William Turvill, Chief Business Correspondent at The Sunday Times, quotes Marcus Anselm, Partner at JEGI CLARITY, during his interview with David Jones, CEO of Brandtech. See below for the full interview or visit The Sunday Times.
On entering a meeting room in Brandtech’s offices in London’s towering Shard building, I find David Jones — chief executive of the $4 billion advertising group — hunched over his MacBook with a boyish smirk on his face.
I have been warned by one of his employees that Jones, an Englishman ordinarily in New York, has prepared some “entertainment” for me. “I have multiple pieces of entertainment,” he confirms with a chuckle. “Where do we start?”
It transpires that 20 minutes before my arrival, Jones, 58, has pulled five images of me from the internet and fed them into Flux, a text-to-image AI tool which he has taken a liking to. By tapping out a few simple commands, he generates ultra-realistic images of me wearing a tuxedo outside a Scottish castle and then, much to the hooting delight of his two onlooking PR advisers, standing topless on a Brazilian beach with a surfboard under my arm.
“This is what we can do now,” enthuses Jones, whose English accent comes littered with Americanisms after 20 years living in the Big Apple. “We couldn’t do this a year ago. Just think what we can do a year from now. It’s, like, mind-blowing.”
For now, he persists with his presentation. Next, he makes me watch a viral AI video that turned Donald Trump and Joe Biden into best friends, touring the US and dining together: “The speed of development is just insane.” Then he shows me Pencil, Brandtech’s own one-stop-shop generative AI tool. It was acquired in 2023 and is used by its multinational clients to create marketing materials. Jones shows me how it was utilised, for an experiment, to quickly create a hypothetical toothpaste that it named Plaque Slayer. “What’s interesting is the speed with which it comes back with something as good as humans would,” says Jones.
We are keeping a close eye on the business. When Jones started out, he faced some scepticism from critics who wondered how his company could stand out from the crowd. Ten years on, having made some impressive acquisitions, Brandtech has a distinct positioning; Jones’s investors will now be looking for a return on their investment.
Marcus Anselm, Partner at JEGI CLARITY
After two years of hype about artificial intelligence, it’s easy to glaze over and take for granted how fast technologies like this are evolving. But Brandtech’s boss, an ad industry veteran of more than 30 years, believes his sector is about to be upended.
Before Christmas, Coca-Cola made headlines — many of them fretful — when it unveiled a fully AI-generated “Holidays are Coming” advert. This year, Jones predicts, “every week, a major brand will be putting out a TV commercial they’ve created 100 per cent using gen AI”.
Clearly, he is not impartial. Ten years ago this month, he began fundraising to launch Brandtech as a business to take on the giants of the advertising sector — WPP, Publicis, Dentsu, Havas and the soon-to-merge Omnicom and Interpublic Group (IPG) — by buying up marketing technology. Today, with every big holding company in the sector investing in AI tools, Jones’s challenge is to ensure that Brandtech can establish a position at the forefront of marketing technology. He likens it to an “arms race”.
Jones, who lives with his French wife Karine and has four children, grew up in Cheshire, where he was privately educated. His mother was an artist and his father the chief executive of a textile business called Vantona.
He went on to study business at Reutlingen University in Germany and Middlesex University, before starting out in the ad sector as an intern at an agency called BDH in Manchester. A natural client man blessed with the gift of the gab, he worked across various agencies, before alighting at Havas, which is owned by the French billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
At the age of 38, Jones was made the chief executive of Havas’s Euro RSCG agency, a role in which he advised David Cameron on his 2010 election campaign. The following year, he was appointed chief executive of the wider group. He left just three years later, in 2014, and was replaced by Bolloré’s son, Yannick. Amicable? “Yes,” says Jones. “Vincent Bolloré was extremely keen for me to stay, and tried a few things to make that happen.”
From there, Jones went on to launch Brandtech, or You & Mr Jones as it was first known. Originally, the plan had been to tag “& Mr Jones” onto the end of each company he acquired — so, for example, Pencil & Mr Jones. He later thought better of it: “I may have a healthy ego, but … I didn’t want to make it all about me.”
At first, he raised $350 million from investment giants including Baillie Gifford, JAB and GIC, and then the company, which Jones says has been profitable since its second year, raised a further $200 million in 2019 and $115 million last year, giving it a private market valuation of $4 billion (£3.2 billion).
The pitch was was to create a tech-savvy outfit that could invest in new tools and thrive while the established ad companies were weighed down by the baggage of the past. The mission was to offer clients “better, faster and cheaper” services.
The “better, faster and cheaper” mantra is also championed by Sir Martin Sorrell, the WPP entrepreneur who left the ad giant amid allegations of misconduct and went on to become the founding boss of S4 Capital, a rival advertising start-up to Brandtech. So, who came up with the slogan? “It’s quite easy to work that out,” says Jones, with a short huff and a roll of the eyes. “There’s a little thing called the internet.” He points out that he used this phrase on launching Brandtech in 2015, three years before Sorrell’s controversial departure from WPP and his launch of S4 Capital.
Jones adds: “I think we’ve also been able to witness that S4 is not very good at technology, or doing marketing better, faster or cheaper. But we don’t even need to go there.” I disagree. What does he think has gone wrong at S4, whose market value has fallen from more than £4 billion in 2021 to £200 million today?
Jones doesn’t hold back, arguing that Sorrell was motivated to launch S4 Capital for the wrong reasons — “revenge” against WPP — rather than a desire to build a “great new company for customers and clients”. As a result, Jones thinks, S4 bought too many companies hastily, leading to a “total integration nightmare”.
“I know you guys in the UK think he is a genius,” says Jones. “Those of us not in the UK don’t.” He adds that Sorrell “has presided over more destruction of value in marketing and advertising than any human in history”. This might sound a bit harsh given that Sorrell started WPP from scratch in 1985 and today it is worth £9 billion.
Sorrell says Jones, as he did at Havas, “has done truly brilliantly. Like S4, Brandtech is now seeking to disrupt the ad industry through new technologies. According to press reports, he’s built a $1 billion business with an Ebitda of over $200 million and a market value of $4 billion in eight or nine years starting with two people. Extraordinary!”
The Brandtech Group has 7,000 employees, including 2,000 in the UK. It is made up of 11 companies, including Jellyfish, which helps companies track how they are perceived on generative AI platforms, and Mobkoi, which buys mobile advertising space for clients. Then there is Pencil, a platform that has been used to create marketing materials for brands including Baileys, Durex and Persil. Founded in 2018, it is built on OpenAI’s large-language models and was bought by Jones for an undisclosed sum in 2023.
Leena Nair, the chief executive of Chanel, said the Jones and Brandtech are “reinventing marketing by harnessing the power of generative AI”.
Generative AI tools such as Pencil offer clients the prospect of cheaper marketing, with Jones reckoning that big companies will be able to “cut their content creation costs by at least 50 per cent over the next three years”. His hope is that “smarter companies” will use the money they save to invest in more advertising to stay ahead of their competition.
This will provide little comfort for those in the marketing sector who fear that their specific expertise — photography, videography, acting, editing, visual effects and so on — is under threat. “I don’t think that people who are interested in embracing this new world need be concerned,” says Jones.
He recalls that, upon seeing an early form of the photograph in 1840, the French artist Paul Delaroche declared: “From today, painting is dead.” But, says Jones, “it was the birth of impressionism”. He adds: “If you’re a traditional ad agency, it’s probably not great news. But if you’re a creator, it’s amazing news.”
What next for Brandtech? Marcus Anselm, a partner at media acquisitions adviser at JEGI CLARITY, is keeping a close eye on the business. He says that when Jones started out, he faced “some scepticism” from critics who wondered how his company could stand out from the crowd.
“Ten years on, having made some impressive acquisitions, Brandtech has a distinct positioning,” he says, adding that Jones’s investors will now “be looking for a return on their investment”.
So, could a New York stock market listing be on the cards? Jones is keeping his cards close to his chest. “There are great benefits that come with being public,” he says. “But there are also some big constraints that come with it.
“It’s been fantastic to have very long-term, smart shareholders who’ve just allowed me to build a successful business without worrying about the next quarter. And, once you’re public, you’re worrying about the next quarter. So, we’ll see.”
