David Allison

Author / Keynote Speaker

David's career took off as a copywriter andcreative 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 coursesat the university and passed along what he’dlearned so far.Eventually, he started a branding companywhere 40 people built campaigns for hotels,condo towers, resort properties, and officetowers around the world. Plus, he was VP ofmarketing for resorts at Sotheby's luxuryproperty division.Even earlier, from childhood right throughhis graduate year at school, he createdcampaigns, secured sponsorships, andattracted media attention for everything frombeer gardens to bookstores.All of this helped him see that people werebehaving in ways that demographics couldn'tdefine. From his vantage point, the next stepwas obvious: we needed a better way tounderstand people. So, in 2015, he launchedthe Valuegraphics Project, years before theValues Economy emerged in response to thepost-COVID world.Today, he helps brands like PayPal, the UnitedNations Foundation, lululemon, and Five StarSchool Supplies change how they look atpeople. He speaks on stages around theworld. His 2018 best-seller We Are All theSame Age Now was named one of the ten bestleadership books of the year by INC Magazine,and his new book The Death ofDemographics: Valuegraphic Marketing for aValues-Driven World will be published inNovember 2022.He is an avid collector of contemporary artand plans to continue weightlifting untilsomething forces him to stop. He lives ina retrofitted Vancouver office tower completewith a home studio and writes in a heritagecottage up the coast in British Columbia,Canada.