The first office had one financial advantage: the rent was free. It was a hotel basement in Hilversum, a Dutch city with a substantial media industry and rather less of Hollywood’s weather. Four people made websites, including work for friends and family. This was an economical place to discover whether other people might pay for what you liked doing.
Wesley ter Haar helped turn that operation into MediaMonks. Over the following years, the company acquired international offices, increasingly elaborate projects and the organizational complications that arrive with both. It also acquired a recurring dilemma: becoming competent at one kind of work can make it harder to notice when you should attempt another.
His career has involved several such attempts. The Flash developer became an operations leader. The production company joined Martin Sorrell’s S4Capital. The co-founder eventually became Monks’ Chief AI and Revenue Officer. Behind the expanding titles sits a fairly persistent interest in the conditions under which people can make worthwhile things.
The advantage of a bad time to begin
Ter Haar grew up in Amsterdam, with an English mother and a cultural diet that included English-language television, films and games. He remembers seeing Pulp Fiction as an early encounter with the force of a different creative approach. His own entry into work was considerably less scripted.
He tried communications studies, spent time exploring the internet and left after a year. There was also a failed startup before MediaMonks officially began in 2001. In his recollection, the route involved friends experimenting, small jobs and the discovery that those activities could become a business. A polished founding myth would have required more advance preparation.
The dot-com collapse made 2001 an awkward year to begin an internet company. Ter Haar later saw an advantage in the lack of attention: small budgets and limited scrutiny gave the young team room to try things. Making mistakes was easier before the audience, and the consequences, got larger.
A good business, interrupted
By 2008, the company faced a choice that can be more troublesome than simply running out of work. It had business, but the founders wanted a different kind. Ter Haar and his colleagues moved toward creative digital production, putting craft and storytelling at the center and working with international agencies.
The decision meant refusing lucrative work in an established market to pursue a smaller one. A successful service is a persuasive argument for continuing to provide it. Turning it down requires some tolerance for explaining yourself.
The resulting projects made the shift tangible. MediaMonks worked on digital experiences around the television format Utopia, an interactive Marseille night walk for Google Creative Labs and 72andSunny, and the Geox project that subjected a man to an artificial rain cloud for seven days. Digital production could involve a great deal more than a handsome website. Occasionally it required portable weather.
The people who make the idea work
In 2016, Cannes Lions introduced a Digital Craft category and appointed ter Haar its inaugural jury president. The category gave a distinct place to skills that could disappear inside discussions of the big advertising idea: interface design, user experience and the intelligent combination of data and technology.
For someone whose business helped other people’s ideas become functioning experiences, that distinction mattered. The execution was part of the creative value. A visitor had to be able to use the thing, follow it and find a reason to stay.
Ter Haar described the first jury’s task as establishing a framework that would help people understand and recognize that work. He wanted the conversation to reach beyond the familiar participants and draw attention to overlooked projects. The person presiding over the discussion was also careful about his own part in it: the jury would deliberate and decide.
That is a useful detail in a career associated with operations. The title can sound like a retreat from creativity into spreadsheets. His work sat at the point where creative ambition met the arrangements necessary to deliver it. The craft category brought that relationship into public view.
“The weirdest things work online.”
Wesley ter Haar, on Dutch digital creativity
A bigger room, the same argument
In July 2018, MediaMonks joined S4Capital in a deal reported at €300 million. The company had reached roughly 750 people across 11 offices. It would become a foundation for Sorrell’s new business, with plans to connect content production more closely to data and digital media.
Ter Haar described the combination as giving the company resources to broaden its offering across creative work, data, media and technology. His closing invitation was considerably shorter than the corporate explanation: “Now let’s go make some stuff.”
The deal changed the setting for the work. A production founder was now helping build within a larger advertising enterprise. The same year brought individual recognition: an Ad Age Creativity All-Stars place and induction into the ADCN Hall of Fame.
International expansion already had an operational logic for him. In a conversation with SoDA, he described running offices through a single profit-and-loss account, with people and projects moving across locations. That accounting choice was intended to support one company working together. Geography also widened the pool of talent and gave employees opportunities to work in other countries.
He was less enthusiastic about putting innovation in a separate lab. Experimentation, in his view, belonged in everyday work. It needed a place in hiring, investment and delivery decisions. Giving it a special room could make it easier for the rest of the organization to carry on undisturbed.
Before the prompt became fashionable
His interest in AI predates the current agency scramble. In 2019, he was already discussing how machine learning could reduce repetitive creative tasks, help teams work together and expand the range of material they could consider.
The target was familiar to anyone who has worked on a global campaign: formats, versions and the substantial manual effort that sits behind the finished asset. Removing some of that work could release both time and budget for more ambitious ideas. The appeal was practical, even when the technology was uneven.
That history helps explain his present focus. He came to AI with a production problem already in mind. An impressive output was interesting; a useful change in the way a team worked had consequences for an entire business.
His opinions about brands followed a similar preference for observable behavior. He argued that a company’s role could be more meaningful than a vague declaration of purpose. The promise had to appear in its operations, its customer experience and its treatment of people. An attractive statement could only do so much of the work.
An agency with an operating system
Media.Monks became Monks in 2024. The announcement outlined Marketing Services and Technology Services, connected through Monks.Flow, and named ter Haar and Bruno Lambertini co-CEOs of Marketing Services. Ter Haar moved into the Chief AI Officer role in 2025; current profiles use Chief AI and Revenue Officer.
The emphasis has moved toward systems that connect stages of marketing work. In his account of Monks.Flow, information can move through research, creation and review, with people retaining judgment at important approval points. The ambition includes a subscription model that combines outputs and outcomes. These are his claims about the direction of the business, with the operational change doing much of the heavy lifting.
His public teaching gets more specific about the organizational task. In the Marketing Society’s AI Playbook series, he addressed where to begin: identify important workflows, understand their steps and make training available. A declaration that the company is adopting AI does little by itself. People need a way to learn, ask difficult questions and use the tools in actual work.
There is a revealing reservation in his 2026 thinking. Cheaper, faster creation makes experimentation easier, but he questions whether the greater obstacle is a brand’s willingness to experiment at all. If a team cannot agree to run a test, generating another hundred options may simply furnish the meeting.
Leave the door open
For all the talk of systems, ter Haar’s stated hopes for newcomers are personal. Through the S4Capital Fellowship Program, he has described wanting to provide useful mentorship and a strong start for talent from communities historically underrepresented in the industry.
He has a particular destination in mind: fellows becoming future chief marketing officers of the company’s clients. It is an unusually long view of what an apprenticeship might produce. The novice in the room could eventually be the person commissioning the work.
In 2024, he also joined the Creative LIAisons Global Coaching Academy, offering individual coaching to emerging creative talent. The practical thread continues here. Opportunity involves access to people who can explain the work and help someone take their first steps in it.
The customer brings a computer
By September 2026, ter Haar was concentrating on another change in the customer’s journey: AI agents that help people compare products and carry out purchases. He argued that brands need information and processes those agents can use. Prices, availability and the ability to complete an action become part of the marketing task.
He also advised against shifting substantial budgets before the basics were ready. A company whose audience barely uses the new channel, or whose product information is in poor order, has work to do first. Enthusiasm for an interface does not organize a product catalogue.
The perspective brings his career back to a recognizable question. Someone encounters a digital experience and wants it to work. The interface has changed since the basement years, and a computer may now do more of the encountering. Ter Haar is still interested in how an idea becomes something usable, and how a company keeps learning to make it.