How Mark Eaves left their lane.
After more than a decade at Omnicom, Mark Eaves co-founded Gravity Road in 2011 to bring advertising, entertainment and technology into one place.
Mark Eaves spent more than a decade inside one of the world’s largest advertising groups.
At Omnicom Media Group, he led Drum, its content agency, working at the point where advertising was beginning to collide with entertainment, digital platforms and new ways of reaching audiences. But Eaves was increasingly interested in a different starting point: not simply where a message could be placed, but whether anyone would choose to spend time with it.
In 2011, he left to co-found Gravity Road with Mark Boyd.
They deliberately resisted calling it a traditional advertising agency. Instead, they described it as a creative company sitting between marketing, entertainment and technology, built around a simple principle: Time Well Spent. Make things audiences actively choose to engage with, rather than treating their attention as something brands are automatically entitled to.
The distinction quickly produced unusual work.
For Bombay Sapphire, Gravity Road created the Imagination Series, inviting people to interpret the same stripped-back screenplay in completely different ways. One of the resulting films, Room 8, won the BAFTA for British Short Film in 2014 – an unusual crossover between branded content and mainstream film recognition. The company went on to win Cannes Lions, D&AD Pencils and Webby Awards while working with brands including Unilever, Booking.com and TikTok.
In 2018, Gravity Road became part of what is now The Brandtech Group, giving the company access to a wider ecosystem of data, technology and emerging creative tools while retaining its own identity. Its founding proposition – combining creativity with whatever technology is changing how people spend their time – has only become more relevant since.
Today, much of that experimentation is happening around AI.
Gravity Road is using generative AI across creative work and audience intelligence, while Eaves continues to explore more human applications himself. In 2026, he helped create Ode with Microsoft AI and William Sieghart’s Poetry Pharmacy – an AI voice companion that responds to how someone is feeling with a poem chosen for the moment.
The tools have changed dramatically since Gravity Road started.
The test Eaves set them has not: is this something a person would actually choose to spend time with?
Previously with <Mark Eaves>
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