Jason Downie and the art of starting over

Jason Downie once toured with an a cappella group while consulting part time at Bain. That combination deserves a moment of appreciation. One job required people to listen closely enough to sing together. The other required people to listen closely enough to advise a business. The wardrobe may have differed. Both arrangements depended on somebody paying attention.

The group was Ball In the House. Downie’s professional life also included owning a bar, working in advertising technology, and joining Google. In 2026, he became chief executive of PublicRelay, bringing a digital marketing background to the business of understanding what people say about companies. A conventional biography could arrange those stops into a tidy procession. His is more interesting when the earlier jobs remain in view.

Music belongs in this story because Downie keeps bringing it back. The touring years sit alongside the consulting years in his account of how he learned to lead. They give his career a useful complication: he had already tried more than one way of making a living before an executive title became the easiest way to introduce him.

A résumé with a backing vocal

His musical life began well before the corporate appointments. He was selected for the Boston Boys Choir and received scholarships through singing. Later came touring with Ball In the House. When he talked through his career with podcast host Dino Cattaneo, the conversation included waiting tables, bar ownership, and the willingness to start again in his late thirties.

Those experiences bring him into rooms that a purely corporate career might pass by. A restaurant customer gives feedback with unusual speed. A musical group makes interdependence audible. These are useful ways to think about his route, without pretending every evening onstage was secretly a management seminar. Sometimes a song is allowed to be a song.

Downie studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and spent ten years consulting at Bain. His later entrepreneurial work ranged from music and hospitality to real estate deals. The overlap matters: consulting and performance were, for a time, concurrent occupations. He did not have to erase one interest to make room for another.

That history makes his arrival in advertising technology easier to understand. He has described coming upon Lotame and becoming absorbed in learning a new field. Curiosity gave him a reason to stay. The business demanded a vocabulary and technical understanding he had to acquire, even with a substantial professional life already behind him.

Listen once. Check twice.

By June 2018, Lotame had appointed Downie chief strategy officer. He had previously been senior vice president and general manager of its third-party data business. The new remit covered product, marketing, sales development, and the company’s data management platform and data exchange strategies. He also continued leading the data team he had built.

The job placed him amid consolidation, changing technology, and growing scrutiny of consumer privacy. His first priorities included examining how customers worked with Lotame and how it competed. There is a practical modesty to that starting point. Before deciding what a company should become, understand what its customers actually do with it.

“listen once and verify twice”

Advice Downie recalls receiving at Bain

He remembered that advice from his consulting mentors. It is a compact rule for a business full of numbers, and a useful brake on an executive’s urge to sound certain. Listening opens the inquiry. Verification makes the answer worth carrying into the next meeting.

His work also brought him into the gap between having information and being able to use it. In 2020, as Lotame’s chief strategy officer, he discussed research showing that publishers and marketers often lacked the people, tools, or starting point for a data strategy. An impressive collection of data still leaves someone with the unglamorous job of making it useful.

The colleagues came along

Google became another stop. Downie served as director of global client and agency solutions, data and technology. Then the company’s January 2023 layoffs interrupted that chapter. He began contacting people and speaking with colleagues, and a new opportunity took shape at Making Science, the Spain-based technology and digital marketing business.

The transition was collective. Nick Tiano and Mallory Bradford joined him. Making Science announced Downie as its U.S. CEO, Tiano as chief revenue officer, and Bradford as chief customer officer in April 2023. Their previous work together gave the new team a head start on understanding one another.

Tiano had initially intended to take time to consider his next career move. The chance to work with familiar colleagues drew him toward the opportunity. That is a telling detail in Downie’s story. The next employer mattered, but so did the people who would be there on Monday morning.

Making Science described Downie’s approach as finding capable people, supporting them, and giving their expertise room. It is a leadership philosophy with an obvious practical test: whether the person who knows the most about a problem gets heard. A CEO can occupy a great deal of conversational space. Leaving some available is a choice.

In January 2024, Making Science announced its U.S. Google Marketing Platform Sales Partner certification, allowing it to resell contracts for the platform’s products. For Downie, the former Google executive, the relationship had acquired a new shape. He was now helping build a business that worked with his previous employer as a partner.

A packed room, a new starting line

In June 2025, Downie looked back on roughly two and a half years of building Making Science’s American business with Tiano. A joint event at Google’s New York offices brought clients, partners, and prospects into a packed room. He described the team’s small failures and larger successes, and thanked international colleagues who had helped.

His reaction was revealing. The gathering felt like an arrival, followed immediately by the recognition that they were at a starting line. There is an appealing refusal of finality in that account. The event could be celebrated without being mistaken for completion. The room was full; the work still had somewhere to go.

Earlier that year, Making Science had named him global chief revenue officer of RAISING, its technology division, with responsibility for global partnerships from the United States. The scope changed again: another assignment involving technology, customers, and the relationships needed to bring them together.

By October 2025, he was discussing applied AI on Advertising Week’s AI: Machine-Made Marketing podcast. The subjects included fragmentation, personalization, experimentation, and the relationship between human creativity and automation. His advice favored getting started and continuing to learn. A finished understanding of a changing technology is a difficult thing to schedule.

New field. Familiar questions.

Downie announced his move to PublicRelay in March 2026. He explicitly described communications as related to, yet different from, the digital marketing field where he had spent the preceding fifteen years. His stated ambition was to bring digital maturity and a technology innovation mindset into the company’s next phase of growth.

The distinction deserves attention. Marketing technology had occupied much of his recent career. PublicRelay analyzes media and helps communications teams understand reputational impact. The move lets him carry relevant experience into a business whose customers ask a different set of questions.

PublicRelay combines AI with human analysts who know a client’s business and check the work. For its new CEO, that model puts people and technology together in a familiar arrangement. The tools can help process information; judgment still needs someone answerable for it. His earlier advice about verification has found a particularly suitable workplace.

During his early months, Downie joined a dinner with communications leaders in New York. He reported a conversation lasting two and a half hours, covering agentic AI, forward-looking intelligence, meaningful metrics, and discussions with CEOs and boards. A recurring concern was that communications teams faced expanding responsibilities with familiar resource constraints.

It was a useful introduction to the field he had entered. Customers were describing the work as they experienced it. Before a growth strategy becomes a presentation, there is value in hearing where the pressure lands. Downie’s account of that dinner returned to people, their workload, and the decisions they were being asked to support.

Room for another destination

Outside work, Downie makes time to travel with his wife. His interests include climbing Kilimanjaro and reaching Everest base camp. Asked where he feels happiest, he pointed outdoors. His wish list included Budapest, Prague, and Vilnius. The map, like the résumé, allows more than one kind of destination.

He named Good Will Hunting as his favorite film, answering with the familiar apples reference. For professional reading, he recommended AdExchanger and Think with Google, along with using LinkedIn to connect with people in the field. Learning, in that account, involves both published material and conversation.

The through-line in Downie’s career is a willingness to enter another room before he knows everything about it. He has done that as a musician, entrepreneur, technology executive, and now a communications CEO. PublicRelay gives that habit a new subject. After all those changes, listening remains an unusually portable piece of equipment.