Havas and Wellcom Worldwide announce launch of Havas Studios
Havas has partnered with global creative production agency Wellcom Worldwide to launch Havas Studios: a global production business with a full range of content production capabilities.
The partnership will be headquartered in London, staffed by employees from both Wellcom and Havas. Havas Studios will be led by Havas UK COO Paul Ward, who will take the new title of global CEO, Havas Studios.
“The global pandemic threw everything up in the air – and Havas Studios puts the Havas network in a great place as things start to come back down,” said Ward. “This launch accelerates the ongoing transformation of our agencies to become businesses which make far more of the work that they previously only managed. Alongside Wellcom, we’ve created a technology first, plug and play content business. We are leapfrogging the competition.”
Ward will be supported by an executive committee comprising both Havas and Wellcom senior executives. Revenue will be shared between the two companies across the venture.
Havas Studios will be comprised of a “micro-network of integrated content studios” initially in London, New York, Chicago and Kuala Lumpur, to be followed by locations across Europe, Australia, China, India, Latin American and the US West Coast.
CEO of Havas Group, Yannick Bolloré, said: “Building better brand experiences means rethinking how content is managed. Now that digital is fully integrated into everything we do, it is content’s turn to become an organic part of our approach. By partnering with Wellcom we are now able to provide our clients with the best production capabilities in the industry. The deal also strengthens our ties with Wellcom’s mother company Innocean, with whom we have a long and fruitful history.”
Wellcom was purchased by Innocean Worldwide in 2019.
Havas Studios is a “creative boutique, technology-first business”with this new production model bringing together existing and newly built studios. This will be supported by a low-cost offering based in Kuala Lumpur. Wellcom’s proprietary, cloud-based Knowledgewell suite, which is a marketing resource management, campaign management, digital asset management and overall studio workflow, is the foundation of every studio, allowing teams to collaborate across the globe in real time through streamlined processes, standards and tools, all under one P&L.
Wayne Sidwell, global CEO at Wellcom Worldwide added: “When we first started speaking to Havas about the launch of Havas Studios, we knew that this was an exciting opportunity that we had to take forward. Paul, Chris and I knew that we had a really unique opportunity, to pull together Havas’ strategy, creative and production origination with our technology platform and large-scale delivery model… It’s an incredibly enviable model and I’m very excited to see the business continue to develop over the next few years.”
The content studios at Havas Village locations worldwide will include film, audio, print, photographic and digital content production. This will also include a range of post-production facilities and dedicated teams “supporting the integrated delivery of retails and e-commerce platform-ready content”.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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