When David Jones tells big brand bosses they can halve their content creation budgets within the next two to three years, they usually raise an eyebrow.
“One CEO of a big global brand looked at my slide and said, ‘Is it not 90%, David?’” Jones tells The Drum. “And I said, ‘Well, it is actually 90%, but when I say 50%, people think I’m making this huge overclaim.”
It’s not often Jones is accused of understatement. As anyone with even a passing interest in advertising will know, this Englishman in New York has no problem being labelled outspoken – especially on the topic of the traditional agency world he left behind 10 years ago this summer to start the Brandtech Group, then known, less bashfully, as You & Mr Jones.
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During my hour in his company, Mr Jones is not holding back. In fact, when it comes to generative AI’s impact on the marketing industry, he could hardly be more bullish. “The new language of creativity is artificial intelligence,” he says. “It’s not a question of whether artificial intelligence is more creative than humans – it’s when.”
To emphasize his point, Jones opens a laptop overflowing with tabs. “I’d love to say I made these for you…” he says, before making it abundantly clear this is not his first rodeo as he seamlessly cycles between well-rehearsed decks, AI-generated ads, client demos and even archive article clippings depicting him as “the man to kill off the creative agency” upon launching his firm a decade ago. “Look at this,” he says, pulling up an animated video for a banking client. “It takes 10 seconds to make this.”
While few can match Jones’s Tasmanian Devil-like energy, I point out to him that all his holding company competitors are doing their own spin on breathless AI demos promising to have the answers to clients’ prayers. But though his rivals’ AI platforms are receiving heavy investment and promotion, he is dismissive of their current feasibility. “Any time one of them says to you they’ve got something great, say to them, ‘I want to log into your platform now and I want to create content on it and publish it to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.’ If they say yes, it’s real. And if they say you can’t do that, it’s bullshit.”
By contrast, Jones points to Pencil, the Brandtech Group’s AI advertising creation tool, which has seven years of output behind it, as evidence that he is not all talk. “Last quarter, with Pencil, we created 235,000 pieces of in-market content for three of the world’s top 10 advertisers. And it was 62% faster, 55% cheaper and 40% better.”
The ‘better’ part of this equation may be a matter of taste, which we’ll return to, but the appeal of ‘faster’ and ‘cheaper’ is undeniable for increasingly under-pressure marketers. Jones considers it inconceivable that clients won’t begin to demand such savings. “If you take L’Oréal’s public numbers – $40bn in revenue, $13bn marketing spend – and guess that 20% of that is non-working media and estimate you save 30% of that… I mean, the level of savings you’re getting into is just mindblowing.”
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As The Drum has already reported, the onset of AI-produced advertising is necessitating a rapid rethink of how agencies charge for their services. “If you’re a traditional business that has relied on selling humans and you’ve got 100,000 of them, you’re going to have a very challenged future,” Jones says.
But what about his own model? Brandtech is, Pencil aside, ultimately a collection of companies that look suspiciously like agencies, such as Oliver, Gravity Road and Jellyfish. Jones’s response is that Brandtech is monetized as though it were a combined service and software business.
“SaaS and tech is much more profitable than humans, for obvious reasons. Of course, I would say the most successful and effective users of [Pencil] have built gen AI content studios in-house using Oliver and Jellyfish. But our clients can use it directly. They can ask their other holding company agency partners to use it. And so [even if we’re not doing the work] we’re still getting the SaaS tech fee. So I personally think for a business like ours, gen AI makes you more profitable, not less profitable.”
Regardless, the last rites that are being read for the billable hours model should not be confused with the death of creativity, Jones insists. “We don’t buy into ‘it’s the death of creativity.’ We think you’re going to see the greatest creative revolution in history. Ad agencies are missing in action. It’s like they didn’t get the memo and, obviously, they’re threatened by it.”
He draws a sharp contrast between traditional creative departments and the rise of influencer-led content. “If you take the creative community, they just all want to tell you that I’m a special creative snowflake and AI could never possibly do what I do because I’m amazing and brilliant. And then if you take the creator economy, the influencers, they’re all creating the best content in the world you’ve ever seen.”
For all Jones’s excitement, he knows there’s a fine line between being perceived as an AI evangelist and an AI zealot. He points to Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, as “the poster child for getting it wrong.”
“He came out and went, ‘We don’t need to hire anyone any more. We don’t need humans. We can replace you all with agents.’ Huge backlash. And what did he post a few weeks ago? ‘We’ve understood that the future is all about humans and we’ve had a moment of enlightenment.’ That’s what his post says.”
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Brandtech has partnered on the creation of the Centre for Creative AI, a UK hub for talent and tech
Jones does not subscribe to the view that the adoption of AI automatically means the elimination of people. On the contrary, he says Brandtech’s headcount will grow. “We’ll probably have two to three times the number of employees we have today, but we’ll be able to do 100 times more work.”
Some fear the rise of AI will disproportionately hurt the kind of junior roles that Jones himself was a beneficiary of when he started his career as an account executive at BDH Manchester in 1989. Indeed, only last month, headlines abounded that the number of new entry-level UK jobs had dropped by almost a third since the launch of ChatGPT.
But Jones believes the tools will, in fact, democratize and even speed up progression. “What I’m already seeing with some of our fastest rising stars is that it’s AI that’s created that turbocharge in their career. A lot of the content I’m showing you today has been created by our most junior people who don’t come from creative backgrounds.”
Traditional training isn’t even keeping pace with the speed at which people can become adept users of this technology, Jones argues. “About two months ago, I sent a memo to our little talent team saying it would be amazing to turn these two people into brilliant creatives. And honestly, I was thinking about the program we were going to put them through. And then Veo 3 [the latest incarnation of Google’s AI video tool] launched and they’ve just become brilliant creatives.”
And if people dismiss the output from junior teams using AI? “If someone says, ‘Yeah, but they’re shit,’ they are every bit as good as 80% of what ad agencies produce. If you grew up in the UK, it’s a special market because the level of creativity is extremely high and the level of advertising is extremely high. But, you know, just turn the TV on in America…”
As part of its thinking around talent, the Brandtech Group has partnered with researchers from University College London and Royal College of Art to launch a new Centre for Creative AI specifically for the UK’s creative industries. The center, set to open in October, will allow young creatives to collaborate with and grow alongside AI developments.
In Jones’s mind, it’s clear that these new recruits won’t be entering the same advertising industry as he did. “It’s a gen AI arms race,” he says.
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