creativebrief: As European and UK Group CEO at Havas, what is your primary focus?

Chris Hirst: Our primary focus right now is growth. In my experience, to grow we need to excel at 3 things; work, wins and noise. That means we need to win the accounts everyone wants, do the work everyone wishes they had done and make as much noise about it as we can.

We are primarily a talent business, so to deliver on those 3 things, we need to attract as many of the most interesting people as we can find.

creativebrief: Please share a paragraph on your career to date – specifically talking us through the high points.

Chris Hirst : I spent many years in account management at BBH, Fallon and Grey. By the time I became CEO at Grey London, I had realised a really important thing. I wanted to create an open culture – one that allowed everyone to be themselves, to have and to own their ideas and to be their best.

I also realised that sometimes even the very best, most talented people don’t work well together.

A personal highlight for me was definitely the time I spent at Harvard. It really helped me visualise the kind of business I wanted to run and the kind of leader I wanted to be.

creativebrief: What's unique about your agency / business? Why did you join Havas?

Chris Hirst : I took up my position as UK Chairman at Havas earlier this year. It’s the first time that the Media and Creative arms of the business have been brought together in the UK and it’s such a unique opportunity. At Havas Kings Cross - our new Village that opened only a matter of weeks ago - we now have all our marketing and communications disciplines under one roof.

The magic of ideas and the spark of creativity come from the moments when human beings collide and we now have this incredible space allowing that to happen every single day. I’m so excited to see what we can achieve.

creativebrief: What has been your agency's best work in the last year?

Chris Hirst : We were very proud of the Christmas ad we made for Heathrow Airport in 2016. On a budget a fraction of that spent by the big players in the Christmas game, the team made a beautiful, heart-warming feel-good spot that captured the public’s imagination. The Independent rated it the best Christmas ad of the season, and so far it has been viewed over a billion times around the world.

creativebrief: Industry wide, what work has excited you most this year?

Chris Hirst : The rise of AI to inform creativity is so exciting to me. We were commissioned by ITV News in November to build an AI to analyse the sentiment behind billions of data points in the US Presidential election.

Eagleai used such sophisticated and complex algorithms to understand the sentiment of everything from speeches to news stories to social media posts, that it was able to predict a Donald Trump victory when no other pollsters could.

It was a groundbreaking use of the extraordinary advancements in tech and data that are possible today and has huge implications for the way we work in the future.

creativebrief: What work or agency from outside the UK do you think is particularly influential?

Chris Hirst : Check out J. Walter Thompson’s The Next Rembrandt. It’s just the most beautiful example of how AI can quite literally blow your mind. Amazing.

creativebrief: Who or what inspires you?

Chris Hirst : I’ve got to be honest. Getting angry inspires me. Mediocrity inspires me to be better. Bad advertising makes me mad as hell. Wasted talent - even more so.

I want our businesses to be places where you get mad and then you get sh*t done.

creativebrief: What do you think are going to be the main challenges for agencies in the next two years?

Chris Hirst : Being effective. I’m the chair of the IPA’s Effectiveness Leadership Group and we have a massive challenge to ensure that while we are rightly focused on the best creative work we can produce, we don’t overlook the absolute necessity of work that works. We can’t simply make ads that are creatively brilliant anymore. It’s not enough. Our clients need to see results and I believe the two do go hand in hand.

creativebrief: How do you see the media landscape unfolding in the next five years?

Chris Hirst : I believe the biggest opportunity in media over the next 5 years will come from the confluence of entertainment, technology and brands. The agencies that can exploit where these three opportunities intersect will be the ones to watch. And it will make the mediocre even easier to ignore

creativebrief: What's your attitude to the 'traditional' agency review process? Do you think there is a better/more modern way?

Chris Hirst : Winston Churchill once said, “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.” And that is pretty much how I feel about agency reviews. They are part of our landscape. They are what we do. We hate them when we lose and love them when we win.

creativebrief: What's the best agency review you've been involved in?

Chris Hirst : When I was CEO at Grey London we pitched for Lucozade. It was a great brief, a great team, a great client and we were massive underdogs. It was meant to be a 2-stage pitch but we nailed it in stage 1 and the client bought us there and then. We made great work for them and it completely transformed the agency.

creativebrief: In what ways do you think the industry can change for the better?

Chris Hirst : Stop making bad adverts. Stop making content nobody wants to see and then force-feeding it to people. Also, let’s not let rubbish like Brexit prevent us from bringing the best people into our country, our cities and our agencies.

creativebrief: What's the next big thing for Havas?

Chris Hirst : My next challenge is making our agencies look and feel less like me. I am a white middle-aged man from Northumberland. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if we want to inspire, entertain and inform the world, then we need to look and feel more like the rest of it.

I am setting pretty tough metrics against every area of our businesses to ensure we are not just paying lip service to the idea of diversity and I will be holding everyone to account. Including myself.

So shoot me if I end up surrounded by people just like me…