“Advertising Is Downstream from Cinema”: Ian Pons Jewell on the Director-Led Ethos of ProdCo
“Advertising is cultural,” says ProdCo co-founder Ian Pons Jewell. “And we should try to see it as that, that we are adding to culture. Every piece of advertising is pushed into the brain of the populace and has a cultural effect. It’s about raising the level constantly and to view that as really important.”
That commitment and insistence on taking the commercial landscape seriously has defined Ian’s career. Since launching ProdCo just three years ago, he has built a fiercely respected haven for craft and community to flourish, nurturing a roster of directors who genuinely care about the work.
As traditional production models navigate a newly-fragmented era, ProdCo seems uniquely insulated, with Ian crediting its embedded director’s and producer’s perspective, along with its obsessive focus on craft, as part of its resilience.
ProdCo has evolved organically since launching in 2023 with founding producer Zico Judge, and it’s now spearheaded by UK partner/managing director/executive producer Jon Adams, and US MD Emma Wilcockson. Having spent years as a top-tier in-house director at shops like Academy, Friend and Reset, witnessing high levels of production, Ian’s instincts were also forged earlier, during his scrappy pre-signing days in music videos.
“I had been to a few different places and had very good experiences, and very different ones,” says Ian. “The difference in style that would seep into the smallest and biggest things – from communication to how a job is produced – was fascinating to me… After I'd left one of the companies, I spent a year in Bolivia independently making music videos with the local producers there. So, I've always been very producer/director-minded.”
And that dual perspective has proved to be his secret weapon.
“A little bit of producer energy can help directors, because ultimately everything comes down to how a thing is organised. We're not painters that can wake up, have an idea, and start working on the canvas. You're creating crew and crew systems; how you shoot, when you shoot, what you prioritise, what you don't. It's going to be very different from one producer to the next. So I'd always had this kind of quite hands-on producer-director hat. And then the idea started to pop in my head, ‘What about starting something?’”
Following an early Disney job produced alongside Jon Adams under the fledgling ProdCo banner, the stars began to align as Zico entered the picture. What started as generous, agenda-free industry advice quickly turned into the catalyst Ian needed to build a brand-new ecosystem.
“I try to make decisions on things that I feel are right,” says Ian. “Me and Zico share so many of the same values. We don't think twice about losing markup if it's going to make the job much better. We don't think twice about spending money on a director's cut. A lot of those difficult things that might make co-founders clash on money, I feel very lucky for that connection.”
ATiiSSU, 'Dessert Cowboy Collection'
“When you start something, you don't think, ‘What are our morals gonna be? What are our values gonna be?’ We never did anything like that. Instead it’s all about energy. Every person at Prodco has an energy that we love to be around; including the directors of course, it really is energy-first.”
No wonder then that the roster feels so intimate, with directorial friendships dating back pre-ProdCo. Preserving that culture and sense of family is important to Ian when bringing new talent into the fold.
“Every time a director is brought on, it's a piece of you which is then connected, and there’s a huge responsibility with that,” he says. “It weighs on us every single day, we're thinking about developing people and getting them to do their projects. It's about bringing in people you genuinely care about… Very often, you end up talking to these people that you work with and represent more than your family and your non-work friends. That's why it's not worth working with people that you don't want to hang out with, because you're going to be hanging out with them a lot.”
Meta, 'Instagram Teen Accounts' director's cut
It’s about cultivating community within the company, encouraging directors to talk, collaborate and share experiences in a way that rarely happens in production. As a director- and producer-led company, ProdCo operates with an unspoken understanding of each filmmaker’s plight to push the craft as far as resources allow, while running the business with empathy for the creative process.
“The benefit is you understand why something might be going wrong,” says Ian. “l bring a director’s point of view, while our producers bring another perspective. It adds an extra angle, rather than just being a producer vacuum. It's always funny when there's something going wrong on a job, I'll get on the phone with the director directly and without loads of context, I can troubleshoot it. Because I’ve been there and I can see things from their point of view.”
Ian credits his understanding of culture to a grounded, zoomed-out view and keeping advertising in perspective, to looking beyond the industry.
“Advertising should be downstream from cinema, I think it’s important that there is nutrition into the advertising space from cinema, from culture, from the free art space. Otherwise it self immolates when it is self referential. Directors, ideally, should have be moving between these two spaces.”
Ramp, 'Chasing Receipts' Director's Cut
“We've always been, and have ended up, a craft-first space,” says Ian. “Over time we've seen that this natural focus has become our brand. This has helped us a lot and will hopefully keep us in a good space with an ebbing and flowing industry… especially now with generative AI, it's more important than ever to be craft-focused and remember that we are downstream from cinema.”
He ushers caution to directors working in advertising, reminding them that commercial work isn’t a complete reflection of their personal style as it doesn’t offer total creative freedom.
“Advertising is a very unique, often wonderful space, where you are working with creative that is already written, already workshopped over long periods of time by the talented creatives and amazing producers at the ad agency. But it’s also serving a corporation’s branding needs, it is there to deliver a specific message or show a particular part of a product. You can only do so much in this space to grow creatively as an artist. It is where style does come to the forefront though, as the way you move the camera, design the edit etc, are the spaces where you have most creative freedom.”
When thinking about style, Ian says “… A director should be careful not to think of their external style by how it's received by others, because style then becomes an outside perception.”
Absolut ,'Tabasco' Director's cut
It’s a lesson Ian learned after finding himself stylistically pigeonholed, a realisation that forced him to actively push against visual tropes and evolve his process. Today, he looks to go deeper on every job, making choices from core motivations rather than pure instinct.
“I don't want to just shoot things how I have done before, because you do develop a subconscious blueprint in many ways. I'm trying to drill into things and make decisions born from more ethereal feelings.”
Reflecting on his music video legacy, Ian credits those early trial-by-fire projects with instilling his sense of resourcefulness and freedom.
“Music videos were just so important. It's what everything started from for me with these bite-sized, very deep worlds, with a very limited budget. This extreme ambition with a seemingly impossible budget forces the most creative thinking. It formed me… I'm always going to believe in music videos.”
McDonald's, 'McDonaldland' Director's cut
That ecosystem offered Ian direct access to a connected community and a healthy sense of creative rivalry, something that Ian hopes to see return to the industry.
“When I was doing music videos I could feel it; we were all watching one 'channel', the activity from the music video community of that time and waiting for Isaiah Seret's next video which we'd share. And then we'd wait for Daniels' next video, which we'd all talk about, followed by Keith Schofield and then Matilda Finn who would make a music video that would just blow everyone's mind. It had us constantly in awe, I really miss that community feeling. Maybe it’s my age, but it felt like an era perhaps fuelled in part by the way Vimeo used to work and before social media became so algorithmic."
To spark that revival, Daniel McKee of Directors’ Library invited Ian to launch directory.work, an initiative designed to "to enable local, discovery, encourage collaboration and build meaningful connections, online and offline, across global cities, creative roles and filmmaking formats.” Reinstating that sense of autonomy is vital and they’re working actively to bring this to the industry, recognising the importance of opening doors to others and seeing it as an essential responsibility of being a commercial director.
Ian stays remarkably busy these days; running ProdCo, building Directory; and developing a feature film to balance his commercial success.
“I'll always do advertising, I have a big love for it, with film always being the driving force.”
He applies that same philosophy to his commercial work, believing that audiences still crave long-form, artful advertising when it’s executed with vision.
“This view of ads being a bit of video that has to grab someone at the beginning, transmit a message and have to be shorter and shorter… I just think it's provably false. People are going to the cinema and sitting through two-hour-plus-long films not looking at their phones. But it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we believe in this overly-repeated myth of ‘attention spans are becoming shorter.’ Of course, people switch off if they’re watching shit.”
What makes work resonate is genuine care, from landing on the original insight down to the fine details of craft. For Ian, that means looking at root causes, convincing clients to invest in powerful creative and advocating against shortcuts like gen AI.
“Everything comes down to conversations and education,” says Ian. “I would love to sit in a room with a client who is considering using generative AI and tell them about why I don't think they should. In general, the vast majority of people hate everything AI; they’re tired of it, they’re concerned about data centres, they care that the arts are affected. People know it’s a gold rush for a tiny sector of the world. It is a technology that is being pushed as a replacement for humans, in terms of labour, craft… everything.
“So, what kind of a message are you giving your customers by using the technology that threatens their very existence to communicate to them to invest in your brand? But we have to bring people on board if we really believe in it.”
Conviction lies at the heart of everything Ian does. It’s the through line of a career spent constantly reinventing the wheel, pushing production culture simply by being brave.
