Reshaping the Future of Advertising and Investor-Driven Brand Success
Jon Bond, Founder and CEO of Bond World, reflects on his decades of experience in advertising and reveals how equity-linked compensation models can transform the relationship between brands and agencies to align business goals for sustainable growth
Jon Bond is one of the most recognized thought leaders and entrepreneurs in the advertising and marketing industry. In 1987, at the age of 29, Bond co-founded Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners, a New York City advertising agency that pioneered guerrilla marketing techniques, including sidewalk advertising, popup stores, and other forms of what would eventually come to be known as viral marketing.
The firm became the largest independently held agency in the United States, with clients including BMW, Target, Citi, Capital One, Tommy Hilfiger, Victoria's Secret, Verizon, AT&T, Snapple, and Delta Air Lines, among others. At the time of its sale to MDC Partners in 2009, the firm had billings of $1BB.
In 2011, he became the CEO of Big Fuel Communications, a marketing, content distribution, and social media company that served clients including GM, Gatorade, T-Mobile, McDonald's, Budweiser, Yahoo! and more. The company was acquired by Publicis in 2012.
A sought-after speaker and commentator, Bond has appeared on CNN, The Today Show, and 20/20; played a central role in the Fox News network special Sex, Lies and Advertising; and written for Forbes and Ad Age.
Jon recently launched BondWorld, a new hybrid agency that creates immersive brand worlds for up-and-coming brands and occasionally invests capital to accelerate valuations. He is also working on a book and a documentary series.
The Continuum sat down with Jon to talk about the last four decades of advertising and why a model that ties brand success and agency compensation together is needed once again.
You’ve had a huge career in advertising, including starting and leading several agencies, but let’s go back to the beginning. How did you get started?
One summer in college, I had a job as a messenger. It was probably the worst job in New York. There were only two kinds of people in this messenger place: kids like me and retirees who were only allowed to make a certain amount of money, or they’d lose their pensions. Seriously, there was no one between 20 and 70.
Believe it or not, two crazy things happened on the same day. First, I found a dusty old copy of David Ogilvy’s Confessions of An Advertising Man on a bench. Why would it be there? I flipped through it and thought, “Hey, this looks like fun. I could do this.” Then, I’m delivering these packages up and down Madison Avenue. I found myself in one of these slick offices with all of these well-put-together professionals and realized it was an ad agency. I thought, “I definitely could do this.”
I graduated from college in one of the many recessions of the 1980s when no one could get a job. I got rejected by a whole bunch of ad agencies. I had this trip to Chicago planned, but before I went, I called up all the agencies there that had already sent me rejection letters and said I’d be in town for a day. I asked if they could just meet with me while I was there, and they all said yes. It worked so well that I tried the same thing in New York. I called up agencies that had already rejected me and said that I was getting flown in by J. Walter Thompson and asked if I could stop by while I was in the area. I secured around 12 interviews, and that’s how I got my first job in advertising. I like to say that I worked for every bad agency in New York in those early years.
You were only 29 when you started Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners. How did you make that happen?
Richard Kirshenbaum and I had a taste for the finer things in life, but not the budget. We were working for agencies about two blocks apart and decided to start a lunch-hour ad agency. It was basically us doing freelance work at nice restaurants and just about breaking even. Then, we managed to get in front of Kenneth Cole. He hated agencies and wanted to do something cool.
Our first ad for him said, “Imelda Marcos bought 2,700 pairs of shoes. She could have at least had the courtesy to buy one of ours.” We did it without a media plan. Anytime anything in the world would happen, we’d do an ad about it and sign his name. This was before social media, and no brands were doing this. Everything we did got picked up by the press, and Kenneth Cole’s business grew tremendously. The funny thing was that the campaign got really famous, but no one knew who was doing it.
Richard was working at Thompson at the time, and his boss, or maybe his boss’s boss, was James Paterson, the now-famous mystery writer. At the time, James was the executive creative director. He would get to the office at 5 am to write his first book before he started work. One morning, he comes out of his office holding a copy of one of our ads, asking who made it. Richard said it was our freelance account, and Paterson told him to bring it to Thompson. That’s when we realized we had something and decided to quit our jobs and go for it.
“We didn’t believe anyone listened to advertising, so we decided to do stuff that got people talking. We wanted stuff that created buzz but didn’t feel like traditional advertising.”
The agency was pretty hot right away. Why do you think that was?
We pretty much started from zero. I think Kenneth Cole gave us a retainer of $2,500 a month. We took space at the front of a real estate company, and when big clients would come, we put our sign over theirs so it looked like we had the whole floor.
We started getting buzz within six months. New York Magazine ran a seven-page article on us with the headline “Hot Copy.” Then Barbara Walters saw it and did 20 minutes on national TV. Today, a young, hot, hip agency is not unusual, but this was the first of its kind. People in their 20s didn’t start agencies, and new agencies were just as staid as the old ones. I remember somebody asked us, “Do your parents know you're doing this?”
We created a genre and that was very newsworthy. And our work was edgy. We got Bob Giraldi to let us do ads for Positano restaurant. One of our ads had the headline “An authentic Italian restaurant where no one's been shot. Yet.” It was controversial and got attention, to the point where we even received angry calls from an Italian American Association for that one.
Was there a philosophy behind the unconventional work that you were doing?
Our philosophy was we were cynical bastards. We didn’t believe anyone listened to advertising, so we decided to do stuff that got people talking. We wanted stuff that created buzz but didn’t feel like traditional advertising.
The original idea of the agency was to generate word of mouth because word of mouth is more believable than traditional brand-to-consumer advertising. Everyone says that now, but no one else was doing it at the time.
“You have to get into an almost-Godlike space to stay independent forever, like Wieden + Kennedy. Agencies that can outlive their founders and stay independent are few and far between.”
You’ve said that the firm's heyday was in the mid-1990s when you were about 150 people and making cultural headlines, but before you got some of the clients that the firm was known for, like BMW, Target, or Wendy’s. Why do you feel that way?
We had a lot of fun and garnered a lot of attention. I’m jumping around in time, but we had Paris Hilton working as an intern as part of the Simple Life, and there was a movie with Bruce Willis and Halle Berry set at an ad agency. They made us—a hybrid of Richard and me—into a character in the movie. Andy Spade was in our creative department. He and Kate started Kate Spade from there. I remember that the night before they launched, they were in the art department trying to decide whether the label should be on the inside or outside of the bag.
We rounded up the best young people, and it seemed that everyone wanted to work there. David Buckingham took a big boot, put it in a box, and left it in reception. When we opened it, there was a note that said, “Now that I've got my foot in the door, take a look at my book.” That idea has been copied a thousand times, but he originated it. There was also one day when every square of toilet paper in all of the bathrooms had writing on them. They’d been stamped “I’m willing to start at the bottom” and were signed by Josh Miller with his phone number. All of these people went on to have significant careers.
We kept doing great work, but much bigger accounts like Wendy’s or BMW meant the agency got a little more corporate. It just comes with the territory—people weren’t roller skating around the office anymore.
You sold Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners to MDC, a big holding company, in 2009. What made you decide to sell?
It’s a tough business. You can only do it for so long before you get burnt out. I always say that your prime in an advertising agency is when you are the same age as the CMOs. Once you get too much older than that—when you’re the same age as the CEOs—the CMOs don’t want to hang out with you anymore. You might be better talent-wise than before, but from a chemistry standpoint, you're not. When that happens, it’s a good time to sell.
You have to get into an almost-Godlike space to stay independent forever, like Wieden + Kennedy. Agencies that can outlive their founders and stay independent are few and far between. It’s like saying that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are going to retire, but the new guys will still be the Rolling Stones.
“I want to reconnect the compensation with the result. That’s what we’ve done with my new agency. If we invest or do work for equity and the result is that the company gets sold for a lot of money or goes public, and I have a share of that, our interests are aligned.”
Given that inevitable end, would you start an independent agency today?
I just started another agency called Bond World. It’s really a hybrid VC agency. We work for clients for equity and upside, and sometimes, we invest some money. We get fees in cash as well, obviously, but it’s a different model that’s more like the early days of advertising. Back then, a 15% commission was pretty standard. If the ads work, the budget goes up, and your fees go up. It was a meritocracy.
That started to change after Ted Bates sold his firm to Saatchi & Saatchi in the late 80s and brought home over $100 million in the process. Marketers got mad, thinking that agency guys were getting rich off of them, and began renegotiating their fees. They’d offer 11% or pay based on FTEs (full-time equivalents). They were buying bodies—I’ll take 20% of that person’s time and 30% of them—as if we’re brick layers. That's one of the things that has commoditized the industry because it doesn’t give you as much room to say, “Hey, but my bricks are way better than the other guy's bricks.”
Can you tell us a little more about the model you’ve created with your new agency?
I want to reconnect the compensation with the result. That’s what we’ve done with my new agency. If we invest or do work for equity and the result is that the company gets sold for a lot of money or goes public, and I have a share of that, our interests are aligned. That’s the idea.
It’s a model closer to an ad agency in the 80s, where you get a share of the spoils if you win, and you get nothing if you lose. In some cases, you can actually lose money. You’re right in there with the client, which means you must be very careful which ones you go into business with.
Here’s my very sophisticated algorithm for what kinds of companies I sign up; there are only three components. Number one: world-class skills; the company needs to have people who know what they're doing. Number two: a product or service that has a point of difference that's defensible. Or, as Warren Buffett says, something you can build a moat around. And most importantly, people you’d go to dinner with and not ask for the check before the appetizers come.
Our relationships are also more strategic because we’re dealing with the founder, the CEO, and the board. We’re at the grownup’s table. I believe that’s why CMOs get fired, by the way. I know there’s research about high turnover in CMOs, but I’ll tell you right now that they get fired because they were put at the kiddie table to begin with.
“What every CMO has to learn is to take whatever they are going to say in marketing speak and translate it into business metrics.”
That’s an interesting point. Can you explain what you mean by that? And do you have advice for CMOs who’d like to keep their jobs longer?
I'm on many public boards, and the people on these boards are lawyers and finance people. They’re talking about valuation. They never, ever use marketing terminology. Ever.
CMOs come in and try to tell them about brand equity and how, somewhere down the line, that will make the valuation go up. These people don’t care. They care about business, not marketing metrics, and they care about stock prices. Some CEOs have their compensation tied to the stock prices. They get $30 million if the stock price is at $40, but nothing if it’s at $39. I’ve watched CMOs come and try to explain marketing to these guys. It’s like a trainwreck; they just pat the guy on the shoulder and send him back to the kids’ table.
I can tell you when I learned this lesson for myself. I was working with a private equity firm that wanted to buy ad agencies. They were looking at two agencies. One of them was Droga5, who they thought was asking for too much money, and I thought it was the steal of the century at that price. The other was some schlocky agency that was happy with a lower valuation. We were in a meeting, and one of the partners asked me why I thought Droga5 was better. I started by saying, “Well, they’re super cool.” And the guy cut me off because cool didn’t mean anything to him. So, I tried again to put it into language that he’d understand, “The coolest agencies attract the most clients, get the highest multiples, and sell for the most money. If the s**tty agency was going to do that, I'd say, buy the s**tty agency.” A big smile came across his face, and he turned to the other guys in the room and said, “Oh, I get it. He's one of us!” (I wasn’t too sure if that was a compliment or an insult).
What every CMO has to learn is to take whatever they are going to say in marketing speak and translate it into business metrics. They don’t want to hear that you’re disrupting a category—or worse—that you’re going to ‘own’ a category. They see through that. They want the answer to one question, “How does this make me money?”
Before we go, you have two projects in the works: a book and a documentary series. Can you give us a sneak preview of what those will be about?
The book is called Sins of the Mad Men. It’s about how marketing screwed up the concept of marketing by eroding trust and what’s being done to fix it. The initial idea behind marketing was really about lying to people, whether it was PT Barnum saying there’s a sucker born every minute or the Radium Girls offering a skin-care product with actual Radium in it that caused cancer, but sure, it made your skin glow. There was a lot of flimflam and snake oil, and that’s why people don’t trust advertisers.
The documentary series has some of the same themes. It’s just called Advertising because it will show the whole history. Ken Burns is a hero of mine. When he does a documentary on baseball, it’s not the White Sox/Black Sox scandal or just about the Yankees. It’s called Baseball. When he does the Civil War, it’s not just about the great general or the battles; it looks at the whole thing. That’s what we’re going to do with advertising. Start at the beginning and tell the whole story like it’s never been done before.
March 13, 2025
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