Havas Group's seasonal perspectives: Riding out the winter

This post is sponsored by Havas Media Group Singapore.

Change is a principle of life. Like the four seasons, we go through stages of renewal, zeal, comfort and perseverance over the course of a year. At Havas Media Group Singapore, we’ve evolved with the winds of change only to emerge stronger on every front. In this four-part series aptly titled Seasons, we sit down with a couple of key members who were instrumental in helping to chart our success within the past year’s climate.

Riding out the winter

As masks began to fall against the backdrop of easing COVID measures, 2022 witnessed a rise of new challenges: a surge in progressive brands led by digital acceleration, changing consumer behaviours as we re-embraced normalcy and a great resignation brought about from great reflections.

In the face of a turbulent landscape as such, how has Havas Media Group risen above? The key, it seems, lies in digging deep and returning to our roots.

Reflecting upon the Group’s impressive momentum this year, Jacqui Lim, CEO of Havas Media Group Singapore shares, “Having emerged stronger and more nimble from the pandemic, we refocused our strategy and pushed towards ‘Building a Meaningful Future’. Built upon our core mission to be meaningful, we looked at establishing meaningful connections with up-and-coming players in greenfield categories, providing meaningful products to existing clients and partners and contributing to a meaningful workplace for our Villagers.”

Meaningful Connections

It is often said the best defence is a good offence. Harnessing our ability to activate different disciplines and specialist offerings as a Group has allowed us to make inroads with future-forward categories, granting us wins with clients in FinTech (FUTU Singapore), Digital Banking (Trust), Gaming (Wizards of the Coast), Marketplace (Amazon) and App-based services (Urban Company, Yuu).

But this is not restricted to solely new business wins. With existing clients, we managed to maintain a high client retention rate and defended our top position as #1 Media Agency (RECMA) with Dominant Profile for the 3rd consecutive year. Hear from Russell Lai, our Chief Commercial Officer about his key beliefs that drive the agency’s success. 

Meaningful Products

A key component in ensuring we remain relevant and up-to-date with clients is our dedication to sharing knowledge with our brands and people. As no innovation happens without a keen knowledge of present challenges coupled with rising trends, we’ve worked over the past year to put together over fifty media owner training sessions, client-tailored trainings/workshops, webinars and events, thought leadership pieces and industry trend reports to ensure we’re the best partners in the industry.

Above that, we sought to bolster our clients’ digital competencies given the massive upcoming changes within the landscape - helping them integrate new measurement properties and improving their internal data capabilities in preparation for technological changes such as Google sunsetting Universal Analytics.

Finally, this year also saw the launch of Havas Market in Singapore, our first full-service eCommerce offering. Built upon our mission of delivering meaningful media experiences, this end-to-end solution is aimed at supporting clients looking to transform their commerce approach - addressing a growing opportunity in the retail and commerce space to deliver more meaningful and seamless experiences to a highly engaged audience.

Meaningful Workplace

Finally, we worked on ourselves. Taking great care in implementing new measures to retain and hire talent, we took a more proactive approach in seeking out fresh graduates and drove up our social engagement. Internally, we opened the floor to our Villagers to voice their opinions through our annual employee survey, which remains a valuable indicator for employee engagement, advising our ever-improving talent strategy. Outside of numerous Village parties, we responded with a slew of team-bonding activities, flexible work arrangements, industry courses and a newly-renovated workplace coupled with a democratically-elected snack pantry.

In addition, we marked a year of our #FreeTimeFriday agency initiative, where our Villagers enjoy half a day off every last Friday of the month for some valuable R&R time. Extending our sights to the wider community, we partnered with social enterprise Green Nudge to clean up the Sembawang shoreline and educate ourselves on sustainability, and championed inclusivity during Pride Month by spotlighting our allies and LGBTQ+ community to discuss what pride and allyship means to them.

Hear from Dawn Teo, our Talent Engagement Lead on how we’re building a culture that succeeds for our people.

Ultimately, we recognise we can’t bear fruit without digging deep into our roots. As a brand that champions Meaningfulness, we understand that it’s less about how many people you’ve touched, but rather, how deeply you’ve touched each of them.

On that note, onward 2023!