A Finger Pointing to The Moon

Jason Xenopoulos is an award-winning creative director, filmmaker, and entrepreneur whose creative ventures have spanned all areas of media from film and TV to advertising, music, and the internet. He is the regional chief creative officer for VML North America and the global chief creative officer for WPP Ford.

Jason has won Grand Prix and Gold awards at the world’s most prestigious advertising festivals as well as Best Screenplay and Best Feature Film awards at international film festivals. He was ranked in the Top 25 most awarded chief creative officers globally in The Drum’s 2023 World Creative Rankings. 

Over the past ten years Jason has helped to shape the vision and direction of VML, now the world’s largest creative agency. As the CEO of VMLY&R New York from 2018 - 2021, Jason helped to transform New York into a flagship office with over 1000 employees. As co-CCO for VMLY&R North America during the same period, he also helped to drive the agency’s creative transformation, leading the region to a Top 3 performance at Cannes Lions 2022. 

Among Jason’s many entrepreneurial ventures, he co-founded NATIVE in 2010, which rapidly grew to be Africa's leading digital agency before being acquired by WPP. Under Jason’s leadership as CEO and chief creative officer, NATIVE (now VML South Africa) won hundreds of awards, including being named Cannes Lions Entertainment Agency of the Year in 2017.

In addition to his creative awards, Jason was named All Africa Entrepreneur of the Year by CNBC and Entrepreneur of the Year at the ABSA Jewish Business Achiever Awards. Jason has published numerous articles, essays and opinion pieces including having co-authored the book, The Art of Branded Entertainment, which appeared on the Amazon Best Sellers list. 

Jason regularly judges award shows including Cannes Lions, Effies, NY Festivals, Loeries, Andy’s, and Dubai Lynx (where he served as the president of the Branded Entertainment jury) Jason is a 5th Dan Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do and the proud father of teenage triplets.

Over the course of my life, I’ve been inspired by artists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs, from Caravaggio to Coppola and Norman Mailer to Steve Jobs. And while I’ve learned something important from each of them, not one person has inspired me more than Bruce Lee.

My fascination with Bruce Lee (born Lee Jun Fan) began when I was a teenager, juggling seemingly contradictory passions for martial arts and cinema. At first, I was simply drawn to Bruce Lee the movie star. I had my own VHS copies of all his films, and I watched them over and over until the mag tape stretched and staticky white lines stuttered across the screen. But as my martial arts training evolved, I quickly realised that Bruce Lee was more than just a movie star.

He was a pioneer, an innovator, a change agent. He single-handedly introduced martial arts movies to the West, helping to create an entirely new genre of cinema. And that was just the beginning of his influence on popular culture — and on me.

As an ambitious young creative seeking to shape my own unique way in the world, Bruce Lee showed me that it was possible to straddle disciplines and to reach beyond the expected boundaries of my craft. At the age of 19, having completed my first year at drama school and having also just received my black belt in taekwondo, I was cast as a ninja in “American Ninja IV.” It wasn’t exactly “Citizen Cane,” but it was a real movie, and after six weeks of shooting in the small Southern African Kingdom of Lesotho, I was convinced that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

In fact, it was during those long dusty weeks in the hills around Maseru that I began writing my first feature-length screenplay, an experience that would eventually launch my career as a filmmaker and inadvertently lead me into the world of advertising.

In many ways, and for reasons beyond logic or circumstance, Bruce Lee’s iron fist has always held me to my path. Although I never met him, he has been a teacher and a guide — or what he himself might have described as “a finger pointing to the moon.”

But Bruce Lee’s influence on me, and on the world, can be felt way beyond the silver screen. 

Dismissing what he referred to as the “classical mess” handed down by traditional martial arts instructors, Bruce Lee created a disruptive, new fighting style called Jeet Kune Do — a style that favoured formlessness.

A style without style.

Apart from the profound effect his thinking had on my own martial arts studies, it changed the trajectory of martial arts as a whole and paved the way for modern MMA, which is now one of the fastest growing sports on the planet. If it weren’t for Bruce Lee, giant arenas like Madison Square Garden and the Las Vegas Sphere probably wouldn’t be packed with cheering UFC fans every Saturday night.

But Bruce Lee was more than a movie star, and he was more than a martial artist. He was a philosopher. A warrior-poet who embodied a tension and duality that I recognise and cherish in myself and in my own creative work.

He has inspired me to embrace that duality rather than hiding from it. To grab creativity with both hands and to thrust it above my head like a weapon.

While many of Bruce Lee’s philosophies are drawn from Taoism and other ancient Chinese philosophies, he made them accessible to a new generation — me included. Many of those philosophies have stayed with me throughout my life.

One that I often go back to is a line from his final film, “The Game of Death.” I remind myself of it whenever I face a tough decision and am forced to choose between the safe creative option and a more dangerous one: “It is better to die a broken piece of jade,” Bruce’s character says, “than to live a life of clay.”

It’s pop philosophy, borrowed from Confucius and retreaded through a Hong Kong martial arts movie, but like so many of Bruce Lee’s teachings, it’s a principle that I strive to abide by in my work and in my life. It is the firm grip of his iron fist on my shoulder, it is his finger always pointing me to the moon.