S4 Capital's Monks Boosts Media Acceleration Offering with Executive Appointments in North America and Returning Global Partnership Leaders

Appointments of Amman Badlani and Kerry Curran, alongside returning leaders Tobey Van Santvoord and Lucy Weber, signal agency momentum in unified, algorithm-driven media, retail, and commerce execution

NEW YORK and BOSTON and SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Monks, the global, digital-first operating brand of S4Capital plc, today announced a strategic expansion of its Data & Media practice leadership. The agency has appointed Amman Badlani as Senior Vice President, Commerce & Retail Media, North America, and Kerry Curran as Senior Vice President, Integrated Media, North America. Concurrently, Monks announced the return of senior leaders Tobey Van Santvoord and Lucy Weber to lead strategic platform partnerships across Amazon, Meta and more.

The combined moves highlight Monks' investment in top-tier Data & Media talent and strengthen Media Acceleration, the company's approach to delivering media relevance at scale. Constant platform algorithm changes, retail media networks, and answer-engine ecosystems have upended the traditional media model, and creative is now the new targeting. Media Acceleration answers with high volumes of varied creative, algorithm-first activation and layered measurement, anchored in proprietary technology, a transparent commercial model, client ownership of their data, and causal incrementality measurement.

Based in New York, Amman Badlani joins as SVP, Commerce & Retail Media, North America, bringing more than two decades of experience, including 13 years at agency networks leading search and commerce for brands such as Haleon, Unilever and Signet, and growing the business he oversaw to more than $2 billion in media investment. Reporting to Gila Wilensky, EVP, Head of North America Media and Data at Monks, Badlani architects integrated retail media and marketplace strategies across Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing and Google, increasingly powered by agentic AI systems he builds and deploys.

Based in Boston, Kerry Curran joins as SVP, Integrated Media, to lead integrated media across North America, uniting paid, owned, and first-party data into a single growth system for enterprise brands. A senior commercial executive with more than two decades running revenue-bearing media businesses, Curran served on the executive committee of a 1,500+ person performance organization, where 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, most recently deploying custom AI agents to transform commercial operations. Curran will also report to Gila Wilensky, EVP, Head of North America Media and Data at Monks.

Complementing the addition of Badlani and Curran, the return of Weber and Van Santvoord strengthens Monks' platform-native capabilities at a moment when algorithmic efficiency and creative variety dictate performance. Lucy Weber re-joins Monks to lead Meta platform partnerships, aligning high-velocity creative assets directly with automated media buying environments like Meta Advantage+. Tobey Van Santvoord re-joins to lead global partnerships, including the company's Amazon partnership, focusing in the near-term on harnessing partner ecosystems to deliver integrated intelligence, scaled creative, end-to-end campaign orchestration and advanced measurement. Both Weber and Van Santvoord will report to Chris Wilhelmi, Monks EVP, Global Head of Data & Media.

"The legacy agency model of keeping media, creative, commerce, and data in separate silos is completely broken," said Chris Wilhelmi, EVP, Global Head of Data & Media at Monks. "Brands waste immense growth potential when these disciplines don't operate as one system. We are bringing together top-tier talent to offer a clear alternative: 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."

For further information, please contact:
Sarah Murray, Senior Director, Global Public Relations & Communications, Monks
[email protected]

About Monks
Monks is the global, digital-first, 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 redefine how brands interact with the world. Through Monks.Flow, its flagship AI ecosystem for marketing orchestration, Monks transforms marketing into a growth engine, collapsing timelines and connecting brands to culture in real time. By deploying bespoke intelligent agents across disciplines and delivering culturally relevant, high-impact creative and digital solutions, Monks solves key critical business challenges across the entire brand enterprise to help brands sustain long-term impact.

Monks was named a Contender in The Forrester Wave™: Global Marketing Services and a leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Global Digital Marketing Agencies. It ranks among Cannes Lions' Top 10 Creative Companies (2022-25) and remains the only partner featured in AdExchanger's Programmatic Power Players list every year (2020-24). Named Adweek's first AI Agency of the Year (2023) and The One Show's inaugural AI Pioneer Organization (2025), Monks was also awarded Business Intelligence Group's 2026 Excellence in Artificial Intelligence Award in the Human-Machine Interaction Team category. Additionally, Monks.Flow earned AI-based Marketing Solution of the Year at the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards and a 2026 Global Generative AI Award in the Agentic Marketing Innovation category. Finally, Monks achieved a record-breaking number of FWAs and continues to hold the most of any partner.

About S4 Capital
S4 Capital is a purely digital advertising and marketing services business built for global, multinational, regional, and local clients and millennial-driven influencer brands. The business operates through two data and digital media driven Practices: Marketing Services and Technology Services, emphasising 'faster, better, cheaper, more' execution in an always-on consumer-led environment. Its unitary structure positions the Company as a systems integration partner delivering real-time relevance in the post-agency era.

The Company now has approximately 6,350 people in 33 countries with approximately 80% of net revenue across the Americas, 15% across Europe, the Middle East and Africa and 5% across Asia-Pacific. The longer-term objective is a geographic split of 60%:20%:20%. Marketing Services accounted for approximately 90% of net revenue, and Technology Services 10%. The target allocation is a practice split of 75%:25%.

Sir Martin Sorrell was CEO of WPP for 33 years, building it from a £1 million 'shell' company in 1985 into the world's largest advertising and marketing services company, with a market capitalisation of over £16 billion on the day he left. Prior to that, Sir Martin was Group Financial Director of Saatchi & Saatchi Company Plc for nine years.

SOURCE Monks