Jonathan Frohlinger

Jonathan Frohlinger runs Big Happy from 28 West 44th Street in Manhattan, a roughly 90-person ad tech company that makes cinematic, story-driven advertising for two very different kinds of screens: the phone in your hand and the digital billboard over your head. The company centralizes 3D creative production, media activation, targeting and measurement in one place, and runs campaigns across more than a million out-of-home screens and 7,000-plus mobile publishers in North America. The clients are the kind of brands you already know - Samsung, Verizon, Comcast, Best Buy, Uber, Coca-Cola, IKEA and Microsoft among them.

The through-line of everything Big Happy does is a single argument Frohlinger keeps making in interviews and press releases: creative is a performance lever, not an afterthought. "Creative isn't an add-on," he said when the company formed its 2026 advisory board. "It's a key performance lever. When executed with precision across screens, it drives measurable, scalable business results." Inside the company, that belief has a name - the order of operations. Creative first. Strategy second. Everything else after.

What makes the position interesting is where it comes from. Frohlinger did not arrive at creative-first through a design career. He came to it from the buying side, the part of advertising where budgets get spent and results get counted.

Big Happy's most recent work has pushed that thesis in a new direction. In June 2026 the company launched dynamic creative optimization for 3D digital out-of-home - a system that adapts an ad in real time to signals like weather, air quality, location and nearby events. When an impression request arrives, a decisioning engine evaluates those signals and selects the right creative variant in about 100 milliseconds, faster than a blink. "Brands can create a primary creative template that maintains consistent branding while dynamically tailoring key elements by market," Frohlinger explained.

It is a technical achievement, but he is careful not to let the technology become the story. Big Happy's pitch, he says, is not a deck full of jargon. "We want to walk into a room and show people something they can feel." That instinct - to lead with the work rather than the plumbing behind it - runs through how he talks about the whole company.

Big Happy reports the kind of numbers that back the argument: roughly 75% average unaided recall, up to seven times higher mental engagement than standard ads, and 120% revenue growth in 2023. In August 2025 the industry noticed, naming Big Happy the Best Overall Mobile Marketing Company in the MarTech Breakthrough Awards.

Frohlinger grew up into advertising the long way. He graduated from Hofstra University in 2011 with a degree in business economics and a minor in political science - not the resume of an obvious creative technologist. From there he moved through the industry's biggest rooms: Conde Nast, Starcom USA, Verve Mobile, and then Coffee Labs, where he was vice president of sales before striking out on his own.

Across those years the numbers stacked up. By his own accounting he managed more than $100 million in media buying and drove over $30 million in revenue from Fortune 500 clients - AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Microsoft, Ford, BMW, Snickers and others. That is a decade spent watching, from the inside, what brands were willing to pay for and what audiences actually paid attention to. The gap between those two things is more or less the reason Big Happy exists.

He founded the company in 2019. The early focus was mobile, teaching brands how to stand out on a small screen with animated, high-fidelity creative. That craft became the foundation for everything after.

The move into digital out-of-home, which Big Happy formalized as a business in 2025, was framed by Frohlinger as a natural progression rather than a pivot. "Mobile taught us how to help brands stand out and captivate consumers with superior animated, graphical creative," he said. "DOOH is the natural extension: a bigger, bolder canvas where brands can drive awareness and purchase intent." The point, in his telling, is to meet people wherever their attention actually is. "Now we can meet them on the move - not just as they scroll, but as they walk, wait, and shop."

He is unusually blunt about the state of his own industry. Asked about generative AI, he did not reach for the usual optimism. "Gen AI can absolutely help raise the bar because, frankly, digital got lazy," he said. "If Gen AI gets us out of a place where ads are unreadable or forgettable, that is a good thing." But he draws a hard line at the idea that generating a thousand versions of an ad is progress. The real question, he argues, is whether the creative is any good and whether anyone can actually operationalize it.

Which is why, even as Big Happy leans on AI for speed and versioning, it keeps humans at the center of the actual design. "Our creative teams are the ones who design the ads," Frohlinger said, "because we believe it takes humans to build human connection." His broader aim is to prove that high-fidelity, cinematic advertising doesn't have to be slow or one-off. "If you can build high-fidelity graphics quickly and leverage creative technology and get them into distribution without breaking the process, then CGI stops being a one-off stunt and becomes a real performance tool."

The business has attracted outside capital to match the ambition. In January 2024 Big Happy secured a $2.5 million strategic investment from Infolinks Media, part of a total funding figure reported around $2.57 million and classified as a Series A. Rather than a splashy venture raise, it reads as a strategic bet from a media partner on the specific idea Frohlinger keeps returning to: that better creative, made fast and distributed at scale, is a durable performance advantage.

In March 2026 the company took another step toward institutionalizing that idea, forming a board of advisors made up of senior media, marketing and brand-strategy leaders. The stated goal was to elevate cinematic creative as a scalable performance driver across screens. "Their guidance will help us define the next era of omnichannel advertising," Frohlinger said, "where DOOH and mobile work in tandem to deliver measurable lift, stronger conversion, and incremental growth."

That sentence is a fair summary of where he wants to take Big Happy. Not a creative shop and not a pure ad tech vendor, but a company that fuses the two - where the ad that stops you on the sidewalk and the ad that catches you mid-scroll come from the same craft, and where both can be measured against real business outcomes. For someone who spent a career on the buying side counting what worked, it is a fitting place to end up.