Jonathan Holburt

Communications Consultant

Jonathan facilitates our messaging and positioning workshops. He helps clients put the market findings into action with words that connect. He was a business director with Asia-Pacific responsibilities at Saatchi & Saatchi, Young & Rubicam, DDB, and Bates. His key clients were: Procter & Gamble, McDonald’s, Kraft, Pepsi, Campbell’s, AT&T, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Mead Johnson, Nokia, Peninsula Hotel Group, and United Airlines.

During his thirty-year career, he has worked in Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo, Saigon, New York, Los Angeles, and Columbus.

Since 2016 he has conducted Presentation Skills and How to Develop Multi-country Campaigns workshops for the Association of National Advertisers.

He has advisory roles at two start-ups: medical device company Neurotech International, and cloud security company Rawstream.

He has contributed articles to the Wall Street Journal, Asian Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, South China Morning Post, Straits Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Enterprise Innovation, Telecom Asia, and Advertising Age. He has been interviewed on CNN, BBC, Asian Business News, and The Advertising Show. Advertising Age described him as an “Asian branding expert.” Jonathan’s novel, Shadow Emperor was optioned for the movies. He won two Effies for Asia regional activation work created for Nokia during its peak in 2007. He was an adjunct professor at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business and Ohio Wesleyan University.

He’s a Magna Cum Laude graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Married with two children he is based in Orange County, California.

Earlier in his career, Neil was CEO of Hondros College, an Ohio-based for-profit education company, and CMO of IGS Energy, an innovative regional energy provider. Previously, he held marketing leadership roles for well-recognized national FMCG brands at three Fortune 500 size companies – SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), Bausch & Lomb, and Borden Foods.

Neil holds a BA in Economics from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.