Havas Media Network UK Launches Cross-Platform Planning-to-Activation Solution for a Cookieless Future

Havas Media Network UK (HMN UK) launches an AI-powered marketing engagement solution, Converged, to empower advertisers to make smarter, more audience-led media decisions in a cookieless future.

HMN believes it’s the first media agency to build a transparent cross-platform solution that provides advertisers with a unified view from planning through to dynamic activation and audience reporting at scale.  

Converged is a solution to the disconnect between planning and buying audiences accelerated by the depreciation of the cookie, signal loss and emergence of new channels and technology.

Converged’s USP is that it offers full cross-platform transparency, handing control of campaign performance, media outcomes and business growth back to digital media advertisers. This approach works without the need for new technology providers, first party data permissions or ID resolution providers – exceeding the minimum requirements of the regulations in personal data privacy.

Powered by the most comprehensive people-based dataset in the marketplace, Converged links over 35,000 audience insights from the geographic, demographic, attitudinal, behavioural, purchasing and consumption data of over half a million individuals. Harnessing the latest developments in AI, Converged offers strategic insights into the individuals, categories and markets that will deliver optimum campaign performance which is then fed back into digital media activation decisioning in real-time.  

In development for two years, 93% of campaigns in testing have delivered a minimum uplift of 10% improvement and a 45% average improvement in campaign performance, including in sectors as diverse as auto (89%), home & retail (43%) and fashion (32%). These performance improvements are against agreed KPIs across VTR, CPM, CPL, CPC and CPV.  

Laura Kell, chief data and product officer, Havas Media Network UK, said, “We believe people are more than IDs. We can’t understand people properly by tracking what they do, what they buy and why, and the demise of the cookie means this is ending anyway. A strength for a particular type of client can be a weakness for another vertical, country or region. With Converged, we are eliminating that one-size-fits-all approach. Advertisers are regaining control of the emerging digital ecosystem by improving audience targeting, insight and control and better still, we are under-writing performance without compromise.”   

Lisa Tickle, director of digital and marketing, Homebase, which has been involved in testing, said, "The depreciation of the cookie has of course accelerated the move to first party data, and this has made it increasingly difficult to match planning with the audiences we want to reach. Converged eliminates this challenge and has already yielded some very impressive results for us across a number of our product categories and channels. We are looking forward to embedding Converged in 2024 as part of our digital plan and strategy.”