Yannick Bolloré: a buccaneer’s son at the helm of Havas
Havas SA The Creators Of Evian Babies...Yannick Bollore, director general and vice president of Havas SA, poses for a photograph at the company's headquarters in Paris, France, on Friday, Dec. 14, 2012. Havas SA, the French advertising company which is known for memorable advertising campaigns, including the 2009 commercials for Evian water that featured babies on roller skates. Photographer: Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg *** Local Caption *** Yannick Bollore©Bloomberg
Inheritance: Yannick Bolloré says his father taught him the value of hard work and the culture of entrepreneurship
The world according to Yannick Bolloré consists of two types of people: those who, faced with change, hunker down and try to protect what they have; and those who welcome disruption and use it to spot new opportunities.
As chairman and chief executive of Havas, one of the world’s largest advertising groups, Mr Bolloré should know. The digital age has shaken the industry in ways that few could have imagined just a decade ago. Along the way, it has presented opportunities but also huge challenges to agencies unwilling or unable to adapt.
So which of the two is the 34-year-old Mr Bolloré? He has only been CEO since the start of 2014 but the French group’s recent performance suggests he has a chance to prove himself as the latter. Second-quarter organic growth was 7.9 per cent higher than a year before, almost double consensus expectations. New clients this year include Disney and Barclays.
Sitting in his office, a glass-walled box with a Castiglioni “Arco” lamp, a square rather than a traditional rectangular-shaped desk and no obvious boss’s chair, the tanned Mr Bolloré says that he is “thrilled” with the results.
A year ago, things did not look nearly so good. Publicis and Omnicom had just announced their ultimately ill-fated “merger of equals” to create what would have become the industry’s largest player.
In a world where competitors had identified size as a necessary condition to fund technology investments and gain access to the technology of other companies at competitive prices, sixth-placed Havas seemed too small to succeed alone.
“It was keeping me up at night,” admits Mr Bolloré about his rivals’ plans. “It made me think a lot about scale and it forced us to accelerate the pace of change.”
Mr Bolloré puts Havas’s recent success down to two things. The first is that the group has not only grasped digital but has started to run with it. One consequence is that he is now hiring more mathematicians than creatives or media people.
“The type of person we are now hiring has changed so much that it has affected the dress code here,” he says. “They dress more casually but also much more geeky.”
Havas’s mathematicians create algorithms to turn big data into smart data. “There has never been so much data out there,” says Mr Bolloré, whose fitted black suit, crisp white shirt and black Hermès tie suggest that he has yet to join the geeks himself. “But what is the point if you cannot use it to give business insight to your clients?”
He says that the maths whizzes at Havas have developed algorithms that not only enable clients to adapt the way they advertise their products online but are also producing much higher conversion rates of online advertising into sales.
The second strategy has been to instil collaboration among the creatives and media teams, but also between agencies – something that he says was absent before. “It was like Game of Thrones,” says Mr Bolloré, tall, engaging and with a thick, slightly wild head of hair. “You would have to get people to leave their weapons at the door.”
“Together”, the name of his strategy to foster teamwork within the organisation, may fall short of Havas’s external standards for catchy and clever branding. Internally, though, it seems to have worked. “The atmosphere is now great here at Havas,” says Mr Bolloré. “If you are a family, you need to be able to sit around the same table and have lunch together.”
What about size in advertising’s brave new world? After all, there is still a consensus that you need to be big regardless of how happy your staff are. Mr Bolloré agrees. “A group needs to have scale because if you don’t you cannot manage a global client,” he says. “But Havas has scale,” pointing to its 16,000 employees and presence in more than 100 countries.
The proposed Publicis-Omnicom transatlantic merger plans finally sank in May this year amid delays in regulatory approval and insurmountable differences over key executive appointments. Strangely, perhaps, Mr Bolloré says that the news did not please him. “I was not happy to see the Publicis-Omnicom merger fail because they would have created an unmanageable monster.”
He says it is hard to quantify how much Havas benefited from the wasted effort both of its rivals put into the proposed tie-up. But he adds: “For sure, it disrupted their day-to-day business.”
Mr Bolloré, who has three daughters and a stepdaughter, always knew that he would end up in business. That may have had something to do with his own father – Vincent Bolloré, industrialist and occasional corporate raider, whose Bolloré Group owns 36 per cent of Havas and is also the largest shareholder of French media and entertainment group Vivendi .
Since Mr Bolloré senior became Vivendi chairman this summer, speculation has grown about a possible tie-up between the media and entertainment group and Havas. Mr Bolloré senior and, most recently Arnaud de Puyfontaine, Vivendi’s new chief executive, have dismissed any such ideas.
The family legacy is strong. Mr Bolloré lives in the same house in which he grew up with his two brothers and one sister in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. His office, though remodelled, is the same one that belonged to his great grandfather and to Vincent Bolloré. Located in Puteaux on the western fringe of Paris, it offers an expansive view of the River Seine, the Bois de Boulogne and the Eiffel Tower.
He dedicates the little free time he has to playing sport. His talent for tennis has twice won him an annual celebrity competition at Roland Garros, an event that he helped to set up. Last year, he ran the Paris marathon, in four hours and 14 minutes.
Mr Bolloré, whose short career has centred on media, says he loves advertising. But for all the seeming inevitability of his passage into the corporate world, he says his father never forced him into it.
Instead, Vincent, who in the early 1980s stepped in to save the dying family business of manufacturing paper for cigarettes and bibles, taught more fundamental lessons. “He taught me the value of hard work and the culture of entrepreneurship,” he says.
They appear to be lessons well learnt: in spite of coming from one of the richest families in France, Mr Bolloré has been clocking up the office hours. He described a short break over the summer as “the chance finally to meet my 11-month-old daughter”.