Ad Astra: Jouke Under the Hood of Creativity

Jouke Vuurmans is a hands-on kind of guy. That’s not a figurative turn of phrase, by the way. He spent a good chunk of Covid refurbishing a 1971 Porsche with his brother. He’s usually someone who can be found creating on the cutting edge of technology, but rooting around under the hood, hammering out dents and marvelling at the craft and design of a bygone, analogue age, he was in his element.

“Human nature started with just making things, and now we have all of these tools but I think there’s still a part of humans that appreciates the tactile and the tangible,” he says. The creative problem solving thinking that goes into refurbishing a classic car isn’t so different than tackling a new virtual reality experience or innovative new app - it’s just the tools that are different. ”I think it’s a good exercise to go back to basics, have less options to solve a problem with, because it gets you more creative with how you solve it.”

That hands-on mentality all ties back to the early days of Jouke’s journey with Media.Monks. When he joined in 2004, Jouke was fresh from a post-college gap year and a nightclub-owning acquaintance told him about ‘a bunch of crazy people in my basement’. Jouke made an interactive portfolio on a CD-Rom - which caught the eye of Media.Monks co-founder Wesley ter Haar. 

“The vibe, the people, the ambition really, really was interesting,” he recalls. 

And so, Jouke was the first creative that Media.Monks ever hired. That meant getting hands-on fast. They were a digital studio that had built a reputation for doing magical things with Flash and had started to catch fame with their work for Nintendo, but they had ambitions of becoming an advertising agency. Aside from his ad school course, Jouke had zero experience out in the field. Nonetheless, within four months they’d won a major pitch and Jouke was on set shooting a film.

“That first project was a really interesting one because it gave me control over something I shouldn’t have had control over. At any other agency you’re happy if you’re maybe producing the script but here [I was] on set actually guiding it. So it unlocked a lot for me, and unlocked a lot for the company.”

Over the years, Media.Monks veered back and forth from pursuing its agency ambitions and focusing on digital production. As digital became bigger, the network agencies began muscling in on the territory of the smaller, independent digital agencies, so the Monks made a strategic decision to focus on the high-end digital production at which they excelled. “It was, especially for me, a hard pill to swallow. But it did unlock for me an amazing amount of opportunity to create more interesting work for interesting brands,” reflects Jouke. 

It gave Jouke the opportunity to really see inside the making of the digital sausage, giving him a somewhat different perspective on creative, understanding the possibilities. It’s stood him in good stead after Media.Monks was acquired by S4 Capital and entered its stratospheric growth phase, tying together creative, technology, data and production and turning its unique brand into a global behemoth that doesn’t just meet those agency ambitions of the early days but transcends them.

Throughout all the flux and growth, Jouke has had to chart his own course for what it means to be a creative leader at Media.Monks. With no established creative department at the beginning, it first it was a case of learning while building. But today, Media.Monks is a unique beast in terms of its heritage, its structure and its direction - and while Jouke now has a giant global creative team with him, they’re still determined to do things their own way.

He confesses that as his career developed, and his responsibilities grew, that lack of a clear structure was a struggle, though it was ultimately a liberation.

“Sometimes it was pretty shitty that there wasn’t necessarily a path for me - like, what do you do now? What’s the next step? How do you become an ECD and now a CCO? In my life and career, I have been trying to get some mentors outside the company, but it always ended up with them being more interested in what I was doing and how I was doing it than I could really learn from them - even though they were way better than I was at certain things, it didn’t always apply to Media.Monks. So I think we always had to define it ourselves - and it really helped me just because I’m a true believer in being open-minded. There are always ten opportunities or ten solutions to the problem. So the ability to think without constraints and only focus on what could help us, what was good for us, and could be relevant for us as a company without being defined by the agency constraint…” he says, before reflecting with a rueful smirk,” There’s only one downside: the majority of the world does think within those constraints.”

That confident independence is a trait that can be traced back to Jouke’s youth. He grew up in a town around 20 minutes from Amsterdam in a family that embraced art and creativity. And at the tender age of 11, his parents deposited him on a coach that would take him all the way down to Spain, to visit his uncle, an artist. They spent the time painting and listening to music, and Jouke connected so strongly with his uncle and the country that he returned several times, making the journey all by himself. He didn’t realise it then, but he was building a foundation.

“I’ve never really been so aware of it - that it's been really triggered from the early days… but yeah, that gave me independence from early on and was super helpful in my life,” he says.

So it’s no surprise that Jouke has become a unique kind of creative leader. He freely admits that his strengths lie less in traditional big idea thinking - he’s far more interested in bringing ideas to life by crafting experiences and moments and he devotes a lot of time to making sure that there’s a strong foundation so that the talent can flourish,

Indeed, as much as Jouke is at the forefront of technology, the really human aspects of creativity, the relationships that make it possible. “I think that’s a really important and sometimes underestimated part of the process,” he says. 

The lockdown years brought that into sharp relief. “The element where we really suffered in the last four years is that you can deliver everything without a certain human relationship, trust, a certain chemistry, but you’ll never be able to achieve the best, [get it to] the highest possible state it could be. I think that’s the element that you need to be focused on. If you want to do the best work, you need to build the right relationship, not only with your clients, but also internally - drive relationships to survive…”

“You’ll never get there if it’s not there, that chemistry in the relationship. It’s fucking scary to be a creative - but it’s really amazing if you are with the right-minded people.”

Finding those right-minded people is crucial - particularly early on in one’s career. He advises young people, just making or considering their first steps, to think carefully about who they follow into the industry.

“That decision can really, easily guide you through to a path that potentially gets you nowhere. I’ve been amazed by so many young people who you’d expect to understand that different way of creativity, or at least formats, and the only thing that they aspire to do is making 60-second spots. How is it possible?,” marvels Jouke, reflecting that it is likely an artefact of a traditional advertising education. ”I think a lot of things in your mind are shaped in your first year of your career. That’s when conventions are being set and it’s super tough to start breaking them again. So you need to be able to be super open-minded and you have to fully immerse yourself in what’s possible, especially now with all these new tools and rules that are coming up. Make time in your own time to find your own path and expression of creativity because that will be needed, even in a company like us, fully dedicated and committed to change.”

And that change is certainly happening. Jouke says that while many clients have been focused on efficiencies and consolidating production, they’re starting to realise that without a spark of magic, it just isn’t interesting or hitting their KPIs. “There’s something interesting happening in that space, where I think we’re getting into an era where creativity has regained a bit more ground in that sense. But at the same time, we’re still in that space where it’s tougher for companies and businesses to invest and you need to invest in some of the changes that are happening.”

That this resurgent appreciation of creativity is coming at a time when AI is also rattling through marketing departments and advertising agencies is not lost on Jouke. “While AI is mainly been positioned as a powerful tool for efficiencies and consolidation, it’s actually unlocking that spark of magic we need. It’s the machines that can make our creative more human as it can make our creative more relevant, more interactive, more personal and just way more exciting.”

Jouke sees it as a good old shake up, forcing clients and agencies out of the status quo that they settled into in the fallout of Covid. 

It’s also an exciting time for creatives looking to grasp hold of their own future. “I hope in ten years time, we’ll look back and we are actually proud to be part of this moment, when we completely redefined what our work and job was. It’s the way I talk to a lot of our talent that is obviously frightened by this - look, you have a unique opportunity to define the future of your job, whatever it may be, Yes, your job will look different, so just make that your standard mindset. But it’s a first! You can define the first form of something that will set the tone and standards for the future.”

And that’s something that Jouke is doing with his own role. He believes that in the near future, creative leaders won’t have a choice but to become more hands-on. As smart tools take over more tasks, senior leaders will be expected to be closer to delivery. “I think we’ll have a new generation of creative leaders that are still pretty hands on… The path from an idea to execution will get significantly smaller - so it’s important to know how it’s been made,” he says. And with that, Jouke rolls up his sleeves and dives back under the hood of creativity.