Damon Stapleton

Damon is Chief Creative Officer and one of the founders of The Monkeys Aotearoa. Before that he was Regional Chief Creative Officer of DDB (New Zealand and Australia). He was formerly Chief Creative Officer of DDB New Zealand where he won over 20 Agency of the Year titles, including DDB New Zealand being named agency of the year in Australia. Before that he was Executive Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia and TBWA Hunt Lascaris, which was voted South African agency of the decade in 2010. He has worked on global brands such as BMW, Toyota, Nissan, Heineken, Visa, Cadbury, McDonalds and the FIFA World Cup campaign for Adidas in South Africa.

Damon has collected awards at some of the most prestigious international advertising festival shows, receiving over 54 D&AD Pencils – including two very rare D&AD Black Pencils as well as seven D&AD Yellow Pencils. One of the Black Pencils is for The Zimbabwean which is the first and only one won in Africa. He has also judged D&AD three times. In 2022 he was globally ranked in the top 20 Chief Creative Officers by D&AD. He’s won over 70 Cannes Lions, including the Grand Prix, 11 Gold, a Titanium and Innovation Lion, two Grand Clio, 11 One Show Gold Pencils, and the first ever ADC Black Cube ever awarded.

He is most known for his “Trillion Dollar” bill campaign for The Zimbabwean and Penny the Pirate for OPSM and Samsung I-Test which have won over 200 international awards between them. Penny the Pirate was judged to be the most effective campaign in the world by the WARC 100 last year. The Zimbabwean is in the permanent collection of the British Museum.

He has been recognised as one of the top 10 Executive Creative Directors in the world by both Creativity Magazine and the Big Won Report on multiple occasions. In 2011, Finance Week awarded him Achiever of Year in South Africa. He’s had a variety of short stories published as well as articles for various magazines and writes a blog called damonsbrain.com. It is stuff he thinks about instead of world domination.

Damon also went to sixteen schools as a child and was only expelled twice. He received no reward for this achievement. This still bugs him.