Dive Brief:

• Havas will invest 400 million euros, or more than $429 million, over the next four years to support data, tech and artificial intelligence (AI) development and meet clients’ needs for cross-functional, integrated communications solutions, the company announced last week.
• The holding company also announced a new global operating system that will be modeled after its existing Converged media tool, which uses AI to provide transparent, cross-platform audience planning. The new OS will roll out over the coming months and reach across all of Havas’ networks and areas of expertise.
• The investment will be supported by a Global Task Force as Havas looks to the possibility of going public in the future.

Dive Insight:

Havas is the latest holding company to invest heavily in AI as it looks ahead to marketing’s future, following similar moves by WPP and Publicis Groupe — which have each said they will dedicate upwards of $300 million a year for the next few years in AI and tech investments.

For Havas, the goal is to enable a more integrated end-to-end client experience as marketer demand grows for ways to create, produce and distribute real-time optimized, personalized and meaningful content at scale. Accordingly, it will appoint a global chief client officer.

“We are building a model that is future-thought, agnostic in terms of data and tech partnerships and perfectly interoperable with our clients’ systems, to meet their needs even more swiftly and cost-effectively,” said Yannick Bolloré, chairman and CEO of Havas, in a statement. “Havas Converged is a collective journey, as it marks a further acceleration in our growth journey.”

Havas has delivered strong revenue growth of late. The investment and Converged model are part of an overall strategy to spin off Havas from its current parent, Vivendi, and become a publicly traded company. Vivendi acquired the holding company in 2017. 

The investment in technology builds on the Together Strategy and a Village approach launched by Havas in 2014. The new Converged model is designed to foster greater global collaboration by using data, technology and AI to fuse talent, capabilities, platforms and expertise, per press details.

The expansion of the Converged model beyond media is intended to enable all 23,000 Havas employees across departments to work together to create integrated and sustainable solutions following four steps of the client journey: intelligence, design, activation and measurement