Havas Media sets its new positioning on “caring for the value of attention”
Faced with an advertising industry in continuous transformation, an increasingly complex social context and an atomised media map, Havas Media has decided to set a new company positioning.
Its new mission will be to focus firmly on the value of attention. According to the agency, people are subjected to media infoxication, the hyperconnectivity of devices and the fleeting nature of messages. “We are facing a scenario in which the attention span of consumers is overexploited,” they say.
Havas Media has based itself on three premises to mature its value proposition and put the focus on the concept of ‘attention’. Firstly, no authentically relevant experience can be perceived with tired or saturated attention. Secondly, overloaded attention only leads to behaviour that is unreflective, unfocused and unsustainable in the long term. And finally, any real connection depends on the quality of attention of its protagonists. Based on these three premises, it follows that Havas Media is not only in the business of capturing attention, but also in the business of caring for it.
In order to fulfil the company’s purpose, the company is already working on a series of specific measures (aligned with those already implemented by Havas Media Group), aimed at all stakeholders: consumers, brands and clients, media and the company’s own team. In this sense, measuring attention and being able to analyse it in detail is a first step towards taking care of it, according to the agency.
One of the measures recently announced is the alliance with Lumen Research, which has specific eye tracking tools to measure and optimise attention. At the head of this alliance is the international spokesperson, Jon Waite, Global Managing Director – Head Of Media Experience Development of Havas Media Group, who maintains that “measuring attention is to reintroduce the human being into the planning process”. This alliance, together with the use of the agency’s own qualitative metrics, will allow Havas Media to make the “best media recommendations to its advertisers, detecting the most appropriate media and creating tailor-made experiences for consumers that do not overload or pollute attention, with quality of impact prevailing over quantity”, according to the agency.
The agency will also strengthen one of its areas of expertise through Hit Response, a unit specialising in Brand Response. This unit will take advantage of its own capabilities and tools for measuring and optimising attention to design omnichannel strategies to increase the ROI of brand communication and achieve the best business results.
Internally, Havas Media is working on specific measures to care for and optimise the attention of its teams with the aim of continuously improving their performance and well-being. These include a specific programme for team leaders focused on improving their leadership skills to maximise their management, with a focus on effective communication between both parties in the new hybrid working model already implemented. In addition, there will be no meetings one day a week, allowing teams to focus on their tasks without distractions. With regard to well-being, the company has decided to reduce the number and duration of meetings and to encourage respect for working hours by not scheduling meetings outside working hours.