Where to start with The Monkeys?

The 2023 season was, frankly, a truly remarkable accomplishment for the team helmed at the time by Mark Green. We say “at the time” because Green has now upped sticks and moved to fellow Accenture Song agency Droga5, becoming its global CEO based out of New York. Now, Matt Michael holds the keys to perhaps the greatest agency in Australia. 

There’s been change on that front since the close of the 2023 season, too. The Monkeys—in name only—is gone. From 1 December 2024, it’ll become Droga5 Australia and will appear as such in next season’s Agency Scorecard. 

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first, partly because there is so little. The Monkeys lost its largest client in Telstra towards the back end of the year. But the team fired right back, signing NRMA Insurance just before the season’s final whistle—in fact, the win wouldn’t be reported until the second quarter of 2024. 

Regardless, The Monkeys saved its best until last with Telstra. Its ‘This Is Footy Country’ and ‘Hello Christmas’ campaigns were masterstrokes—both scooped a heap of awards from across the industry, not least at the inaugural Cairns Crocodiles Awards this year, which will appear in the agency’s trophy cabinet next year. 

But it was perhaps along the sands of the French Riviera, not Tropical Far North Queensland, where The Monkeys saw its most impressive trophy haul. It picked up the Grand Prix with the coveted Dan Wieden Titanium Lion for ‘The First Digital Nation’ for the Government of Tuvalu in 2023.

Away from the awards circuit (because we could be here all day), the Monkeys picked up some important accounts, particularly the retained work for Tabcorp. Its Aotearoa New Zealand office also won the retained Asahi account.

There was a fair amount of symbolic and cultural change for The Monkeys in 2023. Scott Nowell, one of the agency’s original co-founders, departed. The agency moved from the “trendy terraces” of Surry Hills to join the rest of the Song team in Accenture’s slightly less trendy, but nonetheless swanky, Barangaroo office. The Monkeys reckon it will make its whole offer sing louder through closer integration with the rest of Accenture Song’s chops in one-to-one marketing, CRM, customer experience, marketing transformation, personalisation and beyond. In fact, those skills came to the fore in the NRMA pitch. 

The Monkeys also created the ‘You’re The Voice’ film as part of its ongoing work with the Uluru Dialogue, one of the key parts of the ‘Yes’ campaign for the Voice referendum. That work is also more than skin deep with The Monkeys offering staff five days’ paid leave to participate in Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander cultural activities with a focus on reconciliation. It also offered staff the chance to swap the public holiday on 26 January for another day.