Johnny Hornby on AI, Jeremy Clarkson and his Labour links

Johnny Hornby, the veteran adman, proudly plonks a large box onto the glass coffee table. His office in The&Partnership’s buzzy Fitzrovia block in central London, is warm and clubby, with a dark green Soho Home scalloped sofa and a couch facing large TV screens.
The box turns out to be a cardboard, beer-filled advent calendar he has made with the TV star Jeremy Clarkson, his business partner, for their beer brand Hawkstone.
While Hornby, 57, clearly enjoys telling the story behind the brewery that uses barley from Clarkson’s Cotswolds farm, it is the marketing engine that really excites him, encapsulating as it does his theory on the future of advertising.
Clarkson, 64, creates “organic” social posts: little Instagram videos, for example, showing off the calendar on the farm.
The company puts out paid marketing, designed using artificial intelligence. “Click ‘buy it now’, then we’ll stick that on the website we’ve built and we’ve got a Shopify site,” Hornby rattles off.
By the time we meet on Thursday afternoon, this shows they have sold more than £15,000 worth of the calendars. That day. What does this marketing microcosm mean for the industry?
“Every brand starts thinking, ‘What are my assets? How many people come to my site for free? How much do I put into “paid”, how efficient am I at turning that into website visits?’ If somebody buys, they’ve given us their name and email, so we can email them.”
It’s a formula that stems from a lifetime in the business. Hornby began his career as a trainee at Ogilvy & Mather. In 2001, aged 34, he left the agency TBWA, where he was joint managing director, along with Simon Clemmow, the chief executive, and was also joined by Charles Inge, who was behind the Stella Artois “reassuringly expensive” campaign.
The loudmouth, the grand strategist and the quiet creative genius, according to the industry magazine Campaign, formed the agency CHI.
Starting with a £10 million contract with Charles Dunstone, the Carphone Warehouse billionaire who lent them office space, CHI then won the pitch for New Labour’s victorious 2001 campaign. Lord Mandelson, who handled the process, became an investor.
Fast-forward 23 years and this week Hornby sold the final stake in the company, now The&Partnership (T&Pm), to WPP, the FTSE 100 advertising company. It already owned the majority of the business. In 2007 Sir Martin Sorrell bought 49.9 per cent for £30 million, which grew to 71.7 per cent in 2019.
T&Pm employs 1,800 people in 42 global offices, with clients including Amazon, the ecommerce retailer; Mars, one of the largest food companies in the world; and Toyota, the car manufacturer.
It made its name by changing the way adverts were made, prioritising a fast turnaround based on the speed of news, using what are known as “marketing newsrooms”.
Hornby and WPP remained coy about the value of the stake. The latest accounts for the year to December 2023 show sales of £740 million, up from £716 million the year before. It made a profit before tax of £32.7 million, up from £29.9 million. About half of the group’s revenue comes from the UK.
The words “well-connected” often follow Hornby’s name. Aside from having Clarkson as a business partner, Dunstone was his best man; the author Robert Harris is his brother-in-law; Nick Hornby, the writer, is his half-brother; Mandelson is a friend; and his wife, Clare, runs the fashion label Me+Em. The list goes on.
Pulling up some nostalgic 2002 CHI, “You’ve been tangoed” ads, he jokes that at Christmas in the talented Hornby household, he often wonders what he has achieved.
One ad features a teenager filling a waterbed with juice. The bed is then pricked by a porcupine and explodes in a sea of orange pulp, while the voiceover mimics snooker commentary.
Hornby muses that they epitomise the reason for British advertising success: the need to cut through the culturally ingrained cynicism.
Media has changed beyond recognition from those days. Now, 70 per cent of ads are digital and 30 per cent is TV. “No one’s sitting down and watching other things together. The whole thing dissipates. Technology has got better and better at being able to personalise and find different audiences. So the more you tailor an asset to an audience, the more effective it is and the more it’s driven by data.”
The generative AI revolution is taking hold. WPP made early inroads with a sophisticated software engine that generates text, audio and images from written instructions. “If you put the AI platform at the centre of working like this, it allows you to industrialise the amount of content you can create at speed.”
Hornby turns to Richard Pohle, The Times photographer. “Close your ears!”
“That [advent calendar] box is appearing in those different backgrounds but we haven’t shot it ourselves”. Pohle peers at the pictures, impressed by how the fake light falls.
“People say, ‘doesn’t that mean people are going to lose their jobs?’ We hope the demand for digital means brands need more content that’s more and more personalised.”
The AI program can spit out emails in a Clarksonesque way, having been fed with Clarkson’s books “in a way that Jeremy finds it difficult to say that that wasn’t him”. The TV personality has been “dressed up in a green suit and filmed”, so he can be AI-generated in film. This is yet to be deployed.
A note of caution on AI creeps in. A recent campaign for Mars allowing users to make José Mourinho, the Portuguese football manager, say things was treated with care. “How do you know that he’s not going to tell someone to f*** off? You had to make sure that he couldn’t have a conversation about Palestine.”
Then there is copyright. “Every client has different legal thresholds, particularly when you get an image generated of people. Somebody says, ‘well, could we get sued?’ We have those debates. ‘What’s your appetite for being sued?’
“In some cases, we’ll replace the AI face with the face that we pay for the usage of. We’re doing lots of deals for content that is brand-safe; and then every client will have a threshold.”
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, and Lady Starmer, the prime minister’s wife, have been photographed wearing Hornby’s wife’s clothes, but Hornby’s Noughties Labour links do not extend to the new administration.
Sir Keir Starmer is “no Tony Blair or Barack Obama in terms of vision”, but Hornby was excited at the prospect of stability “after the shambles of the Tory government”.
The budget last month, however, was a “disappointment”, he sighs. “I’m hopeful that there’ll be all sorts of wonderful reforms to be announced soon. But saying that you are protecting workers and then putting national insurance up like that …”
The changes will cost T&Pm £850,000 next year, while “in our pub it’s £40,000, in our brewery it’s £100,000”.
Hornby laments the passing of New Labour. “Gordon Brown had put taper relief in for start-up companies, so my partners and I paid 10 per cent of capital gains, because we’d owned the shares for five years. We weren’t trying to make a quick buck. We’d quit our previous jobs, started an agency above a Carphone Warehouse and he rewarded that … I can’t see now where the incentives are to grow for businesses.”
As for agriculture, he rails: “You whack a farmer with a £6 million farm that they’re trying to pass on to their children, which isn’t that big. And now you have £1 million worth of relief; so then there’ll be £5 million and then 20 per cent tax on that will be £1 million. And the average farm is making £45,000 … how the hell is the son and or daughter of the farm going to be able to inherit the farm? And it only made Rachel Reeves £500 million anyway.”
As he talks, Hornby puts his feet up on the table, but he is not retiring to run The Farmer’s Dog, the pub he co-owns with Clarkson in Asthall, near Burford, Oxfordshire.
Far from it. He has told Mark Read, the chief executive of WPP, that he will stick around “until at least 2029”.
AI or not, “you still need to come up with novel, refreshing ideas, especially in a sea of content. You need to find ways of being amusing and distinctive.” Some things in the ad world have not changed.