R/GA Sydney appoints former SapientNitro tech director Bryan Jones in snr technical director role

R/GA Sydney has announced it has further strengthened its expanding team with the addition of Bryan Jones (left) as senior technical director.

Reporting into John Mayo-Smith, EVP, chief technology officer R/GA, Jones will be responsible for driving and shaping the office’s technological vision and capability, while also partnering with clients at a senior level to help develop their internal and customer facing technology solutions.

An industry veteran with over 15 years of digital experience, Jones joins R/GA Sydney from SapientNitro where he was national technology director, Australia.

Says Mayo-Smith: “R/GA creates breakthroughs at the intersection of technology, creative and business, so it is very important to have a senior person with these three sensibilities as the Sydney office grows. Bryan’s experience creating new combinations of powerful technologies that attract and retain customers for global brands made him a perfect fit for us. The digital industry in Australia is well versed in technology, so we wanted a thought-leader with domain expertise who can think in a combinatorial framework.”

Since officially opening its doors in January 2013, R/GA’s Sydney office has grown to ten in headcount, with hires in both creative and experience design disciplines made. The appointment of Jones will enable the office to both grow its technology team, and help create innovative new digital platforms for brands in the Pacific Rim Region. Skilled at simplifying complex technology concepts, Jones’ experience in large scale content and commerce platform development, mobile, social media, and emerging technologies will play a key role as the office continues to expand its client roster.

Says Jones: “R/GA has a reputation as a global agency leader and is known for creative innovation as well as embracing new technologies. I’m very excited to be a part of this agency and help build the Sydney office by driving new business, delivering innovative solutions and attracting the best talent.”

Prior to joining R/GA, Jones was a technical lead for SapientNitro’s Chicago office before relocating to Australia. During his time working at SapientNitro, he was responsible for building global development teams in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and India working alongside global brands such as Luxottica, Chrysler, Billabong, Harley-Davidson, ResMed, Unilever, Snooze, Coca Cola, Westpac and Kellogg’s. His responsibilities in this role included leading technical strategy, new business, solution architecture and oversight for content management and ecommerce implementations across multiple platforms including IBM WCS, Oracle ATG, Autonomy Interwoven, and Adobe CQ5. While at Sapient Chicago, he lead the 2012 Harley-Davidson new model launch – which was a six month project architecting a solution to leverage the clients existing content management system and integrating a custom content generator to output thousands of HTML pages for 34 models across 12 languages, into the clients workflow system for launch.

Before joining Sapient, Jones worked as director of technology at OgilvyOne, where he was tasked with building the Chicago technology practice from the ground up and providing leadership for clients such as Kraft, Unilever, Allstate, British Petroleum and the city Olympic bid campaign for Chicago 2016.