Havas' second-mover announcement is noteworthy for another important reason: in the aftermath of the Horizon Global deal, the two agencies have been touting their kindred spirits,
intimate working relationship and especially the integration and harmonization of AI-enabled "operating systems," including Horizon's Blu and Havas' Coverged.AI platforms.
"I'll give you a little
headline around 'Blu Converged,' which is really a wrapper between Blu, which we do here in the U.S., and what [Havas'] Converged platform does internationally in those markets," Horizon President Bob
Lord told me during an October 2024 briefing on the Blu platform at Horizon's offices in New York City, adding: "They've spent almost four-and-a-half years plumbing all the data for Converge, which is
their platform."
Lord declined to go into explicit details at the time of our meeting, but confirmed that "Blu Converged" is "in-flight," adding: "Partly the way that we've built Blu and they
built Converged is as open ecosystems, plugging into these new LLMs, like a Gemini, which we're working with Google on. That's a really nice wrapper to put across both [Blu and Converged]."
Kudos to both Havas and Horizon for moving so fast to integrate two hard-earned, high-quality and kindred platforms, which was a big part of why MediaPost named Lord our Executive of the Year for
2025, but today's Havas/Akkio announcement seems a little tone deaf and old newsy, especially for making a splash at CES.
Worst of all, it is full of the kind of generic platitudes that any
trade reporter or reader should detest for their meaninglessness. That's doubly true for an agency that has long touted one of its core differentiating attributes about being "meaningful."
I'll spare you the release, but will link to it when it becomes publicly available, and I did ask a follow-up question in advance of writing this column to see if Havas could elaborate explicitly
on what makes its deal "differentiated from how other agencies" have already been working with Akkio.
“We’re customizing and co-building with Akkio rather than licensing
off-the-shelf tools. This partnership goes beyond agents for a single task but instead across our business and Converged.AI platform, developing solutions that advance both our product and our
people," explained Jamie Seltzer, global chief data & technology officer, Havas Media Network, in a quote provided to MediaPost.
Honestly, a much better CES story would be
if the two agencies jointly unveiled "Blu Converged" and talked explicitly about how they have been working together to combine the best of their individual strengths -- as well as those of preferred
third-party developers like Akkio -- to build something in which the sum of the parts equals something far greater.
If you want to learn more about Akkio, you can see their default explainer
video below: