Inside the Village: How Convergence became Havas’ strategic superpower

While others talk about breaking silos, Havas built a model to erase them. The Village concept, now present in over 70 locations globally, remains the backbone of the group’s integrated offer. Global Chief Transformation and Growth Officer Tracey Barber discusses how the agency’s Village model and new Converged strategy are helping the network deliver integrated solutions with global reach and local impact.

Please provide a top line view of your agency’s structure, scale and capabilities.

Havas is one of the world’s largest and most established global communications and marketing groups. We’re perhaps best known for our pioneering ‘Village’ concept – a uniquely integrated approach which sees all our agencies, spanning every marketing discipline, united under one roof, far away from outdated silos.

We now boast more than 70 Havas Villages, plus eight Havas Centers of Excellence, in more than 100 countries around the world. Our 23,000 people all share (at least) one thing in common: we’re committed to making a meaningful difference to brands, businesses and people. We’re proudly independent, having been successfully relisted as a publicly traded company in 2024.

We’re structured under three main business units – Havas Creative Network, Havas Media Network and Havas Health Network – and offer the complete breadth of modern communication and marketing services, including business consultancy and transformation; brand consultancy and design; creative; media; health and wellness; customer experience; PR, public affairs and corporate communications; brand partnership, sponsorship and events; and production and content at scale.

In 2024, we unveiled our new global strategic plan and operating system, ‘Converged’. Fueled by the best data, technology and AI, and with creative ideas at its core, Converged builds on the success of Havas’ Together strategy and the unique Village approach we launched in 2014. By seamlessly fusing talent, capabilities, platforms and expertise, we’re able to turbocharge collaboration across the entire group – with strategy, creative, media and production working as one powerfully integrated cohesive force.

What most inspires you most about your agency?

I would say our people – and mean it, too, particularly my wonderful growth team and the leaders we support globally – but to avoid cliché, I’ll say our Villages. As Global Chief Transformation and Growth Officer, I’ve had the immense privilege of spending time in several of them over the past few months, from London and Paris to Mumbai, Singapore and Beijing.

They remain the best and most inspiring places to work in the industry – beautiful, modern buildings full of disparate but complementary skills, unique localized culture and Havas’ inherent entrepreneurial spirit. Since we pioneered the concept in 2014, other groups have attempted to replicate it – but only Havas is right-sized and culturally aligned to realize its potential, and our Villages remain best-in-class. The proof is in the pudding – our clients love these spaces, and so do I.

We’d like to hear about a new business win that you’re particularly proud of.

HARMAN International, including its iconic consumer lifestyle brand JBL, is the perfect example of the unique value Havas brings to the businesses we partner with. We became its global agency of record, across all its brands and territories, at the end of 2022 – beating every other major holding company in the process.

They approached us seeking a transition from multiple agencies to a single partner capable of delivering seamless connectivity and consolidation for their portfolio of brands. Through Converged, we saw an opportunity to deliver end-to-end creative and media solutions, while accelerating delivery through our integrated production capability.

Since winning the business, we’ve delivered a number of highly successful global campaigns, outsmarting the competition by obsessing over micro-targets, retail trends, cultural insights, media behaviors and more. To launch JBL Authentics, its new range of intelligent home speakers, we analyzed every touchpoint and scrutinized every asset to create JBL’s highest performing campaign to date (pictured below). That’s the true power of Converged: helping challenger brands win.

How do you stay nimble and adapt your agency’s strategy as new technologies or platforms emerge? Where do you see most opportunity for brands?

Havas’ reemergence as an independent company [in December 2024] marked the beginning of an exciting new chapter for the group, as the strongest challenger in a reconfiguring market – combining global reach with agility and an entrepreneurial spirit. Crucially, this increased agility allows us to facilitate acquisitions and investments in high-growth markets and areas such as data, technology and AI to remain at the cutting edge of our industry.

This M&A strategy is well established – with recent acquisitions including Channel Bakers (e-commerce), DMPG (digital analytics), Wilderness (social marketing), Ledger Bennett (B2B) and TED Consulting (data consultancy); while in 2024, Havas committed €400m to data, tech and AI over four years. The scale of change is unprecedented, but so is our ability to adapt.

Our new public status also provides additional flexibility to support growth and innovation efforts through the implementation of our Converged strategy. Simply put, Converged is our superpower – giving us richer audience insights to fuel imagination, sharper analysis and synthesis and, ultimately, more meaningful creativity for our clients. And while technologies and platforms will continue to evolve – plus ça change – the fundamental opportunity for brands will forever be in genuinely meaningful creativity.

Source: AdForum

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