Havas Media onboards new clients with a category read from day one
Havas Media's Middle East Performance Practice made SOMIN the real-time competitive layer under every client brand, replacing hours of manual cross-platform filtering. New clients now get an evidence-backed category read from day one, so planners can guide media strategy from the first conversation.
Havas Media’s performance practice in the Middle East
Havas Media is one of the world’s largest media agency networks, covering paid, programmatic and performance media worldwide. Its Middle East Performance Practice, led by Performance Director Branislav, plans and buys media for multiple brands in the region’s most competitive categories.
Manual data work slowed network-scale performance planning
Hand-collating competitor data across many brands and platforms took hours from strategy.
- ✓ Many brands and platforms, each tracked by hand.
- ✓ Paid and organic competitor creative had to be collated before planning.
- ✓ Every new brief meant rebuilding competitive context from scratch.
- ✓ Rigorous but slow, while new accounts expect a strategy in week one.
A real-time competitive layer underneath every client brand
Brand Tracker pulls competitor content automatically and breaks it down by activity, audience, creative territory and seasonality, showing each brand against its competitive set.
For new clients, SOMIN sets out brand and category facts in minutes rather than hours.
Brand Tracker
Real-time competitor intelligence, pulled and broken down automatically.
Perspective Studies
Audience and messaging mapping that sets brand and category context at onboarding.
Content Library
A current archive of competitive creative for every planning conversation.
SOMIN is now integral to Havas Media’s daily operations
SOMIN is now part of daily operations. Real-time data replaces manual filtering, and client conversations rest on current evidence, not dated audits.
With context ready on day one, the time from signed client to active strategy has shortened materially, in line with SOMIN’s typical 13× speed-up.
My team has become very dependent on SOMIN. It saves us countless hours of manual filtering, and as an agency it helps us quickly get factual data about new brands we’re trying to onboard so we can hit the ground running and guide our media strategy from day one.
— Branislav, Performance Director, Havas Media
Three takeaways from Havas Media’s always-on competitive read
Manual competitor tracking is a hidden cost at network scale: it takes planners’ strategy time. Automating it made SOMIN daily infrastructure.
Onboarding is a speed problem as much as a research problem: a strategy due in week one needs a baseline on day one.
Dependence, not occasional use, is the real adoption signal: SOMIN replaced the manual work between a signed client and an active strategy.
Havas Media case study FAQ
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SOMIN is a Singapore deep-tech platform that turns real-time competitor and audience intelligence into market-ready creative ideas, typically 13× faster than manual research. Clients include P&G, Audi, Ferrari, Gojek, Abbott, Citi, KFC, Nestlé and McDonald’s in 11+ markets; agency partners include Dentsu, OMG, GroupM, Havas and Publicis.
Built by seasoned marketers and an AI professor: the methods behind this study are peer-reviewed at AAAI, ACM Multimedia, SIGIR, WSDM and in ACM TOIS. See the research and talks.
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