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

The pandemic was, for most, a time of fear and uncertainty. After concerns over health and loved ones, thoughts of the stress placed on finances were often close behind. For Jonathan Emmins, global CEO of Amplify, anxiety around the success of the agency he’d founded in 2008 was heightened as the company had just decided, despite the cost, to open shop in Los Angeles.

“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.

... 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.