Havas N.V.

Havas is the smallest of the global Big Six advertising holding companies but is the only one to have changed corporate structure in the last twelve months. The December 2024 carve-out from Vivendi reset the cap table — shares went one-for-one to former Vivendi holders, and the group now reports independently to Euronext Amsterdam rather than as a Vivendi subsidiary. Yannick Bolloré, who has run Havas since 2013, retained both the chairman and CEO seats through the spin.

The trade interest for CTV and ad-tech operators is twofold. First, the Converged operating system — a €400 million, three-year tech, data, and AI investment — pulls Havas into direct posture comparisons with Publicis (Epsilon / CoreAI), WPP (Open / Choreograph), and Omnicom (Omni / the pending Interpublic combination). Second, as a publicly disclosing pure-play, Havas now produces a holdco financial signal that wasn’t legible inside Vivendi’s consolidated reporting — useful when reading agency-side commentary on programmatic, retail media, and identity stack adoption.