The Capability Question
Jason Warnes is a Marketing Advisor and Investor with thirty years across agency, consulting and client-side leadership. Fifteen years at AKQA took him from the pioneering early days of digital to MD and Global Head of Talent. Three years as Partner at Deloitte Digital, then eight years at WPP as Global Client Lead for Shell and Volvo. Now independent, advising PrimeStar Sports and investing in bobi.car.
“The application of technology to solve a particular problem. Never technology for its own sake.”
Jason Warnes is an independent marketing advisor and investor with thirty years across agency, consulting and client-side leadership. From the early digital pioneering days at AKQA to Partner at Deloitte Digital and Global Client Lead for Shell and Volvo at WPP, he has spent his career pairing strategic capability with the practical craft of making the work happen.
He began his career in 1997 at Aspen Marketing Communications, joining AKQA in 1999 where he spent fifteen years rising from Group Account Director to Managing Director and Global Head of Talent. Three of those years were in Berlin (2010:2013), setting up AKQA’s seventh office and leading the work for VW and Audi, including the winning pitch for Volkswagen’s global digital business strategy and the beta launch of Audi’s on-demand mobility service in San Francisco. At AKQA he also worked across Ferrari, Fiat, BMW, Rover, Land Rover, Microsoft, Orange and Sainsbury’s, and led the account that produced Fiat eco:Drive, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions.
In 2015 he joined Deloitte Digital as Partner, responsible for UK digital marketing and design and leading the global Digital Transformation through Customer Experience practice for the automotive industry. He returned to WPP in 2018 as Global Client Lead for Shell, and from 2021 led Team Volvo as Global Client Lead and Managing Partner of the AKQA Group, running the For Life, For All Life and Hej there campaigns across the full breadth of WPP’s communications, experience, commerce and data capabilities.
In June 2025 he became independent, working with founders as a marketing advisor and investor. He is Marketing Advisor to PrimeStar Sports and a board-level investor and advisor to bobi.car, which is building the world’s first AI-led car buying assistant.
“When AI takes the heavy lifting, what is exposed is brand and creative.”
“Tell me something that wasn’t possible five years ago that is possible today.”
Warnes keeps returning to the brief he had to respond to when he first applied to AKQA in 1998. Thirty years of agency and consulting leadership later, the discipline is unchanged. Technology earns its place only by solving a real problem. Technology brought in for its own sake, approved by a CFO or signed off as a big transformation programme, ends up underused and disappointing, and the numbers bear it out across every client organisation he has seen. The brief is simple: what is now possible that wasn’t before, and what does that let us do for the customer?
“Strategic capability cuts through everything. A function just mirrors the silos on the other side.”
In consultancies, strategic consulting is capability-led. It cuts through delivery, technology and every other practice. In most client organisations marketing ends up treated as a function, and that is where transformation breaks down: the experience team talks to the experience agency, the campaign team to the campaign agency, the digital team to the digital agency. The thread is never consistent. Real transformation needs three things and has no shortcuts: CEO mandate, practical understanding of the work, and realistic time horizons. Missing one and nothing happens.
“The new front line for brands is how they appear in AI, not search.”
As AI absorbs the optimisation and performance layers that have dominated marketing for a decade, what remains exposed is brand and creative. When optimisation becomes table stakes, only brand distinctiveness stands out. The next front line, in Warnes’s framing, is how brands appear inside AI engines and agents, rather than how they rank in search results. Smart businesses and CFOs already recognise this: AI is making the case for stronger brand investment, not weaker. The brands that invest now will be the visible ones when agents transact on behalf of their customers.
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