David Allison

David’s career took off as a copywriter and creative director in advertising agencies. He made campaigns for trucks, hotel rooms, hot dogs, newspaper subscriptions, flights, telephone services, cheese, and lawyers. On the side, he taught marketing courses at the university to pass along what he’d learned so far.

Eventually, he started a branding company where 40 people built campaigns for hotels, condo towers, resort properties, and office towers around the world. Plus, he was VP of marketing at Sotheby’s International Real Estate luxury project division.

Even earlier, from childhood right through his graduate year at school, he created campaigns, secured sponsorships, and attracted media attention for everything from beer gardens to bookstores.

All of this helped him see that people were behaving in ways that demographics couldn’t define. From his vantage point, the next step was obvious: we needed a better way to understand people. So, in 2015, he launched the Valuegraphics Project, years before the Values Economy emerged in response to the post-COVID world.

Today, he helps brands like PayPal, the United Nations Foundation, Lululemon, and Five Star School Supplies change how they look at people. He speaks on stages around the world. His 2018 best-seller We Are All the Same Age Now was named one of the ten best leadership books of the year by INC Magazine. His new book The Death of Demographics was an instant bestseller, hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “Convincing, insightful and… revolutionary.”

He is an avid collector of contemporary art and plans to continue weightlifting until something forces him to stop. He lives in a retrofitted Vancouver office tower complete with a video studio and writes in a heritage cottage up the coast in British Columbia, Canada.