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💡 HAVAS VILLAGE MOMENTS 💡     Over the last few weeks, we have been shouting out some of our agency's top displays of innovation and creativity!     Today in our Village Moments campaign we hear from Middle East Managing Director Fabio Silveira, as he describes his region's biggest innovation in 2024 so far.    “Earlier this year we onboarded all Jumeirah brands social media and content creation scope. The account covers 14 markets and 54 brands across multiple platforms and require streamlined operations and a business model that allows for the creation of 1500 pieces of content per month – and that’s on top of all the other social media accounts of Havas Middle East, which include adidas, Levi’s, Virgin Mobile, MG Motors, and others. The innovation was to leverage the moment of setting up a new structure and operational model - focused on tech driven efficiency, consistent quality and agility – to set up a new ‘product’, that allows Havas Middle East to support brands with similar requirements.” Fabio Silveira, Managing Director, Havas Middle East    #OneHavas #MeaningfulWork #HavasProud 

Very happy to have played a very small part in this calling for this to happen, well played B Lab for doing the right thing 👏 I’m a massive advocate for B Corp and a massive advocate for the biggest organisations in (all) industries using the B Impact Assessment ‘tool’ to transform. Yet Havas totally took total liberties here. Having spoken to a number of clients (and employees) of Havas who are rightly shopping about right now - I certainly wouldn’t want to be in their reputational risk or people & culture teams at this moment 👀 And it doesn’t just stop with Havas, network agencies globally are totally under threat. Yes they have size, heritage and media buying power - 🛥️ and can afford a banging boat at Cannes 🛥️ - but if forward leaning clients don’t want to be associated to you because of your client list, and your best talent is jumping ship - surely the best strategic business direction is to take advise from an organisation like Clean Creatives and get your house in order. But what about the stability of employment for existing employees? I can’t imagine the outgoings of a network agencies IT costs, let alone their primo location global offices - but ‘not taking the brief’ doesn’t just protect the agencies reputation - built from hundreds of thousands of hours of brilliant strategic and creative minds collaborating to drive remarkable communications - it also protects the hundreds if not thousands of jobs that will be lost from ‘natural churn’ and clients hitting the eject button. Big news for B Corp, big news for agencies. #Agency #Greenwash #BCorp

In a moment of accelerated #data & #technology, talent matters more not less. Privileged to have spent a few days with Charlotte Lee, Tony Harradine and our inspiring OMD APAC leaders discussing the future of agency services and the growing role #APAC is playing in our worldwide strategy, especially when it comes to #digital #transformation and #commerce innovation.

OUCH. Superficial branding; where you say, but do not do; will cause increasing issue for business, especially when your claim is big. For all businesses who think you can say what you like in market without operationalising your promises to your consumers, take serious note. For those who are serious about operationalising brand, we’d love to talk. Thanks as ever Rob Mayhew for the astute commentary, this time with little translation required to achieve maximum irony.

Day 4 at the 71st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity concluded with the prestigious Cannes Lions being awarded for the Brand Experience & Activation, Creative Business Transformation, Creative Commerce, Creative Effectiveness, Creative Strategy Innovation, and the newly introduced Luxury and Lifestyle Lions. The night also saw the Regional Network of the Year Awards announced. Here's a list of winners Regional Network of the Year - Asia : Ogilvy Regional Network of the Year - Europe : Publicis Worldwide Regional Network of the Year - MENA : BBDO Worldwide Regional Network of the Year - Latin America : DDB Worldwide Regional Network of the Year - North America : FCB Global Regional Network of the Year - Pacific : BBDO Worldwide Regional Network of the Year - Sub-Saharan Africa : TBWA\Worldwide Weber Shandwick Chicago | Pop-Tarts | Loewe Madrid | Klick Health Toronto | KVI Brave Fund Inc. | Rethink Toronto | Kraft Heinz | Dentsu Creative Amsterdam | KPN | LePub | Amsterdam | Philips | Publicis Conseil Paris | Renault Group Congratulations to the winners!  #Creativity #CannesLions #Advertising #Winners #Adtechtoday

I have a love-hate relationship with advertising and marketing. That feeling about Commercial Creativity is never closer to the surface than at this time of the year, when Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity comes around again. By Commercial Creativity I mean the loosely defined name given to a group of activities from the marketing function in a business, to those who help those marketers do what they need to do, the advertising, media and branding agencies and everything in between. I was for a long time of this world: Chief Strategy Officer of EMEA, Global EXCO, Global Creative Council for the then named Y&R - VMLY&R (and now VML!) and then Chief Marketing Officer for the United Nations World Food Programme. I did lots of things in those roles, some of those are still part of my life, but they are no longer all of my life. This is an exploration of the good, bad and ugly of the industry, the importance of metas and what you might do if you want to try something different. (A shorter version of this was first published by my friends and colleagues at BeenThereDoneThat - thank you. David Alberts, Nikki Crumpton and Marielle Kouroushi-Phillips). Saïd Business School, University of Oxford #marketing #branding #advertising #careers #personaldevelopment #growth

Good to see B Corp has now revoked Havas' status because if their Shell relationship, but the broader issue seems to be reflective of the pivot point we're at: it's no longer enough to be "trying" to be better in a few areas, we're way past that; it now needs to be about demonstrably BEING better in every area. B Corp was great for checking that companies really were trying to do some things, now that's the default / minimum we expect from everyone, the bar has to raise for it to be a check that companies really are doing everything they can. Also, side point, but if your reactive corporate statement doesn't stand up to being spoken out loud, even in a satire sketch, then it probably needs rewriting! 😆 #BCorp #sustainabililty #ESG

Managed to sneak into the end of the Agency or the Year awards last night to see Dentsu Singapore defend the Agency or the Year title yet again with maybe the biggest trophy haul I've ever seen! (I'm hiding at the left edge of this photo). Congrats to Prakash Kamdar and the entire Dentsu leadership, and to Sanchit Mendiratta, Trishe Goh, Terrence Quah, Vishal Thakur, Shaun Au Yong, Shushanta Guha and the entire #happytribe at Merkle for dominating every category we do work in. Incredibly proud of Jiani Han for showcasing the work from this generation of Merkle Singapore heroes and taking case study and award deep work to new heights! It was 2016, when some of us at Happy Marketer pulled an all nighter, managed to find $1200 for 4 submissions and put in our first entry to the Agency or the Year awards. While we didn't win, we did get a backchannel message from the Marketing Interactive team and Rezwana Manjur that they were proud to see local homegrown companies do great work and submit to compete with the bigger firms. That spark turned this into an obsession. Over the next 4 years, we changed the way we scoped work, planned deliverables, documented results, set project goals. This focus didn't just change our work, it changed our self worth in the industry. Doing work like this made the #MisfitsOfMarketing feel like they had their own place, and encourage new talent to join us. and that crescendo'ed in 2019 when we swept the award and won the Local Hero Agency of the Year in the year of our acquisition. The usual story at this point is then to give up the spotlight, get sucked into post M&A integration and growth. But Prantik Mazumdar kept the pressure on for new heights, Awadesh Madhogaria and Emily Han kept going for new heights on delivery and client management and in 2022, right after our rebrand, Merkle Singapore won the overall Agency of the Year - dominating across media, martech, CRM, consulting, analytics, search, social, programmatic and so many other categories. Last year, the team continued dominating with another haul last year which led to the Dentsu Singapore family winning the overall Agency of the Year. And this year, Merkle submitted all its work as Dentsu. And all that work lined up with Dentsu Singapore's own 5 year reinvention journey. Happy Marketer starting, surviving, scaling and getting acquired will remain highlights in my entrepreneurial career - but creating a team, culture and organization that has outlasted and outgrown me is probably my proudest achievement. For everyone else working on something different, unexpected and entrepreneurial ... I hope this story is a reminder that with time and intent, your goals are just over the horizon ❤️

2023: No.1 in the Middle East, No.9 in the world. 2024: No.1 in the Middle East, No.7 in the world.

I'm thrilled about Havas Creative's 1st place in the integrated campaign category at Mi:t&Links. Baltic Communication Awards 🥇. At the same time, it's doubly exciting to see the intense competition that continues to grow each year at this festival, where evaluating effectiveness plays a crucial role. This provides much clearer support from clients because it's evident – effectiveness for profit is much closer than creativity. However, my observation about Mi:t&Links aligns with the conclusions and discussions following Effie’s Best of Europe judging experience. Specifically, there's a growing volume of submitted work that consists of social campaigns, where effectiveness is certainly not measured by the same parameters as commercial campaigns. Therefore, looking ahead, it would be valuable to establish different criteria for social and commercial campaigns, ensuring we don't lose interest in commercial campaigns in the latter. After all, partners in commercial campaigns, whether at Mi:t&Links or Effie’s festivals, are crucial. Share your thoughts or comments below. ⬇ At the same time, I can only express my joy that on a Baltic scale, the proportion of social campaigns demonstrates the courage to address socially sensitive issues through communication.