Jessica Davey has never been particularly good at pretending.
Not pretending to agree. Not pretending to be less intense. And definitely not going along with ideas she doesn’t actually believe in.
“At Gut, when you join, you have to find your ‘brand one word’ and mine is audacity,” she says, laughing. “Which absolutely nobody found surprising.”
As Managing Director of Gut Asia, Jessica has built a reputation for saying the quiet part out loud. Sometimes strategically, sometimes accidentally, always sincerely. In an industry that rewards polish and performance, she remains deeply suspicious of the kind of professionalism that asks women to edit themselves into more acceptable versions of who they are.
Rage burns you out. Defiance is a sustainable engine.
Her team, she says proudly, are extremely comfortable telling her to get lost. Jessica considers this a sign of success, “I feel like my work there is done.”
Jessica’s exposure to advertising came early through her mother, Rosem’ry “she removed the ‘a’ from her name because she didn’t like it,” Jessica explained. Rosem’ry was a creative director building a career in the 1970s and 80s, when that was a considerably more hostile act than it sounds.
Often the only senior female creative in the room, when she launched her own consultancy, Rosem’ry named it after herself, complete with a full stop at the end. The gesture feels almost impossibly perfect in retrospect: declarative, theatrical, entirely unconcerned with shrinking itself for other people’s comfort.
She drove her children to school in a Jaguar with Wagner playing at full volume.
Seven months before this interview, Rosem’ry died. What followed was a stream of appreciation for her unapologetic contributions: column inches in the Australian trade press, yes, but also tributes from colleagues remembering the time she helped someone through a divorce, or showed up when a child was sick.
“You don’t think of those little micro moments,” Jessica says, “the potential you have to impact someone just by smiling at them.”
Rosem’ry was criticised for raising children while working, then criticised again for stepping back to spend more time with them. She responded to both, Jessica recalls, without internalising either judgment as her own.
“She didn’t come home and say, I have to be better,” Jessica says. “She was like: they are a pack of assholes.”
Jessica’s professional record is, by any measure, remarkable. During the Unilever Sustainable Living Project, she went 62 consecutive days without returning to London, eventually resurfacing to find the Jubilee line inexplicably quiet because she had missed the entire build-up to the London Olympics.
You don’t think of those little micro moments, the potential you have to impact someone just by smiling at them.
She commissioned documentary filmmaker Errol Morris to direct the campaign. She helped secure approval for the inclusion of a lesbian couple from the CEO of a FTSE company at a time when doing so still required genuine courage from everyone in the room.
She stayed at Ogilvy for 10 years because it gave her the chance to work alongside people willing to push boundaries creatively, culturally, and politically.
“When I said to clients, ‘You have to do this,’ they knew I meant it,” she says.
She knows a story has truly connected when it escapes the boundaries of advertising entirely: when it starts showing up somewhere it was never supposed to be, shared not because anyone was instructed to share it, but because people simply cannot help themselves.
For Her Mark, Jessica chooses a raised middle finger as her symbol. Not in rage, she clarifies. In defiance.
Rage is explosive; it consumes itself quickly. Defiance endures. It becomes a kind of critical gravity that keeps you oriented toward your own values.
Her hope is that Her Mark will serve as a kind of time capsule for the industry. “We spend so much time shaping culture as an industry,” she says. “We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the impact of it on ourselves.”
With characteristic delight, she references the “Boudicca Destruction Horizon” — the archaeological layer left behind in London after Boudicca burned Roman Londinium to the ground. Proof that people were here. That they left a mark.
I would let every woman see herself as her friends see her.
Jessica’s sharp humour and authoritative body language are built on a foundation of tenderness that scaffolds her conviction about the stories women tell themselves.
“Tell your story to yourself first,” she says. Before the followers, the algorithms, or the external validation.
Women, she believes, are often far more generous toward other people than they are toward themselves. “We are our own worst critics. We should be better at being our own best audience.”
And if she could wave a magic wand and change one thing for women?
“I would let every woman see herself as her friends see her.”
After that, she says, everything else follows. The world changes.
HerMark is a visual and narrative study of women shaping the marketing, advertising, and communications industry. Branding in Asia is publishing the ongoing series in partnership with HerMark.
Learn more at hermark.world
