Havas Entertainment rebranded as Arena Media UK at the end of last month and launched an OOH campaign to promote its ‘zero clients, only partners’ philosophy. The culture-first creative media agency still sits within the Havas Media Network, which means it has access to its tech, tools, and data.
Hamid Habib, managing director of Arena Media UK, spoke to MediaCat UK about Havas Entertainment’s history, what inspired the rebrand, the agency’s ‘zero clients’ philosophy, and whether we might see stronger collaboration between media and creative in the future.
How did the Arena Media UK rebrand come about?
We [Havas Entertainment] were set up just a little under four years ago, and we were designed to be the sort of perfect intersection of creativity and culture within media, alongside the tools and tech of a global network that has proper backing behind it. You get loads of great little boutique culture agencies that are brilliant, but they tend not to have access to the data or the partnerships that give them a competitive advantage in the tech data product space. At the same time, the big network agencies win awards and are celebrated, but they tend not to be at the bleeding edge of culture. So, they will have culture clients, but we have a real hire-for-attitude, train-for-skill approach with the people that we go after.
So the first year, we were the coming together of two small agencies and all the culture clients. Our KPI was the client review scores, and consistently we were beating the industry average with our gaming team topping it off at 9.3. I think the industry average is a low eight. We doubled in size in the first year. We doubled in size again in the second year.
We were bringing clients like Sega, Red Bull, Bumble, Pokemon, Penguin, Bethesda — a pretty cool client list that was a real mix of exciting brands but because of the way that they operate, you need different measurement systems. So it’s not that we reject the traditional measurement systems of traditional agencies, but you need to add a little bit extra so you can start to ingest the effect of word of mouth, reputation, hype and those elements of culture into the traditional methodology but with bespoke solutions that were built for our clients.
We started doing that more and more, but we were building the plane as we flew it, if the truth be told. The upshot of that was that we started getting approached by more and more clients who were not culture first. And we said no to loads of brands that approached us. But we were being approached by brands that operate in traditional sectors going, ‘Can you do the sort of work that you do for your clients for us because we want to take a more challenger, disruptive, creative, culture-first approach to stand out?’ and slowly over time we thought maybe we should be doing more of that.
At the same time, we only existed in the UK, but we got to a point where 60% of our billings were multimarket. So, we had more clients coming to us saying, ‘Can you expand your remit to cover more territories?’ and ‘Can we put people on the ground in some of the other markets where we’ve got bigger operations?’ And, every time, we did that — because we’ve got a huge Havas network and offices in 66 different places — but it was always us putting somebody in someone else’s office.
So then we thought that if we expand our culture-first proposition to be challenger and culture first and we want a network that we can tap into when we want to put boots on the ground in other markets, it suddenly made sense to bring the Arena proposition back because that’s exactly what they are. It’s challenger at its heart and they exist in 40 of those markets. And where they don’t [exist], we can tap into the Havas offices if we need to. So that’s where the growth story and the rebrand and the imagination behind it came.
As part of your rebranding campaign, digital and print billboards advertised Arena Media as an agency with ‘zero clients’. Can you expand on this campaign and the ‘zero clients, only partners’ philosophy?
The zero clients bit was partly because we’re a little bit mischievous and just wanted to lob a grenade into LinkedIn and watch it melt down, but at the heart of what we do, we are a media agency first and foremost. For some of our clients, we’re also full service because we’ve got all the components to do every bit of the media mix from PR to creative to social, you name it — it exists mostly on our floor, but definitely in our building.
For clients that live in culture, or want to get a competitive advantage through culture, I generally don’t think that you can just talk about media in isolation, you need to have a point of view on creative, on PR, on the influencers and creators that they work with, the type of content they’re creating, where that content goes out, how you behave on platforms, how you behave with different publishers…
And we talk a lot about the old world where you give us your budget, we say we’re going to spend 80% of it on buying a reach and frequency plan and we’re going to save a little bit of it to do something a bit more creative or wacky at the end. That’s such an old-school way of thinking about how you approach media today.
We look at our clients’ brands and think about what’s the intellectual property at the heart of the brand or campaign and how would that live in different formats and different styles of content in different platforms with different publishers and then you get to much more creative ecosystem-based campaigns.
So when we said we’re an agency with zero clients, it is because if you want to apply that type of multiplatform creative ecosystem thinking, you need to get into the trenches with the brands that you work with. And so we say we don’t have clients, we’ve got partners, conspirators, collaborators and it’s that sort of mentality. We are working together hand in glove in the trenches.
We thought we’ve got to put our money where our mouth is a little bit if we are an agency that says that we live in culture and we want to challenge and be different, even with just the look and feel and the colours and the energy of our office. I think it should be such a fun place to work. Not to disparage other agencies, but you walk around some other agency floors and it can be a little bit like a moratorium. Where’s the joy gone?
Is that [creative ecosystem thinking] what you were referring to when you said that Arena Media UK is not an agency that ‘only stays in the media lane’?
Yeah, it’s exactly that. Is it easier for us? No. I think everybody should think like this regardless of what kind of client you have and what sort of work you do. And we say this to clients. If you want someone who’s just going to buy you some cheap reach, and re-version your advertising asset and shove it into social landfill, then there’s a whole load of media agencies that can do that really, really well for you.
If you want somebody who will challenge the status quo because they’re thinking about all aspects of your communication mix, then we will have a point of view on that and we try and encourage everyone in the agency to have a view on that. We have a different relationship with the people that we work with because they come to expect that from us and they’ll ask it from us, and you have to do it with humility. We don’t know the answers to everything. There are people who will have better perspectives of the world in their specialist area than we will.
But if we’re having the conversation, we will collectively get to a better solution. It’s not about land grabbing. It’s about trying to get to the best answer. And I think media agencies in the past have probably been guilty of being a bit land grabby.
Are there any drawbacks to working on both creative development and media planning?
No, I think there are drawbacks to not doing that. The drawback is thinking in a very isolated, singular way where you put your blinkers on and you lose sight of what the collective sum can be. And really, the sum should be greater than the coming together of the individual parts.
But I do think many agencies operate in that way. Again, we think of ourselves as a boutique agency which has got the backing of a global network but sometimes when you think just through the lens of a global network you get big and you get siloed, and you look at the world through a narrower lens because there’s someone else doing that other bit over there and someone else doing that other bit over there. It was harder to bring it all together.
And so do you think that in the future we’ll see stronger collaboration between media and creative?
If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have gone, ‘Yeah, of course’. But I’ve watched it not happen. Should it happen? Yes. Does it happen? Sometimes but again, not brilliantly. A part of the reason I think is because of the way that agencies are set up to compete with each other. There’s too much overlap between agencies that can do similar things but want to retain the sort of commercial upside themselves.
The business model of how advertising makes money versus how a media agency makes money is completely different. Sometimes when those two things come together, it starts to jar. Then you have other agencies; a brand might pay a research agency a ton of money to do an amazing piece of audience insight work but we’d give that away for free in a pitch because we need to do that body of work to demonstrate that we understand audiences. You’ve got so many different business models and it’s very hard for everything to come together in a cohesive way but it should. I don’t know if it will anytime soon but when it does, you do the best work.
You look at the best awards and it is creative and media context, it all comes together and gels so wonderfully. You go, ‘Okay, yeah, I wish I’d done that’. You say ‘I wish I’d done that’ most of the time when media and creative are working together.
