Why Serviceplan’s House of Communication wants to be structurally ‘unbound’
The Media Leader Interview
Tom Laranjo speaks to The Media Leader about why Serviceplan Group restructured its agencies under the House of Communications banner, and his plans for the new entity.
We are one House of Communication, not a car park of communication.”
Last month, Serviceplan Group — Europe’s largest independent agency group — brought its integrated agency model, House of Communication, to the UK.
The new structure is led by Serviceplan Group UK CEO Tom Laranjo. It combines creative agencies Serviceplan Make and Ace of Hearts, media agency Mediaplus, behavioural consultancy Behave, and digital marketing agency Plan.Net.
Silverside AI, Serviceplan Group’s San Francisco-based agency behind recent controversial generative AI ads for the likes of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, also has plans to launch in the UK.
“We have media, a brilliant platform experience, a very cool creative offering, and our Behave engine in the middle of that, generating brilliant insight about customers in any direction,” Laranjo tells The Media Leader. “So we’ve assembled a lot of the bits. The really exciting part of the change is how we pull those together to deliver a differentiated way of working. It’s not just the what, it’s the how.”
An ‘unbound’ model
That differentiated “how” will be grounded in a posture of “modular orchestration”: clients will approach the wider House of Communication team to understand the problems they need to solve; they will then be guided toward services by individual member agencies based on their needs.
“Hopefully, no one will ask, ‘Is it Mediaplus? Is it Serviceplan? Is it Ace of Hearts? It doesn’t really matter, because the focus is on the outcomes, the outputs,” Laranjo explains. “The subbrands exist only really to help provide some definition, some focus and some substance for clients who understandably want to know if you have the people, the talent to deliver this work.”
The way that clients want to work has changed substantially in recent years, according to Laranjo. He argues that too often, clients are currently being told by large agency groups that the right solution is “massive global operational change” or “huge-scale digital transformation” — a specific “narrative answer” that aligns with a holding group’s latest investment or specialist focus. This has been exemplified in agencies’ recent embrace of AI tools.
Laranjo believes clients are generally searching for partners who can “come in and really understand my business, diagnose what I’ve got, and then it’s about orchestration — not telling me that I need to change everything”.
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That shift in client demand requires a restructure of the type that Serviceplan has instituted, one in which it’s “not just about putting [capacities] together”, argues Laranjo.
“We can innovatively solve your problems, and we are totally unbound by structure or a dogmatic focus on certain technology, or an obsession with a certain channel, or creativity as the answer to everything,” he says. As such, House of Communication can be “joyfully and helpfully neutral” in its recommendations to clients.
He continues: “It won’t feel restrictive, like we’ve come up with the answer already before you’ve started asking the question.”
‘The first priority is talent’
The restructure comes amid a series of rebrands for the wider business.
In the past two years, Laranjo himself has moved from CEO of Total Media Group to CEO of Mediaplus UK, and is now CEO of Serviceplan Group UK, in charge of House of Communications. As such, he acknowledges the business will need a strong go-to-market strategy to communicate the new branding and model. Cut through, he insists, will come as House of Communication “delivers great work”.
In spite of any concerns around brand confusion, Markus Noder, Serviceplan Group’s international CEO, calls the expansion of the House of Communication model into the UK “a natural step” in the company’s growth strategy that builds “on its proven success in other markets”.
“While many others are scaling back, we are actively growing our services to continue to enhance our offering to clients by bringing all experts together under one roof to encourage real cross-pollination, deeper collaboration, and fresh exchange of ideas,” Noder says.
Laranjo confirms the restructure is “all expansion” and that the group won’t be culling, but rather adding to its capacity. But, he indicates, the initial strategy for growth will not be focused on M&A so much as investment in talent for its existing agencies.
“The first priority for me is talent,” he says. “The priority is to make sure we invest in every dimension of our business to give us genuine depth of capability.”
In addition to leading a hiring push, Laranjo says he will put “a huge amount of effort into training”, in particular through a multi-year AI training programme and a multi-disciplinary strategy programme.
The aim is to ensure that all members of staff, across its various agencies, can diagnose and answer questions across disciplines, leading to “T-shaped” employees.
“Giving people the foundations to be more agile, more flexible, more thoughtful is so important,” says Laranjo.
“The talent, the training, the focus on behavioural insight — doing that unbound is really differentiating,” he continues. “Because we don’t have a group holding company telling us we have to invest in this massive new technology that we’ve just bought. We don’t have a group holding company telling us the quarterly shareholder meeting is coming up, and I’m getting my ass kicked because my share price has just fallen another 10%, and I can’t give away the business.
“We don’t have a singular way of working that we’re telling everyone is good, irrespective of what your question is.”
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