Warc, 2 September 2014
PARIS: The successful move of the Havas advertising group to
embrace digital was in part a consequence of the planned merger between
Publicis and Omnicom, according to its top executive.
While that union eventually fell apart, chairman and CEO
Yannick Bolloré told the Financial Times that it had kept him awake at night.
"It made me think a lot about scale and it forced us to accelerate the
pace of change," he said.
The change he referred to has involved shifting the emphasis
of the group towards digital and fully exploiting the volume of data that are
now available to marketers. "There has never been so much data out
there," he stated. "But what is the point if you cannot use it to
give business insight to your clients?"
In evidence, he claimed that recruiting increased numbers of
mathematicians to crunch the numbers had led to higher online conversion rates.
The other plank of his strategy has been to foster greater
internal teamwork, and that has meant the integration of its creative and
media-buying operations.
As Andrew Benett, global CEO of Havas Worldwide, recently
told the Wall Street Journal: "Our clients don't de-couple creative and
media when they're thinking about driving their business so we're trying not to
as well."
As regards scale, Bolloré suggested that Havas already had
sufficient reach – with 16,000 employees and a presence in more than 100
countries – to deal with global clients.
His colleagues offered alternative views of the arguments
around size. "Big is great, big is beautiful, but agility and speed is
better today," said Dominique Delport, global managing director for Havas
Media Group.
Benett came back to digital: "As long as we're a leader
in technology, which we're doing in many ways, scale becomes almost
irrelevant," he said.
Data sourced from Financial Times, Wall Street Journal;
additional content by Warc staff
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