You & Mr Jones CEO on metaverse-focused rebrand: ‘we’re using tech to connect brands and people’

The company, which also owns significant shares of Niantic, Pinterest, Zappar and other tech companies, is headed by David Jones, who previously served as the global chief executive at Havas. Jones says the rebrand is a natural extension of his original vision for the company. “The reason I called it ‘Brandtech Group’ is that it was a belief that advertising would become a less and less relevant way for brands to connect with people,” he tells The Drum. In lieu of advertising, he says, technology is becoming an increasingly integral part of every brand’s arsenal. “Look at ... the enormous growth in streaming and the number of players in that space, the huge growth in platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which just underscore that ... the future is going to be about using technology to connect brands and people.”

Jones has been using the term “brandtech” as a term to describe this concept since the company’s founding in 2015 (he went so far as to file a request to trademark the term "BRANDTECH" in 2016; the request was approved in January of 2020). And from the sounds of it, his vision has remained consistent over the course of the past six years – in large part because the problems he set out to face have only become bigger monsters.

“Marketing has been totally disrupted by technology,” he says. “You know, we used to make a few TV commercials and measure with that a year later – and it was relatively easy. Now we need to create huge amounts of content, literally tens of thousands of pieces of content on a weekly basis for all of the channels. We have access to unprecedented levels of data, and all of that is getting increasingly complex with GDPR and cookies going away. Meanwhile, every single person on the planet has become a content creator. And everyone is increasingly shopping online.”

Beyond these developments, technology as a differentiator is becoming ever more critical for brands in the wake of the pandemic and amid historically high rates of inflation. Jones’s vision has been to solve for these increasingly complex problems – and then to scale globally.

And by this measure, he’s proven fairly successful. In 2015, he raised $300m to build the small startup dubbed You & Mr Jones. Since then, the venture has transformed into a 5,000-person operation serving as a trusted partner to some of the world’s top brands. It tallied a 50% year-on-year jump in organic revenue at the end of Q3 last year – on top of the previous year’s 27% growth in revenue. Per Jones: “Business is booming.”

To maintain this momentum, Jones is eyeing the metaverse. In tandem with today’s announcement, Jones published a blog post detailing his thoughts on the future of marketing and “brandtech” within the context of the emerging metaverse, which he anticipates will be “the biggest and most exciting thing” he’ll encounter in his career. He spells out a few critical emerging trends likely to shape the future of marketing and transacting, including the shift toward decentralization and the rise of the creator economy, innovation in virtual reality (VR) tech and the staying power of NFTs (to celebrate its rebrand, The Brandtech Group itself says it will be “minting the You & Mr Jones logo into an NFT and then fractionalizing it into multiple tokens [to be distributed among employees and that] ... will come with voting rights on charitable donations,” per an announcement today).

The company’s investments in the AI Foundation as well as AR gaming company Niantic – which is now valued at nearly $9bn – are likely to play key roles in its forthcoming metaverse-focused initiatives. “It’s going to be the most exciting next five or 10 years in marketing that we’ve seen,” says Jones.

Some industry players, however, are skeptical of the whole schtick. “The new emphasis by agencies on the metaverse actually feels reactive, not proactive,” says Brady Donnelly, managing director at Sela, a PCA Group agency. Specifically, he says, it feels like a knee-jerk response to an influx of metaverse-focused dialogue that has emerged in the wake of Facebook’s October announcement.

“More importantly,” he says, “it seems to wrongly suggest that the metaverse is a standalone milestone and not just one stop on the same continuum as all other significant digital marketing evolutions over the past thirty years – evolutions that happen in marketing almost constantly.” Donnelly argues that while the metaverse is a sexy topic du jour, it may not have any greater implications for marketing strategies than “more mundane” developments such as infrastructural iOS updates and consumer data protection legislation.

Jones, for his part, is confident in the direction in which The Brandtech Group is headed. “We see the big holding companies, and they’re great at brand advertising and branding, but they don’t get tech; nor do they want to, because it’s going to totally disrupt their business models,” he says. “And then on the other side, we go to the tech platforms, and they’ve got an amazing [product], but they’re only ever going to recommend their tech platform – they’re never going to be objective. And they also don’t have the expertise in brand. What we need is someone who can combine expertise in brand and expertise in technology. So I called our company a brand tech group [from the get-go]. The most unique thing about it isn’t actually understanding of brand and tech, but the ability to do that at a global scale.”

With this goal in mind, the organization is investing big in digital media, e-commerce and metaverse- and web 3.0-related developments. Jones hopes to expand the group’s global footprint along the way. The latest milestone in the path toward global growth was the acquisition of São Paulo-based data company DP6 – with whom Google works closely – last October. “I built the business with a North American-European footprint, because when you’re starting out, you can’t do everything on day one,” says Jones. “And we built a really solid foundation there – so scaling out globally is now a big objective.”

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