Advertising
Age recently interviewed Havas CEO Yannick
Bolloré—poster
child for nepotism in Adland—who offered uninspired perspectives on the White
holding company that he was anointed appointed to lead.
Meanwhile,
Maxim recently spotlighted Vincent Bolloré, veritable
Daddy Warbucks of the Vivendi Group, the global media monster wherein Havas
resides.
The
Bolloré clan has an estimated net worth of $10 billion, which is roughly $10
billion more than the average Havas employee’s annual salary.
So,
what’s the point? Consider the following excerpt from “How
To Be An Antiracist”
by Ibram X. Kendi:
“From the Junior Black Americans of Achievement
series onward, I had been taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That
ignorance and hate cause racist ideas. That the root problem of racism is
ignorance and hate.
But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong.
The root problem—from Prince Henry to President Trump—has always been the
self-interest of racist power.
The source of racist ideas was not ignorance and
hate, but self-interest.”
Don’t mean to sound discriminatory and judgmental, but can French
billionaires really grasp the intricacies of diversity, inclusion, and equity
to authentically embrace antiracism?
More specifically, can a French
billionaire integrate DEI principles to recreate a White holding company?
Non.
BTW, while relating the global
state of affairs at Havas via the Ad Age interview, the prodigal son made zero
mention of diversity, except to discuss diversification of offerings. Hell, he
didn’t even include DEI while pontificating on the corporate mission to make a meaningful difference to the world.
Case closed.
Havas CEO On AI, Whether Agency Brands Still Matter And
Why It Works With Shell
Yannick
Bolloré discusses issues at Havas, which posted 4.5% third-quarter organic
revenue growth
By Brian Bonilla
Ad Age
recently caught up with Yannick Bolloré, chairman and CEO of Havas, to discuss
its positioning versus its competitors, its Shell account, the state of agency
brands and more.
Havas last
week posted 4.5% organic revenue
growth for the third quarter, putting the
Vivendi-owned agency company in good stead among holding company rivals that
have reported quarterly organic revenue results so far: IPG reported a 0.4%
decrease, Omnicom
posted 3.3% growth and
Publicis leads the pack with a 5.3% increase.
Havas
has made significant moves, such as acquiring Uncommon Creative Studio and promoting two co-CEOs to head Havas New York. Havas has also faced criticism over its Shell
account win, which has garnered some pushback from members of the advertising
community. Last week, B Corp-certified agencies signed a letter, supported by activist group Clean Creatives,
calling for shops that work with fossil fuel companies to be stripped of their
B Corp status. This included companies such as Havas, MSQ and TBWA.
Bolloré
has been chairman of Havas since 2013 and its CEO since 2014. The following
conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How do
you think you’re stacking up against your competitors?
When
you look at Havas’ client portfolio, it’s quite well-diversified, quite well
balanced. Maybe we are slightly overweighted in health compared to our peers.
We have one-third of our revenue coming from health clients, but otherwise,
it’s quite well balanced. I looked at the earnings for our top 50 clients and
they were all great. Maybe we are suffering less than our peers [because of]
better diversification. I don’t like to say bad things about our peers, I just
like to focus on ourselves and our clients. And obviously, it’s a very strong
year.
Have
you seen macroeconomic concerns from clients leading to a slowdown in projects
that other holding companies have cited in their financial reports?
To be
totally transparent with you, we don’t really see any kind of slowdown. When I
talk to my teams, maybe it would be fair to say that we might expect slower
growth next year. But still, I’m a huge believer that our clients’ investment
is having a good effect on their business. They’re not spending money just to
please their communication partners. They invest money in communication and
media because it’ll have a positive effect on their business.
Of
course, there are things we need to deal with–inflation, the rise of interest
rates, which is not easy to cope [with] for everyone, depending on the
industry. We also have some geopolitical crises, to say the least. So of course
the environment is pretty scary, but when we talk to our clients, maybe we’ll
see a softening in the investments, but nothing seems to make me think that
next year won’t be a year of growth. When we start budgeting for next year, as
I tell my team, I like to quote the Navy SEALs: “Expect the worst and hope for
the best.”
Last
month you entered into a partnership with retail media network Mirakl. How that
partnership will benefit your organization?
Mirakl
is one of the leaders in the e-commerce website space. We have seen a rise in
investments in retail media. Obviously, Amazon is by far leading the category.
I think Amazon owns between 60% and 70% of brands’ investments in e-commerce
websites. But we see a trend from all retailers to go and invest in that space.
My
belief is that retail media will become the second-most invested space in
advertising after digital, but before TV. So it’s very important that we
continue to offer the best of the best to our clients. Those kinds of
partnerships are really important to us because they can help Mirakl develop
their solution of advertising on e-commerce websites, and they can help us to
access the best websites in the world and offer website solutions to some of
our clients.
You
expanded your partnership with Adobe. How is that significant?
One
hundred percent of our creative agencies are using AI today, mostly Dall-E and
Midjourney. The only problem I see with AI is around intellectual properties
and copyrights because our clients want to have the guarantee that every work
we produce for them, they can use it free of rights. Havas belongs to Vivendi,
which is a world leader in content and entertainment. And when I talk to
Universal Music Group, Canal+ [a French channel owned by Vivendi], or people in
the book publishing sectors, they all fear that AI has not been trained on
free-of-rights content, and it might create a problem in the near future. So it
was very important for me to partner with Adobe, because their tools GenStudio
and Adobe [Firefly] have been trained on only content that is free of rights,
whether it's free of rights or they have cleared the rights.
I’m
always amazed when I discuss with clients the amount of their content that is
not used. They tell me that between 50% and 80% of their content is wasted.
They produce the content, but they don’t really use it. So the journey is how
can we avoid waste? How can we be more effective in producing content and using
it and also more efficient? And this is why we’re developing this strategy
around responsible and meaningful AI together with Adobe.
Recently
Clean Creatives supported a petition to have agencies, including Havas, to get stripped of their B Corp status if they work with fossil fuel companies. You
work with Shell. Can you comment?
I read
the petition, it’s about other groups, it’s not just Havas.
I told
the team that I don’t agree with the Clean Creatives and their position, but
I’m a huge admirer of freedom. And I like to quote a French philosopher called
Voltaire who said, “I strongly disagree with you, but I will fight until the
death to make sure you can continue to express your point of view.” I have
nothing but huge respect for anyone with different opinions than mine. We
discussed with the executive committee about Shell when we were invited to
pitch because we were aware of the sensitivity.
First,
I want to reiterate our mission, which is to make a meaningful difference to
the world. We continue to stick to our commitment in terms of greenhouse gas
emissions. We continue to say that we won’t be participating in any
greenwashing, but once we have said that, the question becomes where do you
draw the line? My belief is that we will have a stronger impact and a more
meaningful impact partnering with every company as long as they’re engaged in
the meaningful transition journey themselves.
Put the
emotion aside and look at what is in the Shell assignment for Havas Media. A
huge majority of the assignment is about promoting EV charging stations, which
is good for the world. So I’m a huge believer that the most effective change
comes from within. That’s why we decided to participate in the pitch. I really
want to express my congratulations to the team that has been pitching and
winning because it was a fierce competition. We were not the only ones in the
pitch, as you can imagine, everyone was pitching. The only ones who were not
pitching are the ones who had a conflict in the fuel [industry] already. So I’m
super happy that we won and we continue our commitment.
I
discussed [our clients] with the B Corp certification inspector a few years
back, and we had the discussion because we work for those kind of controversial
industries in some other parts of the world, and they agreed that as long as we
are committed to making things better [we qualify]. I’m still open to dialogue
and whatever happens, we will continue to commit to our commitments and our
objectives in terms of CO2 reduction.
Do you
feel like the reaction to the account win has been warranted?
I think
it’s good to have these kinds of dialogues with everyone, but if I don’t agree,
I think I will continue to have this dialogue with the team.
Do you
have any thoughts on the Wunderman
Thompson and VMLY&R merger at
WPP?
It’s
very hard for me to comment. I don’t have all the elements. So I don’t know
exactly if it was working or not working. What is sure is that I’m a huge
believer in integration and making things simple for clients. Clients want to
avoid the complexity of our own internal organization at holding companies. So
I believe the more we make it simple for people, the better it is for the
clients.
Do
agency brands still matter?
More
and more clients are consolidating their businesses because they want to avoid
having multiple contracts in different countries. I remember participating in a
consolidation pitch for a big pharma company eight years ago in Switzerland.
For the first time, they were not inviting agencies, but they were inviting the
five or the six holding companies, and they wanted to move to just two holding
companies.
I asked
the CEO, “Why are you doing this big consolidation pitch?” It was one of the
first holding consolidation pitches. And he told me, “I looked at it with the
team and the procurement department, and we have 3,600 different contracts with
agencies around the world. So we wanted to structure and make it more simple
and save money,” and it made sense.
[The
industry] has changed a lot. And that’s true [especially] when [clients] pitch
for media consolidation they talk about Havas, Publicis, WPP, Omnicom, IPG and
Dentsu. They don’t talk about GroupM or Havas Media.
So I
would say it’s important to keep the brands and the different agencies to
manage conflict, but in the end, the holding company matters much more than in
the past, for sure. Havas led the way with our village strategy. I don’t want
to say that brands do not necessarily matter, because it’s not really
true—especially on the creative business for some very boutique, very creative
[agencies] with a strong personality. But at the end of the day, it’s fair to
say that holding companies matter much more than in the past.
I’ve
heard predictions that next year we’re going to see more consolidation of
agency rosters. Is that something you’re seeing?
I think
the trend is here to last in the media sector for sure. We still have some
clients that like to pick and choose by country. But still, I think the trend
is we will move toward more consolidation. It’s slightly different on the
creative side because it’s not true that the same campaign can work in every
country. Locality still matters. For example, the cultural specificities in
France are not the same as in the U.K. or in the U.S.
