How Havas Media Is Supercharging Its Data Capabilities

Havas Media has made a concerted effort to bump up its data offerings lately, investing heavily in data, analytics and martech to provide more value for clients. To that end, it hired former Accenture global managing director Mike Bregman in May as chief data officer, who has quickly been building a team of specialists to boost its offerings in these areas to keep ahead of client needs. “There's a demand for smarter technology, which is my mar tech group, there's a demand for smarter data harmonization data processing data automation, which is my engineering team, and there's no shortage of asks for data science, advanced analytics, optimization, which is a new thing that we set up called decision sciences,” Bregman told Adweek. The latest set of new hires for Havas Media’s decision sciences, analytics, and mar tech (DA&M) group are: Vlad Golinder, svp, mar tech and data consulting; Chris Chobanian, svp group director, analytics; Sriram “Ram” Padmanabhan, svp, decision sciences; Joon Park, vp, director, analytics, Havas Media; Dana Cohen, vp, director, analytics, Havas Media; and Yoo-Jin Cho svp group director, analytics. That makes roughly 35 new hires in North America since Bregman started, and the plan is to get to 50 team members in North America by the end of the year. Building out a team of specialists “The folks that we've brought in have been hungry to build their own practices and their own areas,” said Bregman, who has pitched to these execs a strategy of helping clients find the right solutions, instead of forcing them to buy its version of data tools. The goal is to seamlessly work the clients' pre-existing data stacks into Havas' way of working. Bregman added that Havas Media will work with companies that already have their own advanced analytics vendors and take those datasets and plug them into their forecasting model or cross channel planning tools. “There's always so much that agencies tend to give up to other vendors as a leaky bucket, and my sales spiel to all of these new folks that have joined my team has been, let's find complementary services.” Get the latest advertising news and analysis straight to your inbox with our daily newsletter. Sign-up today. Bregman came to Havas wanting to structure the three main services as innovation hubs and incubators, not just as one product offering. He wants them to be areas where his teams would work hand in hand with clients to build advisory services as a sort of consultancy. Many of Havas Media’s clients—which include big players in automotive, retail and telecoms—have taken their data in-house, and they’re building their own dashboards. As a result, Bregman said that Havas can work with client technology to help with measurement. But, he added that transparency is needed so the agency can advise how to talk with media partners like Google, Facebook, Adobe and the like to build the right infrastructure to arrange how that data goes to market. For instance, clients often hold first party data, but agencies like Havas need to receive that data and pass it on to media vendors. The Havas tech and data teams work with these data vendors to make sense of everything and help build campaigns that drive success. “Even though clients have their own marketing mix modeling partners, we still have a role to play with passing the right levels of granularity of data along,” said Bregman. “We're here to advise clients on the best combination of measurement tools and techniques, some of which we can own, some of which we're happy to build out.” Utilizing the Converged platform Havas Media developed its Converged platform, which is at the center of its DA&M offerings. It’s an identity-based planning and buying platform that keeps the audience and consumer behavior at the center of the media process. Bregman said that Converged is optional for clients, as the agency encourages clients to build the right tech stack to fit their needs, so essentially Converged is a rent-not-buy platform. “We will not be the company that goes in and forces clients to buy through this system. We are using it as a way to complement clients’ existing datasets,” said Bregman, adding that Havas allows clients to onboard their first-party data into Converged, then it mines for insights, looks at audience profiles and runs bespoke segmentations. Land O’Lakes Names Battery and Havas Media as AOR Converged also has an automated dashboarding system that allows the data signals and all of the user profiles and segments to be evaluated at an aggregate level, so clients can see where their dollars are working harder and where they can optimize. There are also a number of data science modules so clients can make better marketing investment decisions and optimize all their buys. Ultimately, Bregman wants to take the agency from tracking performance to tracking outcomes, not just from what media was executed, but what clients get as a result of their campaigns, which is sales. “We want to track how successfully clients are growing their business,” said Bregman. He added that the next steps of Havas Media's evolution is to grow its analytics and artificial intelligence with the most advanced methods, to help clients evolve their brands through growth and build confident creative based on both data and creative concepts. To that end, Bregman's pursuit of top talent will come from outside of media in sectors like technology, vendor side and academics.

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How Havas Media Is Investing in Talent to Supercharge Its Data Capabilities

Agency will work with clients’ existing programs to drive the best outcomes with their data

Kyle O’Brien

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Kyle O’Brien