What next for Jonathan Emmins after selling Amplify to Common Interest?

“We’d just got our feet on the ground and then they were quickly back out from under us again,” Emmins says. “But, I look back and go ‘those challenges and how we handled them have ultimately been our success.’”

Now, he’s just sold 51% of Amplify to Common Interest. The ‘new era’ holding company has agreed to acquire the remaining 49% over the next five years. And it looks like the challenges were dealt with rather well. Perhaps it was the agency’s plucky ethos; Amplify started, Emmins says, as a “kind of East End rave youth agency.” So, when the pandemic triggered “long overdue changes” in the marketing industry, Emmins says, Amplify’s dynamism positioned it well to break format.

Tasked with keeping up the momentum of brand stories and cash tills ringing while navigating a global lockdown, Amplify quickly transitioned to an online-first mentality. Emmins references the ‘Play Has No Limits’ campaign for PlayStation as testament to the approach.

“Rather than trying to repeat what happened in the real world online, which was what the first phase seemed to be, we actually used that whole different world and took over. I think it was 27 cities in 25 countries in 24 hours, with each one coming on. And, we could only have done a lot of that stuff in pandemic time. So again, everything’s always about a twist and moving something forward.”

The campaign saw a host of global landmarks – including the Burj Khalifa, St Mark’s Square in Venice and Piccadilly Circus – lit up in blue light and projected in bespoke anamorphic graphics which showed the console and its associated symbols seemingly break free of their screens, in a countdown to the PS5 going on sale in each region. The campaign won Amplify the Experiential Brand Campaign of the Year award at The Drum Awards 2021.

Fast-forward to 2025 and Emmins’s innovation in the face of adversity seems indeed to have paid off. The ink has dried on his contract with Common Interest, which will also see Amplify’s global leadership team become partners and equity holders in Common Interest. The question is, then: what comes next?

‘Best of times, worst of times’

When I ask Emmins if an eventual sale was part of the plan since the inception of the agency, he answers neither yes nor no. He says: “The principles of why we set up remained the same, while the execution may have become different as it’s evolved and our ambitions have grown.”

Those ambitions started from relatively modest origins. Emmins was the first of his family to go to university, where he studied History and Politics, specializing in politics of race and subcultures (his dissertation was on modern Black music and new British identity). While at Warwick University, he hosted club nights and helped run the snowboarding society.

After leaving uni, Emmins spent six years working at an agency, setting up its Sydney office. He describes it as a “best of times, worst of times” experience – and his introduction to working on brand experiences. “This is probably pre calling it brand experience,” he explains. “On a good day, we were using a brand-experiences comms platform, versus a tactical activation, to start and maintain conversations.” On a bad day, he says, he’d hand out “lukewarm yogurt pots at train stations.”

The experience, though, stayed with him, ultimately informing his approach to Amplify. It seems Emmins’s experience left him well-placed to drag experiential marketing from dank train platforms to the center stage of contemporary culture and, before long, the agency was working with the likes of Nike, Pinterest and Lego. Emmins says that choosing a project above the others would be like “picking my favorite child.” However, when pushed, he brings up the work that Amplify executed for Google.

“There are certain pieces of work – if you talk about our approach and breaking formats and looking at things that are kind of significant moments – that weren’t necessarily first for it, but really consolidated the moment in time. So, for Google, we did the Curiosity Rooms to launch the Google Pixel 3. That was a pop-up in the old Tower Records.”

The brief for the event on London’s Regent Street was to ‘make every day more extraordinary.’ Curiosity Rooms comprised a series of talks, workshops, dining experiences and cultural events in the flagship commercial space – almost like a Wikipedia trawl brought to life. Most curious.

Emmins explains that the event, in November and December 2018, tied together nascent strands in the field of experiential marketing. “That was where, in the old days, the experience was a bit stuck on – often the party at the end. It [Curiosity Rooms] was built out of audience insights: the programming, everything. And then the above-the-line was all about directing towards it, giving context for it.”

He also mentions Airbnb’s ‘Night in the Louvre,’ which let one competition winner sleep under the museum’s iconic glass pyramid. He adds he always looks forward to working with PlayStation – a brand he started working with at the ‘best of times, worst of times’ agency around the launch of PS2, which he says “shows his age.”

Grit and graft

As well as being driven by the projects, he’s motivated by the people. He says a lot of what he’s done at Amplify has been about “trying to right the wrongs of that previous agency and build a positive vibe.” In real terms, this translated, at first, to keeping things small. “When we started, it was like, never bigger than 10 people, never bigger than 15 people. I think I stopped saying that at about 25. If you have amazing, talented people, they want to grow and take it in other directions.”

This drive led to a partnership with student marketing agency Seed in 2017. Four years later, Amplify acquired a majority stake in B2B experiential agency Wonder. Emmins says that through these moments of growth, he’s often had to catch himself. “Each six months, I look back and go: ‘I couldn’t ever believe we’d get to do that, or make that.’ The amount of things we work with and the quality of them often massively exceed my expectations,” he explains.

Emmins says he’d described the perfect brief for Amplify as the “kind that doesn’t fit anywhere else.” He explains: “Whenever we’re doing a pitch, we always try to put someone in there that doesn’t quite fit the energy or has a different perspective. And that always kind of ends up with the work looking and feeling a bit better and stronger. I always had a fear of creating a house style. You saw these agencies become successful and then a brand to go, ‘Can I have that with my logo on it?’”

From the recession to the pandemic, Emmins says he’s “a big believer you shape whether your experience is good or bad.” He adds: “I think along the way we’ve learned. We’ve made mistakes, but we’ve done more right than wrong. We set up in a recession, so I guess that we were well-versed from that.”

It was 2020, though, that was the pivotal year for the agency. “Obviously, the pandemic was a big one for us,” he explains. “We’d invested heavily in creative strat, broadcast, content and innovation ahead. So while 2020 wasn’t the favorite year for our CFO, and it was a lot to guide through, we’d kept the reserves in there. We said on April 1, after the news, that we weren’t going to make anyone redundant. We’re going to keep the team together. And, actually, if you were doing a nice line, obviously 2020 wasn’t great, but when we came into 2021/2022, that’s when it started going off the scale.”

Much to the chagrin of his CFO, he didn’t mind turning down work; in essence, putting quality before quantity. He describes it as: “Sticking to your principles and making sure your time is your most precious commodity, so making sure your team’s energy is always focused. We talk about the three Cs: creative, the culture and commercial. We need to do all three in equal measures. But, if you look after the creativity and culture, in our experiences, the commercial has always followed.”

Not a holdco

Indeed, it seems so. Emmins is in an interesting position for two reasons. He’s not just sold up; he’s also taken equity and a position at Common Interest, which in itself is trying to rewrite the rulebook on what holding companies can be. The last attempt at that, S4 Capital, has found itself repeatedly in rocky waters.

But, Common Interest believes its approach and positioning is well-matched to the challenges of today’s marketing landscape. Founded by Anthony Freedman, former chair of Havas in Australia and New Zealand, the company describes itself as “the world’s first communications and entertainment group focused on building brands in popular culture.” It adheres to a remit of acquiring companies working in culture, tech, data and creativity, that go beyond advertising comms.

Common Interest took over global brand consultancy TwentyFirstCenturyBrand in 2023 and, a year later, it acquired design and communications agency Otherway, as well as founding the cultural intelligence platform CultureLab. Freedman says: “We’re two years old in September and, at the moment, we have seven companies in the group and I think our expectation is that we will have nine, possibly 10, by the end of the year.”

Speaking to me about the acquisition of Amplify, Freedman says that soon his role within Common Interest will change. While so far his day-to-day has been mainly about building a delivery infrastructure, he hopes he can soon change gears. “Perhaps I spend my time really, really looking at how we can build the growth of the companies that we have, but more importantly, the connectivity that will deliver exponential return to clients in turn, both in terms of return on investment, but also the experience that they enjoy.”

Does Freedman think of Common Interest as a holdco?“I don’t think that we consider ourselves a holding company,” he says. “And I think that there’s more sincerity in that than just the choice of language.”

For Freedman, Common Interest’s work is much more about navigating a changing media landscape and capitalizing on newly emergent intersections among traditional industries. “​​Notwithstanding some of the challenges that we see at the moment, from an economic perspective, the whole emerging opportunity to blur the line between communications and entertainment and to see those two things really converging and developing a really symbiotic coexistence, for me, is hugely exciting,” he says.

He uses a reference to the TV ads he grew up being “more creative than the TV shows” to explain where he thinks the marketing industry is at today. “It feels like we’re now reemerging in an era where brilliant creativity that really entertains people, but has inherently baked into it a brand message, is something that is resurgent, but in a slightly different form to what it was at the beginning of my career,” he explains. “And I’d love to be part of seeing how that emerges.”

Talking in terms of “steering it [this change] into its next chapter, and hopefully in a way where everyone wins,” he says the acquisition of Amplify made complete sense. He describes Emmins’s agency as “undoubtedly the best of its type within the marketplace, with an incredible reputation and a brilliantly talented team, many of whom I had known for a long period of time, which is always very helpful.”

He adds: “The cultural and values alignment has been fully proven out with an unbelievable client list and in your body of work. It was sort of like in this space, this is, by far and away, in our view, the best company. And isn’t it fortuitous that we know them and they know us and we like one another and there’s a partnership we could make happen, so it’s as simple as that.”

Freedman has known Emmins for five or six years, he says, as well as having mutual friends and associates. Asked to describe him, he offers: “I think that he is somebody who is a really rare blend of creative and commercial. Often you find that people are one or the other, but he certainly is a combination of the two and someone who has a very similar set of values to those that I hope people see in me, which is to do the right thing and to recognize the importance of acting with integrity and with humanity and believing that we are only as good as our reputation.”

He says he feels confident in his summation: “I think that if you were to ask others, I’m sure that they would give you the very same feedback as well.”

No time to rest

For his part, Emmins says it’s an exciting time and a new start, albeit in a field he knows. “Our ultimate belief is in Common Interest,” he says. “Anthony and the team, that’s something special.”

The secret to its potential success, he believes, is present in the name. “Common Interest works on a number of levels. The common interest with the passions of the audiences and the brands, but also common interest in terms of the partners. So, we think that’s quite a special model. We were lucky to be approached with every shape and size of offer. As well as the shared belief and values, in terms of where creativity and culture and marketing is going, that model feels like a great model.”

For Emmins, it’s not just about the model being right, though. It’s also about the commonality with the principles on which he founded Amplify. “We’ve always tried to pioneer and we feel Common Interest has similar beliefs in terms of that independent spirit: trying to do things differently, trying to always hone our art and science,” he says.

Emmins first got to know Freedman while Freedman was chairman and CEO of Havas Group Australia and New Zealand – a tenure that lasted five years until 2022. Emmins kept in touch. He describes them as “kindred spirits” and said the more they talked, the more the match made sense.

The chance to be a partner in Common Interest is what clinched the deal for Emmins. “The way that Anthony has pulled it together, we all have an opinion and thought on what are the right things that should be coming in and joining the Common Interest family,” he says. “That just clicked for me.”

Now, he’s looking forward to making the most of the collegiate setup, working peer-to-peer with other leaders, under the Common Interest umbrella. All watched over by what Emmins describes as Freedman’s “formidable mind.”

Looking ahead, he says the future of Common Interest is “a mixture of buy and build.” He explains: “There’ll be other agencies like Amplify joining. There are obviously quite a few keen to join. It will be done in a controlled fashion. If you see the way Anthony’s built it, he’s got TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, that’s very strategic, doing a lot of that kind of event brand identity. But, there’ll also be build. So, CultureLab, for example, is something that’s proprietary.”

Whichever companies end up coming on board, Emmins says it won’t be a case of “eating each other’s lunches.” Instead, he believes: “It’s all about the way Common Interest is set up in structure, but also in disciplines. It’s about having the best in class in each of those disciplines, which is reassuring for me as an agency owner. Making sure that we’ve got enough space to grow our agencies is about collaboration and referrals.”

With growth in mind, Emmins adds: “America represents a very big opportunity for us. It’s our biggest area of growth and escalating. So, I should imagine there’ll be more American agencies joining the mix as well.” Talking of foreign climes, I wonder, is there no part of him that wanted to retire and spend the rest of his days poolside somewhere?

“No,” he says. “Thinking, making and creating is what motivates me. I don’t think my partner would know what to do with me if I were pottering, furiously, at home.”