Brandtech Group Appoints Chris Garbutt as Global Chief Creative Officer to lead high craft AI storytelling and experience
World’s #1 Gen AI marketing group taps the ex TBWA\Worldwide & Vice Global Chief Creative Officer to lead creativity and craft in Gen AI for global brands.
New York, September 11, 2026: The Brandtech Group, the world’s leading Gen AI marketing group, has appointed Chris Garbutt as Global Chief Creative Officer.
Garbutt is one of the advertising industry’s most respected and awarded creative leaders, with more than two decades of experience building some of the world’s most iconic brands, including Apple, Google, IBM, Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton, Dove, adidas and Airbnb.
He joins from Vice Media Group (VMG) where he was Chief Creative Officer and Co-President of Virtue, VMG’s creative arm. Prior to that Garbutt spent 5 years as Global Chief Creative Officer for TBWA\ Worldwide, and before that 8 years as Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy Paris and New York.
Brandtech founder & CEO David Jones said: “We believe that AI is going to create the greatest creative revolution in history. What we are now able to do in terms of storytelling is already remarkable and it’s only going to get better. Yes, of course there is a ton of AI slop – but last time I checked there is also an enormous amount of terrible content created by humans without any help from AI, and the most vocal critics of AI usually just don’t know how to use it! In an AI world brand is more important, creativity is more important and talent is more important. But if you know what you are doing, AI will turbocharge all of those. Chris is one of the world’s most accomplished creative leaders, and bringing him onto the team will give our clients an unfair advantage when it comes to creating big brand and creative ideas. We’re thrilled he’s joining the company.”
Brandtech has been a pioneer in AI creativity from creating the first fully Gen AI spot for Super Bowl weekend for client NetApp earlier this year to Brandtech company Gravity Road’s recently launched Ode, an AI poetry app, which ‘prescribes’ poems written by humans and read by real-life actors, in partnership with Microsoft AI, to projecting a real Christina Aguilera in AI settings against iconic buildings like Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar factory.
Brandtech’s Gen AI marketing platform Pencil has created more than 10 million ads across 10,000 brands since 2018. The unique end-to-end agentic operating system can deliver high-craft, high-quality Gen AI TVC spots.
Throughout his career, Garbutt has been at the intersection of creativity and technology, helping build major campaign platforms including Apple’s Shot on iPhone and IBM’s Smarter Cities. He has won four Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Apple, IBM and Google, as well as Backup Ukraine, a project created in partnership with Polycam and UNESCO that used LiDAR technology to enable Ukrainians to digitally preserve the country’s cultural heritage.
Garbutt said: “We’re at a crossroads. There’s a creative revolution bearing down on the industry like a tsunami, and a lot of traditional players haven’t tuned into that yet. What I love about Brandtech is they’ve spent over a decade seeing around corners before everyone else. Planning for a future most people are just starting to notice.
“The old model of creativity had a ceiling. A big idea could only go so far. Now AI powers that idea through the entire process from insight and prediction mining, audience mapping, rapid prototyping, beta testing, optimizing and expanding, connecting to the right communities and culture – and the ceiling disappears. When ideas become limitless, the role of creativity expands far beyond traditional marketing. As a creative purist, that’s what excites me about a platform like Brandtech: it takes an idea and pushes it to its absolute maximum potential.”
His role starts immediately.
