creativebrief: As Group Chief Executive Officer of Havas helia what is your primary focus?

Tash Whitmey: Ensuring that we have inspired people and have an inspiring business.

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

Tash Whitmey: I’ve been at Havas helia for 15 years, and I’ve been obsessed with the power of data in creating human insights since I can remember. I feel like I have been pretty pivotal in driving forward innovation in products and services to help ensure Havas helias’ clients continue to create inspiring, relevant and meaningful conversations with their consumers that drive measurable value over time.

With my role as group Chief Executive Officer I am responsible for the growth of the agency’s profile and offering, with a clear focus on the fusion of data and creative. I am extremely proud of the agency’s incredible wins in the past 16 months: Westfield, adidas, Royal Mail, Heathrow, to name only a few of their new and exciting clients.

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

Tash Whitmey: I joined principally because of the people who work across the Havas helia network. People with talent and passion and determination. And then officially launching the Havas helia network alongside my colleagues in the UK and in our other markets.

As an agency we live and breathe by Smarter Art. Smarter Art is the unity of art and science, a concept broad enough to apply to all the work helia creates. Past, present and future.

For Customer Relationship Marketing, it symbolises the present and the future through the unity of art and technology. It channels agnostic storytelling to the individual, powered by technology.

For communications, bringing data to communications through Smarter Art makes our strategic and creative approach truly unique. Smarter Art offers an approach that we can – over time – build into a system. Today in helia, our Art is to tell compelling stories for brands. And technology is providing us with smarter infrastructure allowing us to be quicker, more relevant and ultimately more engaging. We are moving away from a world where reach and media presence are the default tools, to one where more targeted, relevant messaging brings cut through. As people we live rich lives that span locations, cultures and environments. We don’t live in single media channels. Only by joining the data together with culture can we start to understand key moments that really matter. This is our vision, creativity and relevance at scale through Smarter Art.

creativebrief: Who are the people new to you (either within your business or externally) who have particularly impressed you in the last twelve months?

Tash Whitmey: The brilliant people in my agency. For their focus, determination and bloody hard work.

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

Tash Whitmey: I believe and hope that the work we produce across all of our clients is brilliant. But the most recent piece of work that I would like to shout about is our April Shower billboard for Dove in Times Square.

We combined data with creativity to take the most unpredictable of elements, the weather, and create an experience to give our consumers a small moment so carefully orchestrated it would seem completely spontaneous.

The April Shower was the result of careful planning. A digital billboard in Times Square was linked to a weather API and a rain sensor to trigger a series of pre-shot sequences featuring Alice, a real Dove woman. We see her reacting to weather conditions in real time with a series of gestures and glances to camera, then getting ready for and taking a shower when the rain starts. Her natural enthusiasm and playfulness turned miserable April showers into measured moments of pleasure.

Data was the key: The Times Square media buy was unique. Weather data was used to help determine the most appropriate slots. Data helped us predict the likelihood of rainfall at specific times, predict the day-parts likely to see our target: women going to and from work, and allowed us to make rain sensor technology adjust the experience in real time. 

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

Tash Whitmey: Being the Judge for the Data Creative awards this year at Cannes gave me the opportunity to see some fantastic work, so I think I really must talk about this. The Next Rembrandt was The Grand Prix winner for Creative Effectiveness, and was my personal favourite. As a team we loved this for so many reasons, it's hard to put into words.  It's a beacon for the Creative Data category, it's a beacon for the data industry. It shows how to take many complex data sources and fuse them into creativity in a way that is both inspiring and future facing. It brings a new dimension to data collection, to data visualisation and it shows that when you have creativity in working with data you can achieve almost anything. It evoked powerful feelings in us all, it made us excited and scared in equal measure, and that's a great thing.

creativebrief: Who or what inspires you?

Tash Whitmey: There are a great many inspiring people in the industry I work in: Clive Humby and Edwina Dunn, for example, who set up dunnhumby and who are now running another genius data business. All the people I work with at Havas helia, both in the UK and in our other offices around the network. And countless other smart, intuitive people I have met on my travels. 

creativebrief: How do you stay in-touch with the industry's best work and culturally relevant news?

Tash Whitmey: Well I get fantastic opportunities to do a lot of judging, Cannes being one of them, otherwise I’m constantly looking out for new work, ideas for data and how we can move the industry forward.

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

Tash Whitmey: The Next Rembrandt.

Data + Art + Culture + Technology. It's everything I admire brought together in a beautifully executed piece of work.

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

Tash Whitmey: We work in an industry that loves to speculate about the future. What shape will we be? What challenges will we face? How will we work together to deliver real value to our clients? We take a pragmatic and simple approach to this speculation because we believe that just as it was in the past, as it is in the present, the best work in the future will be born from those who build the best relationships.

The relationship between client and agency will continue to be the most critical. A client who challenges and enthuses, who clearly sets out the vision and objectives for their brand, who understands the new brand landscape and sets bold expectations, but who equally respects that in this new world, bravery and failure are sometimes close relatives, but most importantly a client who empowers their agency partners, and creates a positive atmosphere of permission and facilitation. It really does follow that if a client values the relationship with the agency, and is passionate about the creative idea, then anything is possible.

Beyond that, the relationships within a brand team, between experts and specialists, and between agency cultures will come under increasing scrutiny. The best ideas need to be executed beautifully and that demands that teams need to work smarter and with a greater openness, candour and fluidity.

We have developed the Havas Village to allow us to work in this way. The Village model allows us to bring different capabilities and skill sets to the table and to build better ideas together. But in all honesty its success is based on the genuine relationships between people, with the client at the heart.

The last relationship that really matters is the relationship between a brand, its idea and its audience. Gone are the days when a brand could broadcast its idea at a specific time slot and expect a response. Today’s challenge is more nuanced and complex, and revolves around gaining a much deeper understanding of consumer behaviour to ensure that an idea meets its audience at precisely the perfect moment, and that the audience is enabled to own and distribute the idea themselves. This is not an easy task and requires us to have much better relationship with data analytics and the science of behaviour.

So over the next three years, whilst the world continues to embrace technology, data and digital, we believe there is going to be even more emphasis placed on the human relationships we forge. Between clients and their agencies, between the experts and specialists that are needed to design and execute, but foremost between brands, ideas and the audiences they seek.

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

Tash Whitmey: As the role of data in marketing becomes more widely known and accepted, welcomed even, we need to celebrate but also provide guidance to an industry that begins to understand how data can effectively help as part of the creative process.  It is clear to me that data is the future of marketing. As such, the jury need to look for brilliant examples of how data has been used to inform and inspire creativity in a way that delivers insightful and helpful solutions, with business changing results.    

If I could do one thing about data it would be to get everyone to love data as much as I do. Make them understand that it enhances the creative process, rather than stifles it. Make them recognise that data PLUS creativity is where the future of marketing lies.

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

Tash Whitmey: I love new business and I love pitching so perhaps that's a hard question for me to answer! 

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

Tash Whitmey: Heathrow integration with Havas London. This showed how we can work together bringing all core skills together to win a leading integrated pitch. Obviously I’m proud that CRM was a big part of it. Moving into the village in January 2017 we will be doing more and more pitches like this, and they carry great energy.

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

Tash Whitmey: The market is changing really fast, especially in data, below is just some of the ways that will really shape things moving forward.

1.     First Party Data Becoming Very Important

As a result we are seeing a growth in the importance of first party data.These systems will give companies the ability to be more targeted and so more efficient in how media budgets are spent and it will open up the ability to reach different markets. Along with this will come the ability to deliver targeted customised creative at an individual level. Ultimately it’s about using data to customise products and messages for the individual not just a targeted segment. A great example helia have done is to use staff data to then develop and brew its own customised beer. The beer for the people of the people.

2.     The Programmable Web

Platforms are opening up different technology stacks via API’s (Application Programing Interface). When companies release an API it allows them to pursue other industries via an open source model. You allow other businesses to build on your core services which further grows your business and embeds you into a whole new sector. Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook have all deployed this model to incredible effect. The ability to connect API’s for marketing will be the next level of development. As companies start to look to build closer relationships to consumers they will open up their tech and data stacks to allow new products and services to directly connect to the consumer. 

3.     Gen Z shift from broadcast

On demand is king. They want it now. As a result we see a younger generation moving away from linear broadcast TV to a model where they watch content on YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu etc. Being able to find, target and engage with these groups will be challenging in the future because content will need to be plentiful and dynamic enough to keep them wanting to come back for more. They have the smarts to block or dodge content they don’t want already and so marketing will need to be sophisticated enough to mould to what they want and not just what brands want to say.

4.     The internet of things

This is about connecting things to the internet. It’s actually not about technology. There are some interesting developments in this area around how you can connect products and services back to consumers. 

This ultimately drives more trust in the brand as consumers can be confident in the quality of the product. By 2020 it’s expected that the IOT market will be worth in excess of $7.1 trillion.

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

Tash Whitmey: To keep innovating and doing brilliant work - and most importantly maximising the benefits of moving into the Havas Village in Dec 2016.