Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Taking Big Risks: How David Jones Built a Billion-Dollar Brand Against All Odds | E54
Tue, 19 Nov 2024
Convinced that technology was the future of advertising, David Jones set out to build Brandtech. But again and again, investors rejected his model, doubting the potential of AI and digital technology in an industry where traditional models worked so well. Despite countless ‘no’s,’ David pressed on, believing he could redefine the industry. And that's exactly what he did. Today, he leads a billion-dollar company that blends tech and creativity to reshape advertising. In this episode, David shares actionable advice on staying resilient in the face of doubt, innovating in a traditional industry, and building a brand that stands out. David Jones is a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and founder of The Brandtech Group, a pioneering digital and Gen AI marketing company. He is also the co-founder of One Young World, a global organization empowering young leaders to drive social and environmental change. In this episode, Ilana and David will discuss: - His 180° shift from sports to advertising - The audacious cold call that got his foot in the door - Climbing to the top by breaking every rule - Finding courage by imagining the worst - Stepping back to leap forward - Taking Australia’s digital ad scene by storm - Defying naysayers to bring AI to ads - Going from countless ‘no’s’ to billions in revenue - Why he’s all-in on empowering young leaders - How Brandtech is using AI to reinvent ads - The business case for ‘doing good’ in the world - Using your privilege to make an impact - Turning vision into action - How excellent storytelling creates opportunities - And other topics… David Jones is a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and founder of The Brandtech Group, a pioneering digital and Gen AI marketing company. Previously, he became the youngest global CEO in advertising history, leading Havas and Havas Worldwide, and was the only British CEO of a publicly traded French company. In 2009, he co-founded One Young World, a global organization empowering young leaders to drive social and environmental change. He also collaborated on Kofi Annan's TckTckTck Campaign for climate justice and has advised numerous high-profile leaders. Connect with David: David’s Website: https://thebrandtechgroup.com/ David’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjonesoyw/ David’s Twitter: https://x.com/davidjonesOYW Resources Mentioned: David’s Book, Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business is Better Business: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Cares-Wins-business-Financial/dp/0273762532 One Young World: https://www.oneyoungworld.com/ Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training
Chapter 1: What inspired David Jones to shift from sports to advertising?
Got a very stroppy letter from him saying he couldn't believe I was leaving for a tennis tournament without having secured a final year internship. And back then, email wasn't the thing. So I just picked up the phone, called a whole bunch of ad agencies, pretended to several of them that I was the marketing director of Coca-Cola and asked to speak to their CEO as I was running a pitch.
And everyone put me through. And then 50% of the people I spoke to were like, you're a complete time waste. You'll never get a job in this industry. And 50% were like, that's quite smart. I'm obviously not going to see you, but I'll put you in touch with the person who runs our internship program. And long story short, landed on an internship in advertising and kind of never looked back.
So take me back to that moment. What made you have the courage or the idea? Advertising is a lot about rising above the noise, right? There's a lot of noise in the system. And you could see that a few decades ago to understand that you need to get through. And the biggest thing is how do I open the door? How did you even get the idea? And how did you have the courage?
I think there's a thread all about understanding people. And actually, that was what fascinated me about the person who came. He was a head of planning from an agency called BMP in the UK who'd kind of invented strategic planning and just talking about people and what motivated people and how you change people's behavior.
That was the first piece, which I just thought, this is really interesting because I'm fascinated by people and what makes them tick and really into creativity. And it was a golden era. UK advertising back then was pretty amazing. TV advertising back then, it was a very different world. What's going on in the world of tech and Gen AI today is exactly what was going on in TV back then.
And then I was like, hey, I want to go on this tennis tournament. I don't really have time to wait for lots of replies. So what's the fastest way of doing it? We just call people. But are they really going to listen to someone saying, hey, I'm a student. I'd like an internship. No. But if you pretend that you're a big client and you're going to do a pitch, you'll get through to anyone.
And then, you know, from then on, it's just it's a bit of a lottery as to what happens.
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Chapter 2: How did David Jones secure his first internship in advertising?
John Maxwell says it beautifully. He talks about the people pile. And I think, you know, a lot of it is understanding people and how do you rise above the noise? And that is incredible to hear. So you find this internship. How from that in 2005, you became, you know, a really, really young CEO of a global company, Havas. Again, how did that happen?
And also, how do you adapt to such a big, big role? I mean, that's hard.
There's another thread, which is just about learning from different countries and cultures. And also many of the things I did early on in my career. were potentially stupid moves because you're stepping out of something that is what you should be doing.
And the fast version I ended up, because I spoke German, getting a crazy amount of responsibility on a pitch because at the time, no one in the UK really cared about pan-European advertising. And I thought international and global was the future. So I pitched with the CEO and the MD. I presented to Henkel's worldwide board when I was 21 and we ended up winning the business.
So they asked me to stay on. But firstly, the fact that I'd lived and worked in
germany that i understood german culture that i spoke german gave me a level of responsibility that i would never have had if i'd just been the english intern speaking english and then that led to me wanting my next move and i moved out to paris to work at j waltz thompson and i didn't speak french and i had a really tough time for a year or so but then i learned fluent french and french culture and all of those things just add to your learning and knowledge and understanding
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Chapter 3: What strategies helped David Jones become a global CEO at a young age?
both in terms of cultures and in terms of doing business in different ways, in terms of particularly if you come from the US or the UK, where you're usually used to sitting at the center thinking you know how the world is. And actually, no, you don't. So it's good to be on that. And then the language piece. I mean, I ended up CEO of a French publicly listed company.
In fact, the only British CEO of a French publicly listed company at the time. I'd never been able to do that without speaking French. Forget any of the other things. So there was that sort of journey that led me down an international path. But also, my wife and I, we met and we were super interested about not just being in London or Paris.
And we decided we would either go and live in... We identified three places that had great ad industries. and that were really good places to go and live, which were Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Sydney. We started off going down to Sydney. Both of us got jobs down there. I arrived down there in 1998.
And the piece about taking, you know, when I moved to Paris, I took a salary cut and moved to a more junior role than I'd been doing in the UK. And many people go, that's really dumb. But actually, it was the thing that caused the big leapfrog later on. I was heir apparent to be the next MD president at Abermead Vickers BBO in the UK. I was the youngest board director there.
I was running British Telecom, which at the time was the biggest account in Britain. And I left all of that to go and work at an ad agency in Sydney called URSCG. But it was that that allowed me to launch Australia's first ever digital agency. We were booking at 1.40% of all online media in Australia. We were four years in a row digital agency of the year.
I became the inaugural chairman of the Australian Digital Advertising Association. And that really put me on the map because I got tech and digital in the global company. And so all of these things sort of at the time, you don't necessarily do them because you think it's going to lead somewhere.
But as you connect the dots back, many of the things that at the time, you know, why would you leave like Britain's biggest and best ad agency where you're in the pole position to go and work at some kind of small agency in Australia that didn't have the best reputation at the time. And it's like, well, actually, if I hadn't done that, I'd never have ended up.
So from then, I ended up being asked to do in New York what I'd done in Sydney. So moved to New York age sort of 36, 37. We turned the... Business around in 12 months and a year later, an activist investor took over Havas and said, would you like to be the global CEO of the main ad agency? So I think I was like 37, global CEO. I went from CEO of Australia in 2002 to global CEO in 2005.
I'm hearing that you're just not afraid. Or maybe you're afraid, but you do it anyway, right? Because different cultures, different countries, different people, that takes a lot. But then you're also... You're not afraid of going back in order to leapfrog forward. What do you think went in your head? Did you know that you're taking a risk? Did you just see the future?
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Chapter 4: How did David Jones raise $300 million for Brandtech?
Watch our free training today at leapacademy.com slash free hyphen training. The link is in the show notes. Now back to the show. Do you think the reason you had the courage, because again, the rejections is what kills more dreams than anything, right? I mean, it's the rejection, it's the fear, it's the, you heard too many no's and now you're starting to wobble yourself.
Is it because you've been, I mean, you've been in marketing and advertisement, you knew the world so well. Is it that knowledge of the problem that just made you so, that level of conviction of I gonna find, it's basically, Who's going to be on board versus if I'm going to find it?
I just sat there and thought, I know there's a huge opportunity for this because basically all of my clients are saying this is what they want. I mean, they would say, look, we don't want 300 ad agencies around making TV commercials for us. I was sitting there going, actually, I don't want the future of my career to be recommending to my clients what I wouldn't do if I were them.
Can we just do this with 10 out of agencies? Yeah, you could. Yeah. But then suddenly your revenue goes. So I just I'd much rather be on the end of solving their problem rather than trying to convince them they're wrong when you know they're right. And so I was absolutely confident about what they were looking for and what they needed. And I was pretty confident in my ability to build it.
But I was probably even more worried that someone else was going to do it. I'd always wanted to have my own business. I had a fabulous 15 years at Havas. I loved it. Great place to be. great people. But, you know, every time I was getting a bit restless, you know, I've been four years CEO of us. Oh, go run global. Oh, go run New York. Oh, run this.
So every time I got a bit restless, there was a new thing to do. And then obviously I ended up at the top gig. So there wasn't a new thing to do, but I kind of was sitting there going, someone's going to do this. I'll be so pissed off if I'm sitting there five years from now going, could it be me? But
And then at the end of the day, going back to, if it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world, you know? You'll have learned a ton. You leave a big job. And often people would say to me, you know, because I'd fly like crazy. So I was a Brit running a French business from New York.
So I basically commuted to Paris from New York, which sounds glamorous, but it isn't because you spend your life in planes. I was in Paris at least every two weeks off and once a week, add side trips to Asia, Latin America, go to the West Coast. And people would often say, you know, God, your life. And I was like, you know, I've got a choice.
You know, like most people can't choose to be the global CEO of a big company. I can choose not to be. So if ever I feel sorry for myself, whatever. It's easy to step away from it. But likewise, when you make the leap to go set your own thing up, it's like, if it doesn't work out, you've learned a ton. You've learned so much.
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Chapter 5: What role does AI play in the future of advertising?
And I just was convinced that you could create a better model where you use much more technology to help brands do their marketing better, faster, and cheaper using tech. I was Googling one weekend and realized that no one was using the term brand tech. So I thought, we'll have that. So trademark brand tech. And basically set off on a journey, which has really exploded in the last 18 months or so.
But just to say, let's build that group that helps brands do their marketing better, faster, cheaper using tech. And we started investing... in AI back in 2015. We did AI chatbots. We actually did the world's first AI influencer chatbot with Kalani Hilliker for CoverGirl. We were doing AI media planning with LC, doing AI data with Crossing Minds.
I went on the board in 2018 of a company called AI Foundation who were building AI twins of humans. And you can Google a great episode of Jimmy Kimmel where Deepak Chopra takes digital Deepak onto Jimmy Kimmel and takes everyone through a guided meditation. Honestly, the technology has moved on so much since then.
That demo looks really good, but once you were outside of the safe environment of a demo, things were a bit wilder back then. All of that led me to look for a company that was making ads end-to-end using GenAI. And there was only one company called Pencil built in 2018 on GPT-2 back then. And Will and Samukh, the founders, brilliant talents.
And particularly with Will early on, we had a meeting of the minds around how big we thought AI and GenAI was going to be. Now, obviously, everyone will tell you now that, of course, they knew this. But back then, no one did. We hit it off, and I said, why don't we get together and we can turbocharge what you're doing? He'd built a great platform for SMB.
The brilliant thing about it was, if you've got an SMB SaaS platform, it has to work because there are no people to hold people's hands, but our core clients are enterprise. I said, look, if you join, what we need to do is build the enterprise product. We built Pencil Pro and launched that about 18 months ago. And it's being rolled out by many of the world's biggest advertisers.
And very simply, what it does is it's a SaaS tech platform that aggregates all of the best models. So from... ChatGPT-4, to Gemini, to Stability, to DALI, Adobe Firefly, et cetera, et cetera. And it connects straight through to the ad account. So you can publish directly to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, you name it. And in the center, you basically can decide what it is you're looking to do.
So are you looking for a strategic insight? Are you looking for just an image? Do you want to finish YouTube video or a TikTok video or Instagram video? And you can literally, in minutes, put together content that historically would have taken weeks.
And what we have seen, I think the really unique thing about Pencil, and by the way, it was called Pencil through a belief that it would enhance human creativity, not replace it, that it should be as easy to use as a pencil and as good for creativity as a pencil. But we've made over a million ads using Gen AI across 5,000 brands, spent more than a billion dollars through the platform since 2018.
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Chapter 6: What is the importance of surrounding yourself with honest feedback?
We want to create this platform for young leaders. And I remember we were on stage with like Kofi Annan and Desmond Tutu and Bill Clinton. Oh, my God. What are all these people? This year, we've got everyone from Jane Goodall to Sylvia. We've got incredible people coming. And it's amazing where these little acorns lead.
It sounds amazing what you're saying. And I think it's also the execution. I think in your book, Who Cares Wins, you actually have a beautiful quote and I may be butchering it a little bit, but you talk about different corporate social responsibility. And one of the quotes that I loved, I think it was from Lee Scott, the CEO of Walmart at the time.
And it said something like, we will not be measured by aspiration, we'll be measured by our actions. It's basically what you live for, which is really interesting because you're also taking action. You're not just thinking about it, which is probably the difference with a lot of people.
Well, the other quote I love is the, I think it's the Henry Ford one. No one ever built a reputation based on what they said they were going to do. I think it's also very true. I mean, I'm not sure how many of your audience
budding or current entrepreneurs but the number of people who have a business idea they never do ideas are really easy and honestly whatever your idea is there's someone else in the world who's had it too execution's hard and i think being obsessively focused on when you've had an idea just be ruthlessly focused on on everything you need to do to make that idea successful
That to me is a big one. And I think there's a little bit of a myth today because it looks easy. We talked a little bit about it, right? You see it on Instagram. You see it at TechCrunch. You see the successes. What you don't necessarily see is the rejections, the how long it take, the overnight success that took 10 years in the making. So I think you don't see those.
So there's like a little bit of this freedom myth. I can have it all. You could, just not at the same time. So let's tack it up.
We like to have a simple summary, you know, the narrative, oh, it was brilliant. There was one over the weekend, a little video on one of the entrepreneur things I'm obviously following on Instagram, the time that Bill Gates and Microsoft saved Apple by putting 150 million in, you know, and you're like, oh my God, I never knew that. I love the Amazon story on every level.
One of my favorite headlines is the front cover of the New York Times about 20 years ago. And it says, Barnes and Noble sue Amazon for over their false claims that they're the world's number one online retailer of books. And you're like, remember, that was a credible thing that people might dispute that they were the number one in books rather than the number one in everything.
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Chapter 7: How can entrepreneurs overcome rejection and doubt?
I went several times and lectured at Harvard with Mike Tushman, who's the guy who'd done the Havas case. And again, it was nice to say going to Harvard to lecture, but I learned so much in those sessions. It was some of the questions and was really interesting and helpful in sort of perfecting the business plan and deck for the business.
So I think sometimes it's not like, oh my God, I've got to go and help this person. It's in doing that, it's going to help you. But then I also think, and I think one of the things that I've been very, focused on throughout my career is promoting senior women, putting women into CEO roles.
And I think one of the things I would say, we're still in a world where senior men get a much easier ride than senior women. It's so much easier. I was asked to do a talk on behalf of, because I do a lot of things around women in tech, and I was asked to do a talk. And the question I asked in the room was, how many people in the room
think that their gender or race has ever held them back, and obviously not a single white man in the room put their hand up, and pretty much every woman did. There's a great mug in a shop down the street which says, behind every great woman is a great woman, and I think that should be more true.
I don't think it necessarily is as true as it should be, but I'm kind of proud of having a great network of very senior female execs who some have mentored me, some I've mentored. But then I think also you end up being in circles where you just meet and get introduced to really interesting people. So things that start by you thinking, you know, okay, this is the right thing to do.
It's a good thing to do. End up actually coming back and being a good thing.
And to me, that's so important because although I'm the person that always says we have our own gifts, we can figure it out, we can break the glass ceiling, but the truth is it is harder. And there are a lot of situations that we're just not invited to the table. And we actually need ambassadors like you that open these doors. So to me, that's really, really important.
I love that you're doing that.
And even honestly, one of my observations is, I have never promoted, and I'm maybe pushing this slightly, but this is directionally 100% true. I have never promoted a senior man into a role, and they've said, I'm not sure I'm ready. Do you think I'm good enough? It's much more about time. I'm really good, and it's taking you this long to recognize that. But honestly, the number of times where
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Chapter 8: What is the vision behind Brandtech and its impact on the advertising industry?
Basically 30 and under, you know, the sweet spot is sort of 20 to 30 because, you know, typically sort of sub 20, this isn't always true, but usually under 20, most people haven't really had a big impact in the world yet. And we're really about 20.
real impact it's not with all due respect hey someone raised some money in a bake sale at school you know it's not yet genital mutilation abolished in the gambia or they you know had a rate law passed in 37 states in the us it's that kind of level and we are a mix of The world of business, the world of charities and NGOs, the world of politics, the world of journalism.
We have a Journalist of the Year Award every year. We have a Politician of the Year Award every year. I mean, I think without commenting on the election this year, I mean, the fact that up until recently, we were looking at two old white male candidates, neither of whom particularly inspirational, you know, says, shouldn't we get more young people into politics?
Yeah, that's a good idea, yeah.
And I think it is still one of the ways of driving the most change, you know, the quickest, but it's not necessarily a career that young people are drawn towards. But no, it's kind of all-encompassing from the world of business, the world of charity, the world of entrepreneurs, so...
So David, from everything that you've doing with brand tech and raising so much money and disrupting marketing and the impact that you're creating, the book, like I can't even catch up with everything, David. What would be an advice that you would give your younger self?
One of the things that I think all young people should have in their mind is that you're going to probably go on to do amazing things that today you're completely intimidated or in awe of someone. And actually, you'll end up doing something that's 100 times bigger than that. I mean, I still remember the day that I got to meet the then global CEO of Havas. I was like, oh!
oh my God, I ended up being that person and now look back on it as a bit of a small job. And so I think it's really hard to understand when you're just starting out just how far you can go. So I think the second piece of advice would be believe in yourself and absolutely listen to people. and particularly listen to smart people.
But at the end of the day, trust your own judgment and believe in yourself because, and this is particularly true of entrepreneurs, but pretty much everything any entrepreneur has done, most people have told them is a bad idea. I've told my story, everyone telling me you can never raise money with a PowerPoint. I would have stopped and I wouldn't have the company.
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