How AI Will Revolutionize Advertising by 2025: Insights from David Jones

On entering a meeting room in Brandtech’s offices in London’s 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.”

It is impressive. But after five minutes of watching him generate fake images of me in different scenarios, my eyes wander longingly towards my notepad of unanswered questions. Jones has had a successful career, from intern to chief executive to start-up entrepreneur; he has worked for billionaires and prime ministers; and he is unafraid of ruffling the feathers of under-performing peers.

For now, he persists with his presentation. Next, he shows me 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 explains how it was utilized to quickly create a hypothetical toothpaste named Plaque Slayer. “What’s interesting is the speed with which it comes back with something as good as humans would,” says Jones.

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 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 percent 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 others — 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. 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.

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. From there, he went on to launch Brandtech.

At first, he raised $350 million from investment giants and then the company raised further funds, giving it a private market valuation of $4 billion. The mission was to offer clients “better, faster and cheaper” services.

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 percent 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 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.”

What next for Brandtech? Marcus Anselm, a partner at media acquisitions adviser Jegi Clarity, is keeping a close eye on the business. He says that when Jones started out, he faced “some skepticism” from critics. “Ten years on, having made some impressive acquisitions, Brandtech has a distinct positioning.”

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.”