AI is transforming marketing, and this series by Monks provides marketers with a practical playbook to applying AI in their business. With tangible tools and solutions, learn how to identify and create momentum to start your transformation, and leverage AI throughout your business, from GEO, content and media, to measurement and marketing intelligence.
Monks experts will provide you with the essential tools and knowledge to address current challenges and apply these insights throughout your business to stay ahead.
Your AI Playbook to Applying AI is a new series of LinkedIn Live events from The Marketing Society in partnership with Monks.
Session 1 - Your AI Playbook to Applying AI : Where to start?
Monks shared their journey from AI hype to practical implementation at scale. The session explored how they've enabled 10 billion tokens through their organisation, not through big announcements or corporate emails, but through systematic process transformation, grassroots training and transparent conversations about what AI actually means for talent and workflows.
Session 2 - Your AI Playbook to Applying AI: Real-Time Brand Building
Jouke Vuurmans, Chief Creative Officer at Monks, challenged marketers to move from "Black Mirror" anxiety to "White Canvas" opportunity. The session explored how brands have lost cultural relevance and speed in a landscape where everyone with AI tools is now your competition. Jouke shared practical insights on transforming from traditional marketing cycles to real-time brand building through three key pillars: faster decision-making using AI-analysed data sets, rapid strategy development that turns insights into strategies in minutes rather than days, and quick concept generation that kickstarts creative work. The focus was on genuine transformation, not just tool adoption, demonstrating how AI requires tailored marketing applications alongside human expertise to deliver contextual relevance at the speed culture demands.
Session 3 - Your AI Playbook to Applying AI: Content, Craft and AI
In this session Monks Executive Creative Director Jon Biggs, revealed how AI is fundamentally reshaping creative production - not by replacing craft, but by moving it. The session also challenged the "AI slop" narrative, arguing that quality has always been rare (Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is rubbish), and that AI simply makes the conversation louder. For marketers, the real opportunity lies in working with genuine intent, embracing new workflows rather than bolting AI onto old ones and understanding that the economics, speed and collaborative possibilities of AI production are genuinely transformative as long they are approached thoughtfully.
Session 4 - Your AI Playbook to Applying AI: Media and Performance
AI-driven media buying is not a future possibility, it's already here and marketers who aren't building the right infrastructure around it will fall behind. Thiago Correa, Head of Media for EMEA at Monks, revealed how platforms like Google and Meta have fundamentally changed how digital media works, why creative is now the primary targeting lever, and how marketers can build a practical, scalable system to deliver measurable value from AI in their media today. Rather than a theoretical overview, this was a clear, step-by-step guide to getting smart campaigns working and proving their impact to the wider business.
The Series so far
Your AI Playbook to Applying AI : Where to start?
With Monks’ Chief AI Officer Wesley ter Haar
In this session we address the million-dollar questions: where do you start, how do you identify and create powerful momentum, and how do you identify the key areas in your business to prioritise your transformation?
Applying AI: Harnessing AI to create your real-time brand
With Monks’ Chief Creative Officer Jouke Vuurmans .
In this session as we dive into how you move at the speed of culture. Using agentic workflows, you learn how to capture insights that create real-time opportunities.
Learn to construct and work with interactive personas, develop active listening tools. Harness AI to build a brand that gets smarter with every interaction and build briefs for success.
Your AI playbook - Content, Craft and AI
With Monks’ Executive Creative Director EMEA Jon Biggs
- What does the craft process look like in the era of AI?
- Processes distilled to six to twelve weeks... utilising AI to the fullest.
- How do you work with your creative partners to make the most of the possibilities?
Your AI playbook - Media and Performance
With Monks’ Senior Vice President Media EMEA, Thiago Correa
As companies scramble for practical AI use cases that can demonstrate value today, CMO's have a big opportunity.
Digital media is evolving beyond programmatic, offering AI-driven media buying that requires no build cost and offers less operational complexity with better return on investment.
Your AI playbook - The New Era of Marketing Measurement
With Monks’ Senior Vice President of Measurement – Head of EMEA, Tim Fisher
Measurement is no longer just about looking backwards. It’s about driving what happens next. In this session, Monks explores how brands can turn fragmented data into real-time intelligence that ensures smarter, faster decisions.
From next-generation MMM and forecasting to AI-driven optimisation, we’ll show how modern measurement systems can move at the speed of marketing. How we connect insight directly to action and informing the next campaign. Expect practical frameworks for closing the loop between measurement, performance and learning, so teams can continuously improve, adapt and unlock growth in real time.
Coming up in the series on LinkedIn
2026 dates still to come
- Tuesday 7 July: Building your GEO Strategy
all at 12:30pm GMT/BST - booking links to follow
SESSION 1 5 KEY POINTS
Your AI Playbook to Applying AI : Where to start?
We're post-hype
This is the first technology cycle where capability outpaces understanding. The tech is good enough for most use cases. The real challenge isn't the technology itself but how organisations adopt it and adapt their structures to use it at scale.
Don't just send the email
Declaring your company 'AI-first' in an all-hands message solves nothing. Real transformation needs transparency about both excitement and anxiety, grassroots energy and concrete enablement, not corporate announcements.
Three lenses for transformation
Monks approached this through talent enablement (tools, training, compliance), applied AI (process mapping and workflow optimisation) and services evolution (moving from time and materials to outcomes and outputs).
Build your AI compliance core team
Bring together legal, data privacy, InfoSec and business leaders to vet tools quickly whilst maintaining protections. This unlocks speed and creates space for ethical conversations beyond just legal requirements.
Map your processes first
Intelligence is freely available for the cost of tokens. Your infrastructure and ways of working matter more than the models. Process mapping reveals where to add automation, which steps to collapse and which silos no longer make sense.
"This is the first hype cycle that I've seen where the bonus of the technology is ahead of most people's understanding of it."
Wesley ter Haar Monks
2 ACTION ITEMS
Start process mapping now
Pick one or two high-impact workflows you need to transform anyway. Document inputs, outputs and the steps in between. Identify where intelligence can replace manual effort and which steps should collapse entirely.
Create an AI compliance process with teeth
Don't let legal become a blocker. Get them working with AI partners (including early startups) to figure out what works internally versus commercially. Make sure everyone signs an ethical AI use policy.
SESSION 2 5 KEY POINTS
Applying AI: Harnessing AI to create your real-time brand
From Black Mirror to White Canvas
The anxiety around AI stems from a natural human resistance to change. Rather than focusing on what we might lose, marketers should embrace the progress and opportunities AI brings, shifting from fear-based thinking to opportunity-based action.
Marketing Has Been Overtaken by Reality
Brands are no longer fast enough to stay relevant. Consumer expectations have evolved rapidly, attention spans have diminished, and every person creating content online is now competition. Marketing needs to match the speed of culture.
Real-Time Requires Three Components
Effective real-time marketing needs faster decision-making through instant data analysis, rapid production capabilities to act on insights within hours rather than weeks, and continuous optimisation that learns and adapts in the moment.
AI is Not About Removing Humans
The transformation requires both sophisticated tools tailored for marketing applications and marketing expertise to manage these tools. Humans remain essential for turning AI outputs into solid strategies and creative work.
Social Understanding Over Social Listening
AI-powered tools can analyse massive social data sets in real time, identifying conversations and opportunities for brands to participate authentically. This moves beyond traditional listening to genuine understanding and instant strategic recommendations.
"The machines will make the work more human."
Jouke Vuurmans Monks
2 ACTION ITEMS
Establish 24-hour insight cycles.
Start each day by reviewing real-time data on what conversations are happening around your brand and category, then make fast decisions about whether and how to participate.
Build a live audience panel into your process.
Use AI tools to maintain constant access to audience insights and perspectives, allowing you to test concepts and strategies against real consumer sentiment before full production.
SESSION 3 5 KEY POINTS
Your AI Playbook to Applying AI: Content, Craft and AI
Pre-production is the new post-production
AI compresses the distance between idea and execution dramatically. Near-finished creative is now visible within the first few weeks of a project, meaning the biggest creative decisions happen earlier than ever. Marketers need to adapt their review and approval mindset accordingly.
Speed changes expectations - manage them carefully
AI accelerates the start of production, but the finishing stages can be surprisingly slow and unpredictable. Small tweaks can cause unexpected knock-on effects. Being clear upfront about what truly matters in the work is essential.
3. Be ready to kill your darlings
The AI landscape shifts constantly. Workflows, assets and approaches that work today may be redundant tomorrow. The ability to recognise when to change direction and act on it quickly is now a core creative leadership skill.
Intent beats technology every time AI doesn't fix bad thinking, it amplifies it
The teams producing the best work are those focused on why they're making something, not the tool they're using. Monks has stopped labelling work as "AI work" internally, judging everything on whether it's good or not.
The economics are genuinely significant
AI can deliver TV-quality film, full product libraries, brand assets and social content for roughly a quarter of the cost of traditional production. For marketers managing budgets and needing to scale content, the cost-efficiency argument is compelling, especially at scale.
"AI doesn't fix bad thinking, it makes it louder. Get it right first time, and then follow it through."
Jon Biggs Monks
2 ACTION ITEMS
Restructure your briefing and review process
Traditional review stages need rethinking. Build more collaborative time with your creative teams at the very start of a project where the big decisions are now actually happening and set clear expectations with stakeholders that early-stage work will look polished, but that the finishing phase takes longer than it used to.
Audit whether you're bolting AI onto old workflows
Assess whether your team is simply using AI as a shortcut within existing processes rather than embracing new ways of working. If your briefs, approval chains and production stages look the same as they did two years ago, they need rethinking. Start with one project where you consciously design the workflow around AI from the outset, rather than adding it in afterwards.
SESSION 4 5 KEY POINTS
Your AI Playbook to Applying AI: Media and Performance
AI-driven media buying is inevitable
Every major platform is moving towards AI-optimised buying, from Google's Pmax to Meta's Advantage+ and beyond. This isn't a trend to monitor, it's infrastructure to build for now, because the brands investing in the right foundations today will have a significant competitive advantage tomorrow.
Creative is the new targeting
In AI-driven systems, your objective and your creative together determine who actually sees your ads - not your audience settings. The algorithm learns from who responds to what you serve, meaning content strategy and production capability are now central to media performance.
Your signal foundation is the single highest-impact quick win
Getting your data signals right, particularly server-to-server conversion tracking, is the cheapest and fastest way to improve performance, regardless of whether you've moved to smart campaigns yet. Monks sees an average 15% uplift simply from implementing conversions API properly across platforms.
Give AI freedom but with constraints
The guiding principle for optimising AI media systems is to give them as much freedom as possible, but as much constraint as necessary. Over-targeting and hyper-segmentation can harm performance. Lookalikes, exclusions and broad segmentation tend to work better than tight audience restrictions.
Incrementality testing is the best way to prove value
Standard click-based attribution is increasingly unreliable and won't convince non-marketing stakeholders. Randomised control trials (testing current activity against smart campaigns against a baseline with no ads) are the gold standard for demonstrating real business impact and building organisational buy-in for scaling AI media.
"A media plan is no longer enough — it needs to be complemented by a marketing system. That system is either a force limiter or a force multiplier. Any gaps in that architecture become exacerbated very quickly."
Thiago Correa Monks
2 ACTION ITEMS
Audit and fix your signal architecture now
Before changing anything else, review whether your conversion signals are properly configured across every platform you're active on. Implement server-to-server conversion tracking (Conversions API) where it isn't in place. This single step delivers measurable performance uplift and costs relatively little making it an impactful starting point for any marketer.
Run an incrementality test on your next campaign
If you're not yet able to prove the value of AI-driven media to senior stakeholders, design a simple ABC test on your next activity - comparing a business-as-usual approach against a smart campaign format, with a holdout group exposed to neither. Most major platforms now allow this within their own environments. The results will give you the credible, methodology-based evidence needed to make the case for broader adoption.
In Partnership with
Monks is the global, purely digital, data-driven, unitary operating brand of S4 Capital plc. With a legacy of innovation and specialized expertise, Monks combines an extraordinary range of global Marketing and Technology Services to accelerate business growth and redefine how brands interact with the world. From crafting tailored, outcome-focused campaigns to modernizing critical infrastructure for the ever-evolving digital landscape, Monks delivers solutions that engage audiences in real time, drive cultural relevance and sustain long-term impact—a tripartite approach that establishes it as a trusted partner to the world's most innovative brands.
Check out Monks 25 Minutes of AI for further inspiration here.
