The Brandtech Group:
The Brandtech Group is the world's #1 digital-only marketing group and the leading global generative AI marketing company.
It was founded in June 2015 (as You & Mr Jones) by former Havas Global CEO David Jones, with the simple mission to help brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology. It was renamed The Brandtech Group in January 2022.
Today it is the largest global digital content partner for many of the world's biggest brands and companies, often using its unique in-housing model. It works with eight of the world's top 10 global advertisers and 49 of the world's top 100. Clients include Google, Microsoft, Unilever, LVMH, Morgan Stanley, Bayer, TikTok, Diageo, Reckitt and Renault-Nissan.
Its most recent acquisition was Pencil, the only generative AI marketing company that is powered by $1BN in media spend across 5,000 brands. Typically, Pencil’s ads are 10x faster, with 2x better performance than a brand’s usual baseline. Working with the Group, Pencil launched a new tool, Pencil Pro, which is specifically designed for major global brands and has an industry-leading approach to brand safety, data ringfencing, IP ownership, copyright protection and other policies.
In addition, the Group invests in cutting-edge marketing technology companies and has been active in the AI, AR and the metaverse spaces since 2015. The Group was the very first external investor in Niantic (creators of Pokémon Go), alongside other investments such as AI Foundation (2018), Automat (AI chatbots, 2016), Elsy (AI media planning, 2016), Jivox (dynamic automated content,, 2016), Crossing Minds (deep learning AI recommendation system, 2017), VidMob (automated content, 2018), CreativeX (AI-driven content optimization, 2022), Zappar (AR, 2017), Provenance (blockchain, 2022) and GGP (the world's largest gaming fund).
The Group is one of the most prominent marketing industry voices on the prediction and movement to AI-driven marketing, including generative AI. It was named one of the World's Most Innovative Companies 2021 by Fast Company, and by CB Insights as one of the World's Most Valuable Private Unicorns.
Pencil:
Pencil is a single platform for the deployment of GenAI at scale for enterprise marketing teams. It is unique in aggregating the industry's best AI models with a single set of legal terms and data security policies. It is unique in its focus on generating complete ads - not just text or images - with support for templates, image and video editing and more. It is unique in ingesting brand guideline documents and information and applying that to ad production automatically. It is unique in connecting directly to media accounts to provide AI insights & predictions, with over $1B of media spend already connected. And it is unique in its focus on being client-owned and oriented, allowing brands to equip their agencies and teams with a ready-to-go AI platform that follows brand guidelines and generates ideas predicted to perform, allowing creative teams to do their best work.