Havas Media Group’s bolstered board shares mission to covet attention, not reach

Bevan, who is still in the process of fully integrating these new services into its wider offering, is enthused by the early results, telling The Drum how Search Labs and Expert Edge attracted business from Wolverine and Brompton respectively. Partly as a result of the acquisitions, the agency grew revenues 25% last year and now boasts a headcount of 749 (up 18% year-on-year).

On the wider flux in demand, Affleck admits that briefs coming to the agency are drastically different than he has seen before. “Their requirements and expectations were changing, so I was just really starting to wonder if our business is set up in the right way. We already had strong capabilities but we wanted to turbocharge it.”

To that end, he has brought in Nolan from HMG Global, where she was executive vice-president and managing director of strategy and intelligence, to serve as chief transformation officer. She has vowed to help join up HMG with Havas’s global villages and help it spread its newfound capabilities. The data and analytics, insights, strategy and planning departments will report to her, providing her with information that will help identify opportunities to augment the business (which could be further acquisitions).

On this new hire, Affleck says: “Lizzie will be massively important in helping us think about what comes next, what we need to do to evolve, where we need to acquire and the things we need to build. That’ll make us more of a sustainable business for ourselves and for our clients. It’s about getting close to clients and having more senior upstream conversations with them about their requirements. That way we can change quickly to suit and support those needs.”

Nolan meanwhile tells The Drum: “We’re developing an approach that is genuinely integrated and united. We work really well together as a network. The village concept is a very genuine thing. We’ll do a gap analysis in terms of our offering, look at how to create more of a strategic end-to-end approach and products for the clients and support them to grow their business and their brands.”

Bevan, who was previously the agency’s chief investment officer before stepping up to the chief operating officer role, will be tasked with helping integrate the acquisitions made in 2022, as well as those to come. The agency believes these bolstered capabilities are helping attract and retain clients, with Rémy Cointreau, Matalan, 505 Games, Bumble, Badoo and British Red Cross having since come on board.

Bevan points to the “alarming pace” at which the client demands are growing. It’s a good thing, he says, if you have the capabilities to meet them. “We’re seeing the number of services that clients are wanting off the back of our skill set grow very quickly.”

In response, he is tasked with assembling and maintaining “centers of excellence” across its Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and London offices. In 2022, HMG had a “really good head start” in its evolution from “traditional reach planning to more attention-based planning,” he adds. “If you put great talent, great product in the right place at the right time, you can make magic happen with clients.”

The pair will report to Affleck, who had his final say on potential growth areas. He touts the 2022 launch of Havas Business, which started catering to the “accelerating” B2B space that the agency is disrupting by applying “creative B2C thinking,” and adds that the agency wants to be the go-to place for effective content that people actually want to spend time with.

Nolan is taking the reins on this. “We’re trying to get brands to create more meaningful relationships with their customers and change their perceptions of their brand, and content plays a really key role in that.”

She believes that the industry has lost its grip on “consumer centricity” after a decade of “focusing on data, distribution and performance.”

The villages, she hopes, will feed into a loop where data, insights and strategy help form content that will work. “We’re not looking at it from a discipline or a skill set perspective – it is actually more about looking at ways in which all of it can be incorporated and work together.”

It’s clear that the agency is looking to pack away the “usual creative toolkit”. Nolan claims that ad avoidance is up 20-fold, while content marketing budgets are up threefold. She sees an opportunity, especially at a time when content products and TV are increasingly looking for brand funding.

She says: “People have been too focused on ‘performance or brand’ without thinking about what purpose the end product serves for the audience. We’re going to create those solutions across all aspects, indulging social, experiential and ad-funded programming. Content’s going to start having its day properly.”