. And we still have a few really big launches to come. This year We’ll get ChatGPT5. So I think we’ll get to a point within the next two years where a lot of things that we see as a human job could potentially be done largely or in large parts by a machine, and that’s strange.

Pat Murphy
Now last year you were named AI Agency of the Year at Media.Monks. What kind of work were you doing that contributed to you getting that accolade?

Wesley ter Haar
First, we had our existential moment at the end of 2022. We’d been interested and bullish and excited by generative AI for a while, but it was very much a toy. And then, at the end of 2022, it very much became a tool and I think, looking at that industry, it wasn’t that difficult to see what was going to happen. It was just a timeline question. Is it going to happen in three years, five years, one year?

So we committed to being fast and first, really quickly. We’re very outspoken about it. I think we’re more transparent about the impact on service industries and the reality that our service industry is a bit of a canary in the coal mine. So I think just what we call race to reality was an outlier in the industry and because of that, I think we just got to work quicker, did real work, showed practical use cases, worked very deeply with technology partners to, in some cases, help train their models and some case, help implement their, their tools and tech. So we just got to work and I think even now you see a lot of pontificating, a lot of hand waving. We’re like this is it’s real, it’s happening. If I think we’ve done one thing quite well is get to the next version of the industry as quickly as possible.

Pat Murphy
A lot of this technology is, of course, hugely alien to a lot of clients. So a lot of people that we work with, who we spend time educating, are you finding a lot of what you do is educating clients at the same time?

Wesley ter Haar
Yes, and it goes in waves. I think the initial education was ‘what’s happening’. The second wave was legal and ethics, although I felt legal was probably too heavily weighted and ethics wasn’t weighted enough. I think people sort of looked at it was like this is legal land mine, but then realistically, this is also big tech’s next trillion dollars in market cap. So it was always clear that the indemnification was coming. It was always clear that there would be ethically sourced supply chains – like that was always clear.

But I think a lot of clients spend like six months in that space instead of just looking at the ethics and the use cases and what are the actual risks and, to an extent, opportunities for your business. So that’s really where we’re at now, which is ‘what’s a practical use case that can get you impact now, but what also, which I think is underappreciated at the moment what’s about to happen when you think about your industry’. We have clients, many of them, for whom e-commerce and digital advertising is a massive driver of their revenue. What happens if 20-30% of search traffic moves to an LLM? What happens if 10% of e-commerce moves to agents? What happens if the whole customer journey collapses into a prompt? What does that actually mean. So the education has gone through those phases and now it’s really more strategic and forward-facing, instead of just ‘what’s happening in this moment’.

Pat Murphy
I mean, in a sense that’s slightly kind of what I would call mentoring as well, and I know that you do a lot of mentoring. Tell us a bit about how you bring that to life.

Wesley ter Haar
Like. For me personally, the interesting part to trying to fill that role is it forces you to talk and think about spaces more deeply. I think it’s really easy to get stuck in just ‘let’s go’ and it’s the next day, it’s the next day, it’s the next day. So having to talk about something, I think forces you to take a point of view, create a perspective. So for me, anything that we sort of broadly put under that bucket is mostly, selfishly, an ability to sort of mentor yourself.

I think, with clients we are trying to be a – we’ve always done this with technology – we’re trying to be good stewards of the moment. I think our industry has this boom and bust cycle when it comes to technology. We often as an industry ask our clients to invest, overinvest, too early, and then we sort of engineer some of the disappointment, right, because in the end, where’s the ROI, where’s the reach, all that sort of parts of it? And then we sort of ride the disappointment wave and something goes in the fridge for two years even though we should be using it. So we’re always looking at just being good stewards of technological change in ways that make it sustainable for our clients. I think the industry doesn’t do that well enough.

Pat Murphy
As an executive director at S4 Capital. I mean it sounds very grown up to be honest… is the main focus on money and driving shareholder value, or are you still allowed to have a bit of fun?

Wesley ter Haar
Well, the focus, like to your point, it’s very grown up. It’s yeah, it’s a board, you’re a stock listed company, so there’s the uh of what that entails. We just had a board meeting recently. We always focus on bringing in outside speakers. We had an outside speaker of a very important technology company, like we’re trying to make those sessions partly practical and partly ‘what do we feel happens next’? And I think our role, and maybe to an extent responsibility at the industry level, is to be a disruptor. So a lot of focus, which to me is fun. There’s a dinner and some drinks, of course, but the fun is sort of meaningfully talking about what does that mean and are we delivering on it and what does it look like six months from now, 12 months from now?

Pat Murphy
Talking of fun. How are the salsa lessons getting getting on?

Wesley ter Haar
HA! So I haven’t had lessons in a while. The disappointing thing is I had a year and a half lessons here in Amsterdam during covid, went to back to mexico where I was spending a lot of time and then um the slightly higher tempo of the uh, of the salsa. So I need to up my game a bit.

Pat Murphy
So you’ve been doing that with your wife.  You still, you are living in mexico now, yes or not?

Wesley ter Haar
yeah, yeah, I spent a lot of time there, but there’s also so much travel – yeah, it’s lots of planes.

Pat Murphy
And how are you missing your favourite sandwiches? I think they’re called Brutje Zee Dijk. Is that right?

Wesley ter Haar
Best sandwich in Amsterdam. I would recommend it to anyone and I always buy it for the Dutch team on my birthday. So that’s a little bit of history.

Pat Murphy
Brilliant.  Well, I’m looking forward to having one. I’m in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks, so I’ll check it out. I’ve never had a Brutje Zee Dijk before.
And finally, Wes, we’re going to have to, unfortunately, end this conversation because we’ve been talking for a while and we’re half an hour up. So, finally, the question we have to ask all of our guests. It’s the highlight of our podcast – what’s your favourite ad of all time?

Wesley ter Haar
Traditional ad? I’m gonna go Surfers for Guinness. Uh, just a massive fan of Guinness advertising.

Pat Murphy
Yeah me too. Jonathan Glazer I think wasn’t it, who did that.

Wesley ter Haar
Yeah beautiful brand, amazing advertising history and making I guess a negative – you have to wait – into the brand. Like I, I love that brand as an advertising story and as a drink, but that ad to me is just art and it’s beauty and it’s, I think, the height of our industry.

Pat Murphy
Thank you so much for having a chat with me today, Wes. Look forward to seeing you in Cannes, hopefully. I really enjoyed chatting to you. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Wesley ter Haar
Same here, same here.

Pat Murphy
Today we talked to Wesley ter Haar, all round good guy, co-founder of Media.Monks and board member of S4 Capital. To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes. If you’d like to feature on the podcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com.

I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, all of which the links in the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again to Wesley or Wes, as I’ve now got to know him, my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media. Thanks for listening. See you next time.