Monks Hires Two North America Media Chiefs and Brings Back Two Partnership Leaders

Two new SVPs for North America

Amman Badlani joins as Senior Vice President, Commerce & Retail Media, North America, and is based in New York. According to Monks, he has more than two decades of experience, including 13 years at agency networks leading search and commerce for brands such as Haleon, Unilever and Signet. The company says he grew the business he oversaw to more than $2 billion in media investment.

In his new role, Badlani will build integrated retail media and marketplace strategies across Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing and Google. Monks says these are increasingly powered by agentic AI systems that he builds and deploys.

Kerry Curran, based in Boston, joins as Senior Vice President, Integrated Media, North America. She will unite paid, owned and first-party data into a single growth system for enterprise brands. Monks says she has more than two decades running revenue-bearing media businesses and served on the executive committee of a performance organization with more than 1,500 people. According to the company, she merged siloed channel teams into a centralized center of excellence, returned a declining $100M managed media business to 40% year-over-year growth, and commercialized proprietary AI-powered media planning and measurement platforms. Both Badlani and Curran report to Gila Wilensky, EVP, Head of North America Media and Data at Monks.

Returning leaders for platform partnerships

Monks also announced the return of Tobey Van Santvoord and Lucy Weber. Weber re-joins to lead Meta platform partnerships, aligning high-velocity creative assets with automated media buying environments such as Meta Advantage+.

Van Santvoord re-joins to lead global partnerships, including the company's Amazon partnership. In the near term, he will focus on using partner ecosystems to deliver integrated intelligence, scaled creative, end-to-end campaign orchestration and advanced measurement. Both report to Chris Wilhelmi, Monks EVP, Global Head of Data & Media.

Media Acceleration and the case against silos

Monks says constant platform algorithm changes, retail media networks and answer-engine ecosystems have upended the traditional media model, and that creative is now the new targeting. Its Media Acceleration approach responds with high volumes of varied creative, algorithm-first activation and layered measurement. The company says this rests on proprietary technology, a transparent commercial model, client ownership of data, and causal incrementality measurement.

Wilhelmi framed the hires as a challenge to the established agency structure. "The legacy agency model of keeping media, creative, commerce, and data in separate silos is completely broken," he said. He added that the company is offering "a unified, agile Data & Media practice built on Monks.Flow, our intelligent platform, which connects intelligence, creative, activation and measurement so brands can scale what works across every market."

What it means for brands

The appointments show Monks concentrating its Data & Media leadership on retail media, commerce and platform partnerships with Amazon and Meta, where, in the company's view, algorithmic efficiency and creative variety determine performance. For brands, the pitch is a single practice covering media, creative, commerce and data rather than separate teams. The release gives no details on pricing, client wins or results from the new structure, so its effect remains to be shown.