The Brandtech Group

You & Mr Jones Media hires Mindshare Global CFO Dawn Dickie

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on the back of exponential growth, as new category explodes

New York, New York, January 12, 2022: You & Mr Jones is changing its name to The Brandtech Group. The move puts a spotlight on the positioning that has fueled the global group’s extraordinary growth since its launch in 2015, and the spectacular velocity of the overall brandtech category it pioneered.

Founder and CEO, David Jones, says: “When I created the group six years ago there were two of us and You & Mr Jones seemed like a great name for a tiny start-up. We’re now a leading global enterprise-level marketing technology group, and the largest global digital partner for some of the world’s biggest brands, we’re over half a billion in revenue, have more than 5,000 employees, 18 senior partners, and brandtech has gone from being an idea to being a huge category – so I felt it was time to reflect that by changing the name of the company.”

When Jones founded the company in 2015, he used the term ‘brandtech’ to describe the ways technology could connect brands with people far beyond traditional advertising, and how it could help companies do their marketing better, faster and cheaper. Since then, the legacy advertising and marketing services category has been irreversibly disrupted – pre-Covid, US $32BN was wiped off the market cap of the ‘Big 5’ traditional holding companies. At the same time, an increasing number of innovative, tech-enabled companies are joining the brandtech category as traditional advertising becomes less relevant to brands that are increasingly seeking to connect with people in ways that are more authentic and less annoying.

Alongside this, the role of global marketers has been totally transformed. The company was created to help CMOs who were being challenged by a new marketing world. Technology was causing an explosion in the amount of content and formats brands needed to produce for all the different channels. Every individual had become a content creator and the cost of creating content was being dramatically reduced. Brands had access to unprecedented levels of data while data itself was impacted by a constantly evolving regulatory environment, and people were shopping online more and more.

CMOs who, in previous decades, had perfected the traditional TV marketing playbook, needed urgent help to crack the digital, mobile, and technology marketing playbook. Jones set out to solve this by acquiring companies in highly-disruptive fast-growing sectors to help global brands do their marketing, better, faster and cheaper in the post-advertising world.

Since launch, the group has defined and led a new era of marketing and tech-enabled commerce at a global scale. The group has also been heavily committed to what’s now being called the metaverse since day one, with visionary early investments in cutting-edge companies, such as a series of investments beginning in 2015 in AR gaming and real-world metaverse pioneer, Niantic, which is now valued at US $9BN, as well as, among others, a 2018 investment in the AI Foundation, which builds metahumans.

To mark its name change, The Brandtech Group is minting the You & Mr Jones logo into an NFT and then fractionalizing it into multiple tokens that will be distributed to The Brandtech Group employees. The idea is that the tokens will come with voting rights on charitable donations totaling $100,000 that the group will then make.

Partner, Emma Cookson, says: “It can sometimes be hard to fully grasp how fundamentally marketing has been disrupted by technology and the mobile revolution. The group has specifically been built to help global clients solve the many challenges they now face and all the associated pain points: the vast amounts of content, the layers of complexity, the deployment of data, leveraging the power and diversity of the Creator Economy, a fragmented and growing collection of suppliers that can be rationalized by moving operations in-house, improving output and results. We’re proud to be the largest digital partner for some of the world’s leading brands, helping them solve these pain points, and are looking forward to helping even more.”

The accelerating demand for the group’s brandtech services is evidenced by the fact that its 2021 revenue is in excess of $500MM and its YTD Q3 2021 organic revenue growth was more than 50 percent, following 27.1 percent net revenue organic growth rate for 2020.

“When I said we were changing name someone asked me if this meant I was leaving the company!” joked founder and CEO David Jones. “Absolutely not! I couldn’t be more excited about the future and the role we can play helping drive our clients’ growth as Web3 and the metaverse further revolutionize marketing.”

All entities that previously carried the You & Mr Jones name are also being renamed, while the individual group companies will retain their existing brand names.

For The Brandtech Group’s views and predictions on the future of marketing and the metaverse, please read the Founder’s Letter by David Jones here.