Women to Watch 2022: Marie-Celine Merret Wirstrom, MediaMonks

Marie-Celine Merret Wirstrom

Head of business operations, AUNZ
MediaMonks
Australia

Marie-Celine Merret Wirstrom has not only managed to break the mould but also smash the glass ceiling. 

A Stockholm University graduate, her career path has taken distinctive and diverse turns. In exactly a decade, she went from being a dancer in Europe, to moving to event management and production, and now heading business operations at MediaMonks ANZ. Her first big job after university was that of a producer at Fake Love, a New York Times experiential design agency. At a time when digital innovation was still nascent, she built creative-led, bold experiences by intertwining art, technology and a whole lot of design and logistics.

Poached by Edelman for a similar profile, Merret Wirstrom was one of the few people in New York with the skillset of an experiential producer. Some of her most prominent work includes producing the first immersive live concert for deaf young adults for 7Up, taking over Hollywood Boulevard for a real-time sun-powered art sculpture, producing the first life-sized dynamic user-generated light racing track, and building the first large-scale kinetic sculpture in Grand Central Terminal. 

Having achieved various milestones at MediaMonks New York as well as Vandal in Sydney, Merret Wirstrom was re-engaged by MediaMonks at the start of the global pandemic in 2020 to set up the firm’s ANZ content business from scratch. While she may have already proved her mettle in various roles up to this point, balancing the chaos and demands of a creative shop as employee number-one is no easy feat. Regardless, she’s grown the operations to a dynamic 250-strong team. 

Merret Wirstrom has been directly responsible for growing the creative content business from zero to US$1.7 million in the first year across two client accounts, all while going through a pregnancy and having her first child. A supermom at home and even at work, she is known to operate beyond her remit across many functions acting as GM, looking after business growth, spearheading pitches, keeping a tab on staff wellbeing, talent recruitment, culture and operations as well as production.

When she’s not busy doing all of that, Merret Wirstrom enjoys mentoring producers and junior creatives on experiential production and plays an active role in the leadership team for the non-profit Women in the Metaverse community. She believes that while the metaverse matters, so does the role of women in it.