10 Questions on Advertising... with Translation president Jonathan Akwue

Seriously, that’s how Jon ended up at Translation. Read the answers below for all the detail on that. But before you do, a quick intro…

Jon is a hugely inspiring industry leader. He’s done the big roles at big agencies thing – global media lead of Publicis Groupe, an APAC client lead, the custodian of Samsung, UBS, Bank of America and Microsoft on local, regional and global scales. He’s done the startup thing – founding graphic design and social media agencies, helping to launch BBC Radio 1Xtra.

And he’s done an incredible job championing diversity and ensuring that cultural relevance and inclusivity is at the top of the agenda. He’s been chair of the Ideas Foundation, a Trustee of Black Cultural Archives, the co-founder of Black Artforms. He’s a former DJ, lifelong hip-hop enthusiast and the author of a graphic novel.

And now Jonathan’s leading Translation, one of the most interesting and exciting agencies on the planet. It all feels so apt. You just know the answers to his 10 questions are gonna be good.

1. If you could go back and relive one day in your career, which would it be?

This could be recency bias, but if I could relive one day, it would be one from recent months. Because coming into Translation feels like the culmination of all my passions and interests, my capabilities and experiences, all coming together as one.

I guess the one day I’m reliving in my mind is a Town Hall I did for the agency just after I joined Translation. It was just an introduction to who I was, so I walked everyone through how hip-hop knocked my world upside-down when I was young, took them all the steps along my journey – from my DJing days to launching a record label, to working at Fallon on the BBC Radio 1Xtra account – and then coming to New York. It’s clichéd but it really does feel like everything I’d done in my life was leading up to that moment.

2. …Now tell us about the day that still gives you nightmares.

I’ve worked with Samsung pretty much on and off for a decade and there’s been some amazing moments, but you get some challenging days too! The great thing about working with Samsung is they have a relentless ambition and drive and everything has to work at ‘the speed of Samsung.’ And that’s faster than a speeding bullet, let me tell you!

But if I was to boil it down to a day that still gives me nightmares… We were in a hotel in Seoul, knowing we had an all-day presentation the following day at Samsung HQ, and at about 11pm, I received notes from the client who had just seen the deck we were going to present and – written in all caps – he was explaining how off the mark the content was.

Realizing you’re going to be up until 4am making changes, then presenting it to Samsung leaders when the car comes at 7am – that was a relatively typical day working for them at the time and I still get the cold sweats! I’m grateful for my time and for the lessons that I learned, but they could be hard lessons.

3. Who gave you the piece of advice you still live by – and what was it?

An old CEO of mine had a little maxim of ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ It’s another cliche – a line that you can get on an Instagram square – but what I always admired about him was that he lived it too. He was always playing 4D chess. When I went into a meeting with him, he had already thought through how other people were going to respond. And when we’d come out, he’d say to me, “OK Jon, what just happened?”

His approach just stuck with me. And it goes back to what I was saying about Samsung. I could have got that email at 11pm and said, “That’s annoying but oh well, we’ve got what we’ve got.” But that’s not how you succeed. You prepare properly for whatever it is you’re going into. You’ve got to put the reps in.

4. What piece of work done by someone else are you truly jealous of?

The piece of work I love to this day is Droga5’s Bing campaign for the launch of Jay-Z’s book. It wasn’t just that the idea was brilliant – that they were going to decode Jay-Z’s life and put extracts from the book in relevant locations – but the craft that they put into it was sensational. The integration with Bing to gamify it and use Bing maps to search for locations was genius. It almost made Bing cool for a minute – which in itself was a tough ask!

5. What’s your elevator pitch to people thinking about getting into the advertising industry for the first time?

If you’re prepared to put the work in, and if you’re prepared to do things that other people would consider crazy, then you may have more fun than you ever thought was possible. There’s no guarantee of riches and fame in this industry, but fun? I think that’s almost a guarantee.

I didn’t come from a privileged background, so I never stop being grateful for the experiences this job offers me. Even when I’m moaning about the stressful times in Seoul – I’m still in Seoul for goodness sake!

The Final Five

6. You now work for Steve Stoute – not many people can say they’re working directly for their hero – how the hell did that happen!?

I’d read Steve Stoute’s book ‘The Tanning of America’ in 2011. It’s a book about how hip-hop culture rewrote the rules of the new economy – and back in 2011 I was so enthused about it that I remember talking to Rory Sutherland and together we pitched the idea of forming a ‘culture’ agency within Ogilvy. We got a pretty flat ‘no’ from the Ogilvy top brass, but it ignited something in me.

Fast forward to 2024 and I’m at The Masters of all places. I’m standing there in the golf shop in Augusta and I see a Black guy in there – as you can imagine there weren’t many Black guys at The Masters – and that guy was Steve Stoute. So I go and introduce myself and told him how he’d had such an influence on my career.

We get into a conversation – I was telling him about working around the world and how I’d fallen in love with New York because it was hip-hop and comic books and everything I cared about since being a kid. He asked me for my details – at The Masters they take your phone off you, so I had to write them on a piece of paper with one of those little golf pencils! – and off he went.

A month later, I get a call from him one Friday. He said, “Listen Jon, I’m going to cut straight to the chase. I’ve spent a year looking for a president for my agency, and I think you’re the person.” I was like, ‘What?’. Literally off the back of a 10-minute conversation at The Masters, is how my journey began. It was a crazy, serendipitous, chance encounter that’s led to the best experience of my life.

7. What’s the secret ingredient to running a big global account?

Number one is you need to be respectful of culture. When you’re running a business like Samsung that’s operating in 75 countries, there are genuine nuances depending on markets and culture. So having an interest and respect for cultures helps.

Number two is that orchestration becomes everything. How can you make operating on a global scale work for you? Having teams that can pick up work so you can start in Europe and move into the US and hand off to Asia and create a flywheel that goes 24-hours per day is really important. Some places have cracked it, some places really haven’t.

And the third thing I’d say is that no matter what size and scale an operation you run, it’s the time you invest in your leadership tier that makes a difference. When I was the global media lead at Publicis for Bank of America, I realized I just had to empower the seven people who reported into me and then they would take care of their teams and so on. Because if you try and take care of everything, it becomes overly daunting and too much to handle.

8. How are you seeing the roles of agencies changing, thinking about how Translation works with creators and influencers more and more?

I think the world of creativity is changing on two fronts. First, I think there’s going to be more collaboration with independent creators of all shapes and sizes – whether that’s musicians or YouTubers or TikTokers. I think that line is blurring already and will blur even more.

And then, of course, you’re going to be increasingly co-piloting with AI. Again, we’re already doing that, but I want to make sure we’re doing it in a culturally nuanced way. Every chatbot sounds English, for example. And if they sound North American, they certainly don’t sound like they’re from the Bronx. I think it’s really important for young Black kids to hear artificial intelligence that sounds like them. So I’m really passionate about solving that and we’ve been speaking with Will.i.Am about doing it, to evolve creativity from both the human end and the AI end.

9. You do a lot around encouraging young people to embrace the creative industry. Has the industry got better at it? What more can we all do?

The biggest challenge is that it’s a supply and demand issue. There are more agencies than there are clients and there are more young people trying to get in than there are agencies. Creative agencies need to create avenues for unconventional talent. I know there are a million different ways people have tried to solve that – and we have come on a long way. But I think fundamentally it means needing to be aware of the supply and demand issue and therefore the need to look for unconventional talent without using the dreaded phrase ‘they may not be a cultural fit.’

10. Translation formed out of Steve’s obsession with hip-hop. What do agency leaders need to learn from hip-hop?

Well actually I think it’s bigger than hip-hop! For agencies like Translation – which is part of United Masters – we’re in the culture import and export business. So think of it this way…

Countries are in the culture import and export business. The US, for example, has been very good at exporting its culture – from Hollywood to music and especially hip-hop and R’n’B.

What you’re seeing now is a reversal of that process. Where the Western world is importing culture. And that’s to do with youth demographics. Young people are at the forefront of culture, and the large majority of people under the age of 25 today live in what we would call the ‘global south’ – Latin America, Africa and Asia. When you take a minute to think about, is there any surprise that the fastest-growing music genres according to Billboard are Latin music, Afrobeat and K-pop?

So I have a whole thesis that I’m talking to the team on how, like we saw with the emergence of hip-hop, we are in the culture import-export business. Which is why Translation is launching in Dubai and United Masters is in Brazil, we’re in Nigeria, we’re going to be in Southern Africa. We’re going to go to places that the big holding companies aren’t really focused on. We have a position and right to do that and cultural insights that I think others would struggle to come up with. That’s what I’m super excited about.