How Havas Village built a connected insights and audience platform with YouGov
Business challenge
Building a globally consistent connected insights platform.
Solution
Connecting YouGov’s audience intelligence, brand tracking, respondent level data and research surveys.
Business outcome
Using YouGov’s data, Havas launched a proprietary platform for audience understanding, activation and live tracking.
Business challenge
Havas, a leading advertising and communications agency, needs to stay ahead in a highly competitive landscape by leveraging data effectively. Its goal was to differentiate its offerings by building a globally consistent insights platform that compiles consumer and brand metrics, segmentation, and media consumption data. This platform would enable deep audience understanding, precise campaign activation and live tracking, setting Havas apart as an expert partner. Havas planned to launch the platform in 18 initial markets.
Solution & research results
YouGov provided Havas with a comprehensive solution, leveraging its flagship tools across 18 markets: YouGov Profiles for audience intelligence, YouGov BrandIndex for brand tracking, Respondent Level Data and research surveys. To address the agencys’s broad sector coverage, YouGov expanded its data scope, adding new audience variables, including attitudes and media-related behaviors, and additional sectors and brands globally.
A key component was the proprietary CMBC study (Connect, Meaningful Brands, Content), which identifies relevant touch points and assesses brand content and meaningfulness. Produced in collaboration with YouGov’s research experts, CMBC has delivered approximately 700,000 interviews across four waves, fueling Havas’s connected insights platform – Converged OS.
CMBC now serves as a core data source within the platform, offering insights and analysis to inform both creative and media solutions. This allows Havas to better understand consumers' perceptions of brand performance, media touchpoints, content and experiences for its end clients.
Business outcome / impact
The ongoing success of the partnership and the platform’s capabilities led to its expansion to 26 markets, including all Havas Village divisions, by January 2024. YouGov continues to work closely with the agency, designing and rolling out new global surveys to meet the evolving needs of its clients, including a new global health questionnaire.
The integration of YouGov data has significantly enhanced Havas’s ability to demonstrate the power of its tech stack, winning key clients and driving better campaign performance. The data has been instrumental in building audiences and activating media campaigns, leading to improved performance metrics for several Havas clients.
User adoption within Havas has grown substantially, from 40 weekly users in 2021 to nearly 600 in 2024, underscoring the platform’s value. As a key partner for YouGov, Havas Village is also collaboratively consulted in our ongoing product development, ensuring that our solutions continue to meet the team’s needs.
As we aim to deliver upon our Converged Havas ambition and power the convergence of creativity, data, technology, media and production across our global network, YouGov will be a key data partner for the future. Our expanded partnership will greatly enhance what we can offer our clients and bring in insights from key markets across Europe, LATAM, MENA and APAC. YouGov has a global reach and connected data capabilities which has enabled us to integrate their data at a respondent level into our data and tech platform, Converged, in markets around the world.