Planet Propaganda Hires Dan Monarko to Build Media Practice for the AI Era

Former BarkleyOKRP leader joins as Chief Media & Growth Officer to create a new operating model for a shifting landscape

At a moment when most agencies are trying to retrofit legacy media departments for an AI-driven world, Planet Propaganda is taking a different approach: starting from scratch.

The independent creative agency, which is home to clients Duluth Trading Co, Cheba Hut Toasted Subs, Weed Man, and Layne’s Chicken Fingers, has hired Dan Monarko as Chief Media & Growth Officer, tasking the longtime media strategist with building a full-service media practice designed for today’s market.

Monarko arrives from BarkleyOKRP, where he served as SVP of Media & Growth under the agency’s MissionOne Media brand, leading media strategy and new business efforts. His experience spans brands including Premier Protein, Dole, McCain Foods, Motel 6, Dum Dums, NatureSweet and Ruiz Foods, with a focus on CPG and challenger brands competing in crowded categories. He also led the media strategy for the National Pork Board’s first major campaign since “The Other White Meat,” helping reintroduce the brand to a significantly changed consumer landscape.

Rather than take that experience to a large holding-company agency, Monarko opted for the opportunity to build something from the ground floor—and purpose built for the AI age.

“Most agencies claim their creative drives results. Planet has the receipts,” said Monarko. “‘Freaky Fast’ didn’t just sell sandwiches — it became the operational DNA of an entire franchise system. ‘A Sub Above’ turned Jersey Mike’s into America’s fastest-growing food chain. Duluth Trading went from a workwear catalog to a $600 million retailer. When creative does that kind of work, media isn’t a line item, it’s a multiplier. Building that capability here, from scratch, was not a hard decision.”

“The industry has spent years perfecting a model that made sense when media was slower, more manual, and easier to compartmentalize,” said Monarko. “That model doesn’t hold up anymore. AI has compressed timelines, automated a lot of the mechanical work, and exposed how much of the process was built around structure instead of outcomes.”

What replaces it, he argues, is not a smaller version of the same system, but a fundamentally different one.

For decades, media organizations have been organized around specialization—planners, buyers, programmatic leads, analysts—each responsible for a narrow slice of the ecosystem. That structure created clear roles, but also created silos that hobbled efficiency.

Now, AI is removing much of the friction that once justified that model. 

“AI doesn’t get rid of media expertise,” Monarko said. “It gets rid of the performance of it. The value now is in understanding the system as a whole—how the pieces connect, how signals travel, how decisions upstream affect outcomes downstream.”

At Planet, that philosophy is shaping a media practice without legacy org charts that need preserving or entrenched workflows to work around. Monarko is building a practice that centers on a smaller group of senior, cross-disciplinary thinkers who can move fluidly across channels and functions and engage in creative development as competently as they do in platform strategy or data interpretation. The expectation is not mastery of a single tool, but fluency across the ecosystem.

The practical effect is speed. Creative teams get near real-time feedback on what is resonating while strategy evolves continuously, informed by live performance rather than retrospective reports. Media plans are built around where attention actually exists, and are adjusted when that attention inevitably shifts.

It’s a version of integrated media that agencies have long promised, but rarely delivered at scale.

“You don’t win by trying to outmaneuver the platforms,” Monarko said. “You win by giving them better inputs—better creative, better data, clearer objectives—and letting them do what they’re designed to do. A lot of the industry is still organized around trying to outsmart systems that have already outpaced them.”

For Planet Propaganda, the timing is deliberate. As clients reassess how media dollars are allocated—and what they expect in return—the agency sees an opening to offer a model built for efficiency and adaptability, rather than scale for its own sake.

Planet’s new media practice is available immediately to current and prospective clients.

Source: Planet Propaganda

  Agency, AI, Appointment, Chief Media & Growth Officer, Dan Monarko, Planet Propaganda