How Did I Get Here?

Jonathan Mildenhall

Chief marketing officer, Airbnb
from
  • Education
  • John Smeaton Community High School, Leeds, England, class of 1985
  • Thomas Danby College, Leeds, class of 1988
  • Manchester Metropolitan University, England, class of 1990
  • Work Experience
  • 1990–92
    Account manager, McCann Erickson
  • 1992–96
    Account director, Bartle Bogle Hegarty
  • 1996–99
    Board account director, Lowe Howard-Spink
  • 1999–2000
    Head of account management, HHCL & Partners
  • 2000–05
    Managing director, TBWA London
  • 2005–06
    Strategy director, Mother London
  • 2006–14
    Vice president for global advertising, senior VP for marketing and design, Coca-Cola
  • 2014–Present
    CMO, Airbnb
  • Life Lessons
  • “Approach everything with brutal honesty.”
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  • “Every night, ask yourself where you practiced humanity and creativity today and where you failed.”
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  • “You’ll be successful if you stop pretending to know it all.”
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  • “I’m the only mixed child of five boys—my younger and older half-brothers were white, and my father is Nigerian.”
  • “My career adviser said, ‘Jonathan, advertising is incredibly white and middle-class, and they only recruit from Oxbridge. You need to manage your expectations.’ It made me work incredibly hard.”
  • “I got there at the wrong time, when the culture was imploding. They’d been bought by a holding company, and I learned how damaging an acquisition can be to a culture.”
  • With specially commissioned artwork commemorating Whitney Houston after her death, 2012
  • Toasting with Sir Richard Branson and a Virgin America flight attendant, 2015
  • “My job is to help reach an audacious goal: that one day, all 7.5 billion people will feel they can be trusting and open up their homes. It’s just so far-reaching and exciting from a creative perspective.”
  • “On my 16th birthday, I asked my mom for a subscription to Vogue. I remember saying to her, ‘One day, I’m going to work in brands.’ I didn’t even know what marketing was.”
  • Receiving an honorary degree from Manchester Metropolitan University, 2008
  • “The joy of being a global account lead for Smirnoff is spending your time in research groups with 18- to 24-year-olds in bars around the world.”
  • “We did French Connection, bringing FCUK to the world.”
  • “For the 2014 Super Bowl, we had [an ad with] 13-year-old Americans from different cultures [singing] America the Beautiful while showing contemporary U.S. families: Mexican, same-sex, Caucasian, Native American, African American. I am really, really proud of the impact of that work.”
  • With former Coca-Cola executive Don Keough on the corporate campus, 2013