Havas Play Network’s CEO is on a mission to bring media and creative back together
The Media Leader Interview
Havas Play Network CEO Nick Wright discusses his vision for the new collective and how he wants to finally bring media and creative closer together.
“How you plan media isn’t just across paid channels any more.”
Nick Wright, the CEO of the newly formed Havas Play Network, is tired of creative and media acting in silos and believes there is more to integrated marketing campaigns than just buying media.
“We’ve talked for years now — knocking on for a decade — about breaking down the silos between creative and media. And I genuinely don’t think we have. Creative thinking is still usually a little nice-to-have that’s tagged on to the end of a media brief,” he tells The Media Leader.
Earlier this month, Havas restructured its Havas Play proposition to create the Havas Play Network, an umbrella collective that encompasses PR specialist agency Organic, social media agency Wilderness and brand-to-brand shop Simbiotik alongside Havas Play. Both Wilderness and Simbiotik were acquired last year.
The goal of the collective, as Wright explains, is to offer clients more streamlined access to talent working like a “pendulum”, swinging between media thinking and creative thinking when considering briefs.
“Most briefs that come in now aren’t just singular channel briefs,” he says. “They come in as: ‘We’ve got a challenge. We want to do this. We want to get into the culture. We want to do something that knits together all those opportunities.’
“We’re able to do that more effectively by having those agencies together under one single leadership, connected to teams that sit underneath that.”
Havas Play Network leadership: (from left) Wright, Basden-Smith, Jarvis, Cook and Taylor
Havas Play itself went global in 2023 as a consolidation of existing agency brands Havas Sports and Havas Sports & Entertainment, offering expertise in music, sports, gaming and other areas of “fan activation”. It sits at the centre of Havas Village London, bridging Havas’ creative and media networks.
At the newly created Play Network, Wright is flanked by Havas Play UK managing director Lucy Basden-Smith, Wilderness managing director Tom Jarvis, Organic managing director Caragh Cook and group executive creative director Ross Taylor.
Initial clients include Disney+, Netflix, Bethesda and The Football Association.
A ‘cultural UN’
Havas has been “on an acquisition and diverse services drive over the past few years”, Wright notes, and by establishing Havas Play Network, those individual agency brands can be empowered to create better output through collaboration and offering clients a single point of contact.
“This isn’t about creating another brand that is an alternative,” Wright points out, referring to the collective as a “cultural United Nations” that came about serendipitously from considering how newly acquired agencies like Wilderness could be leveraged.
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“The analogy I use is: you sort of need the mothership of Play with the speed boats of Wilderness and Organic,” Wright continues. “Clients want to buy the individual services but, at the same time, some clients want to buy the whole piece.”
The creation of Havas Play Network is not the only change from Havas this month aimed at breaking down silos. Earlier this week, Havas Media Network evolved its Havas Market agency with the explicit goal of helping “brands break down barriers between commerce and performance”.
The new agency will be 150-strong and seek to deliver “unique technology and creative solutions”, led by managing director Alex Walker.
Building personality
Wright, who has worked at Havas on both the creative and media side over the past 12 years, was most recently Havas Media Network’s chief growth officer.
Stepping into his new role, he gives his main priority as honing “the culture, the personality of the agencies”.
Wright is seeking to double down on the existing culture within the network by promoting outside-the-box thinkers.
“There is a certain type of behaviour, a way of working, an attitude that comes from the people that sit within creative functions,” he says. “Unless you’ve got that right, you don’t really get to deliver the sort of work you’d like to deliver.”
Wright wants to develop a “signature style” across the collective that bridges media and creative. This starts, in his view, with hiring and retaining the right talent. He points to Havas Media UK group head of strategy Emily Fairhead-Keen and chief planning and strategy officer Emma Withington as talent who “push the boundaries” of traditional media strategy by thinking “outside of the brief to get to a great idea”.
Getting to the “big idea” will be core to Havas Play Network’s efforts in bridging media plans and activations with strong creative that can be applied across channels. For Wright, media tools can be used to create a strong understanding of audience and provide a “good jumping off point” to reach the big idea.
“Any direct clients that come to Play, I want them to feel like we don’t just stop at creative and we don’t just stop at media,” Wright continues. “We’re able to actually connect all of this together in the most effective way possible and deliver the right solutions for clients where there’s not gaps left because ‘we don’t do that bit’.”
Beyond campaign delivery
Wright expresses confidence that there is a growing desire for clients to “divest” from paid media and invest in “creating work that sits more in the spaces that Play occupies”.
However, he is concerned by a “hangover” from the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cost-of-living crisis that have caused brands to “revert back to safe channels and a ROAS way of thinking”.
By contrast, Wright believes agencies “need to get clients back into being a bit more challenging with how they take their brands to market” by adopting a “mindset of growing brands again, not just delivering on campaigns”.
“I think the planning side of Havas has changed and will change and evolve to actually accommodate this more creative thinking,” he continues. “How we then slot in, from a Play point of view, is definitely being evolved as well.
“You can’t grow a brand without doing the work that we do in Play.”