Anthony Rhind Co-CEO & Marketing Director Havas Digital

Havas Digital is the umbrella holding company that manages all Havas Media's interactive companies.  Havas Digital brands provide data driven marketing solutions across all interactive channels to over 400 clients worldwide and it Digital operates from 40 cities in 30 different countries across Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania. Recently, Omniture's Josh James had this discussion with Havas Digital's co-CEO and Marketing Director, Anthony Rhind.

Josh James: Please tell us a little about your career and path to CEO at Havas Digital.

Anthony Rhind: My background is media strategy, but I have been involved in managing the digital network for the last six years.  Gabi Saenz de Buruaga—my fellow CEO—and I were promoted in January. Prior to that he was COO and I was Chief Strategy Officer, so we have been a team for a long time.  We also have a great team around us, which means the transition has been smooth. . . aside from the economic environment, of course.

Looking back, our focus has evolved with the industry.  A fundamental result is that we evolved from a single agency brand—Media Contacts—to a group of agency brands.  We now have three digital media agency brands: Media Contacts, Latittud and iGlue.  We also added a dedicated mobile network, called Mobext, while further expanding our creative capability though acquisitions and startups. 

What has been consistent is a focus on service quality, enabling the capture and sharing of institutional knowledge, plus a commitment to our proprietary data capture and interrogation capability, called Artemis, to make informed digital media planning/buying decisions.  It is interesting that over the last few years, as the boundaries between elements of the advertising delivery chain have blurred, levels of collaboration and openness have improved.  This is a trend I enjoy and see continuing.

James: What are some of the most meaningful changes you have brought about at your agency to make the CMOs you service be successful? And what is still missing that you would like to tackle in 2010?

Rhind: CMOs hire agencies to help drive business results, usually profitable sales.  Digital agencies have a unique advantage in that they have levers available in the form of data through the purchase funnel to continuously help to grow the CMO’s business.  We are committed to improving our human and system resources to continue to do better for our clients.  Three specific areas of focus in 2009 have been education, developing custom attribution models and building our capability to trade media in real-time, at the impression level, using data points and algorithms to define value opportunities for our clients’ campaigns.

Education has been a big win in 2009.  We created a global e-learning platform, populated with digital-knowledge and professional-development training, customized to the seniority of each employee or client who is trained via our platform.

As far as attribution goes, digital might be the most accountable medium, but accountability is defined by the process of attribution.  We must acknowledge that most of our industry—relying on last-click or last-impression attribution models—actually does a poor job of really understanding attribution.  In fact, we have published a white paper on the subject. To add further insight into the management of our clients’ media investments, we built automated attribution reports into Artemis. 

In terms of trading media in real time, we have been focused on how the evolving models of digital-inventory trading will allow us to find advantages for our clients, with more efficient pricing and more effective inventory selection.  Buying at the impression level, as opposed to the placement level, allows segmentation strategies to be executed with greatly reduced waste.  It is the arrival of ad exchanges, such as Right Media and DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which has enabled impression-level buying at massive scale.

Of course, segmentation must be informed, so with impression buying comes the need to use data to profile impressions to realize that segmentation.  This is where the fusion of contact/customer data with campaign data, site data and profile data becomes critical to directing trading strategies.  This is an extremely exciting area for our industry, with major implications for our ability to drive clients’ business volumes that are attributed to digital media.