Havas Media Network's Peter Mears on the meaning of 'Meaningful Media'

Peter Mears, Global CEO - Havas Media Network, and Chairman, Havas North America Village, is a passionate advocate of the Meaningful Media philosophy. In an interview with Storyboard18, Mears decoded what that means exactly for brands in today’s complex and fragmented media age.

What is the Meaningful Media philosophy and how does it work?

We launched the concept of Meaningful Media about five years ago now. It was in reaction to a very cluttered, fragmented media environment, concerns about fraud and an unsafe environment for many clients and their advertising dollars, and also the changing technology marketplace.

We started thinking about how we can ensure that our clients can cut through that, given those constraints and those challenges, constantly transforming in a dynamic market. How do we ensure that clients' investment is protected? So we landed on this territory of meaningful media, which is, in our definition, media which is engaging, which is influential, and which is highly impactful. Meaningful media for us is media that delivers on one or more of those different criterias.

And it's the media that you and I love spending time with. So if we can really tie into those most meaningful media moments, then we believe we'll have a greater impact for our clients.

We've developed a toolkit around this. We've developed a planning process called MX (meaningful media experience) around this. We rolled it out to our clients about five years ago. We're into the second version of it now, MX 2.0, which we've rolled out in all markets, including here in India.

How is that different from the first version?

What we've done is we've evolved the tools. So it ties into a question about AI. We've used AI technologies to infuse into a number of the tools that we've been developing to support MX. So, now a lot of the audience identification work that we do is fueled by AI.

We've also updated the process to reflect how the market has changed, even from when we launched version 1.0. Post-pandemic, the role of content and activation is way more important than it was five years ago. So, if we're in the business of building meaningful media experiences, we really need to be able to deliver on that.

We launched an arm called Havas Play last year, which is our division to help bring together culture, content and activation. We're really trying to surround consumers with meaningful experiences, and that's resonating in the marketplace.

What is the ‘Meaningful Rating Point’ and the ‘Meaningful Digital Matrix’?

What we tried to do was take the industry tools of GRPs or TRPs and make them more bespoke for a meaningful media experience. So we created the Meaningful TV Rating Point, the MRP, about four years ago and it takes the criteria that we believe in to create meaningful media and applies it to television. It really allows us to surface the kind of shows that our audiences, our clients' audiences have the deepest relationships with.

And essentially it's the same concept with the digital space as well. The choices for an advertiser from a digital perspective are endless. How do we really leverage meaningful media in a digital ecosystem? It's very challenging to do. So we created an algorithm to help us cut through and discard the digital media that is less meaningful.

Ultimately, our dream is that we'll be able to go to a media partner and transact on these rating points. So actually buy and trade on these audiences and these rating points. And there are many media partners out there who are interested in having those conversations with us.

When do you think that will happen? Do you have a timeline?

We are expecting it to happen in the next two to three years, depending on the market. It's different. But we've got some very developed conversations in the US and the UK already. Many media partners are interested and open to having different conversations around the trading audience kind of dynamics. So we're tying into that right now.

Watch out for the full interview on Media Dialogues With Storyboard18 on CNBC-TV18.