Brett Stiller is Back in Australia to Make Monks Work on “Precipice of Recently Possible”

Brett Stiller is a few weeks into a new role as creative director at Monks AUNZ, and his focus is on making work that sits on the “precipice of the recently possible.”

His move back home to Australia marks the end of a 13-year stint working overseas across Amsterdam and New York, the last seven of which he’s spent at Sir Martin Sorrell’s Monks. He noted “there’s still a hangover from being production focused” when it comes to how Monks defines itself creatively. 

It has authority in AI because it has focused on being “fast and first”, he said, without getting “bogged down in a lot of the discourse about it”. But his priority is human craft.

“We want great ideas, and we want great execution of those ideas. Sometimes AI is the tool that we just use to get that 'wow' moment in a deck, or to be able to explain an idea with the clarity that … will get that idea sold,” he told LBB.

“How do you hold space in those conversations for creative? What's the point of view? It's human craft. That personally is important to me, especially as we talk about machines, and then also as we understand the creative and technology offerings of Monks too. 

“How do we keep creative at that precipice of the recently possible? How do we stay in that new and scary space?”

Brett started out as an actor at the Sydney Theatre Company before he moved to New York, working job to job, pay cheque to pay cheque.

“That life is great for a robust 20-year-old, but as your life moves into other phases, I wanted to maintain being a creative person, but just wanted some structure.”

Brett knew Nick Law well, and would often stay with Accenture Song’s creative chairperson in the city. In 2014, Nick was at R/GA, and became a mentor figure to Brett.

“I would go and stay with them in New York, and he would be living this creative, sustained kind of life. And I was like, ‘I want that.’”

Brett retrained through a New York University interactive telecommunications program in order to “achieve things that I wasn't going to get to after 15 years as an actor” and switched to advertising. 

He spent a little time at Droga5 and Havas, but the bulk of his advertising career has been with Monks, first in Amsterdam and then back in New York, so “I've never dealt with the big TVC. It's always been the social and the digital way in first, and then that big idea has been left to other creative agencies of record.”

When we speak, he’s been back in the country for a month. Bringing his global perspective home “was certainly an appealing proposition.” He’s showing clients “how tight that line [is] between the team here” and the global Monks team. He feels as though he already knows many of the 90-strong Sydney team, since he spent years working with them from afar.

“It's kind of Through the Looking Glass, right? It's the same wacky world, but all of the characters are very different. The same job. It's the same company. But from Amsterdam to New York to [Sydney], it was strangely familiar, but also very different.”

That balance between the familiar and fresh is what’s kept him at Monks for so long - “it evolves.” Anyone who’s been with Monks for seven years would feel the same, he said, because “their job, the demands of their job, the ways that they work, the people that they work with, the output, the clients, the atmosphere, ethos - all of that has evolved over and over and over again.”

“While sometimes discombobulating, it's fresh, and we're just at a point where we're really understanding what all of that [means]. That's really exciting.”