The GO Council recently sat down with Adam Rattner to discuss the changing landscape of growth strategy and business development.

Adam joined Havas Media Network in 2024 as Chief Growth Officer for North America, leading growth strategy, new business, and integrated pitch development across media, data, commerce, and creative. He previously held senior roles at Carat, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP, and served as Head of Media for The Coca-Cola Company in the UK & Ireland. In 2023, he founded Stick & Key, a growth and connection strategy consultancy supporting agencies and brands working to sharpen their story and accelerate commercial performance. Across his career, Adam has driven $8B in new billings and $600M in revenue growth. He serves on the board of F.Y. Eye, a nonprofit committed to expanding media access for underserved communities. He lives in the New York area with his wife, Iryna, and their two children, Jake and George.

GOC: What is the remit and role of the chief revenue/growth officer in your organization?

Adam Rattner: First and foremost, it's about driving top-line revenue growth. Today, the majority of that growth comes through responding to inbound RFPs, where we work to articulate our story and value proposition as clearly and compellingly as possible. Increasingly, we're also prioritizing expansion through outbound opportunities and organic growth within existing relationships. I oversee those initiatives as well, ensuring we’re diversifying our growth channels and building a sustainable pipeline for the business.

GOC: What are the essential requirements for growth strategy mapping, continuous innovation, digital transformation and performance calibration across the enterprise?

Adam Rattner: The marketing services landscape is in a period of transformation. AI is accelerating disruption, but even before that we were seeing consolidation and increased pressure as many clients evaluated in-house or alternative models. As a result, the largest enterprise clients continue to be well served, while mid-tier, high-growth brands are often overlooked.

Our growth strategy starts with addressing that gap. We’ve identified these rapidly scaling companies as our core market, and we’re building a suite of services designed to meet their evolving needs. Many of them are outgrowing independent agencies as they require more advanced analytics, deeper integration between media and creative, and a higher level of strategic support without losing the hands-on partnership and service they value.

To do that effectively, Havas Media Network’s approach is intentionally data- and tech-agnostic. We stay client-centric, matching solutions to where the business is in its maturity curve rather than pushing pre-packaged products. This allows us to support continuous innovation, guide digital transformation, and calibrate performance in ways that are flexible, scalable, and genuinely aligned with our clients’ growth ambitions and media experiences.

GOC: What data-driven insights and intelligence are essential to identifying growth areas and formulating sustainable growth strategies?

Adam Rattner: We’re constantly assessing extensive data around client spend patterns and the broader economic signals shaping those decisions. The economic movements in the US this year with the introduction of tariffs has had a huge effect on the way a lot of our clients are spending. We're looking at how much they're spending and in what areas. We are seeing clients shift spend out of traditional media and more into incremental value-driven spaces like ecommerce or owned media.

At the same time, discovery behavior has changed. Categories like travel, which historically relied heavily on search, are now navigating zero-click journeys driven that start and end with AI. Consumers are finding what they need without ever leaving the result environment, and that shift has disrupted long-standing revenue and acquisition models.

Our role is to stay ahead of those shifts through understanding where attention, influence, and conversion are moving, and evolving our services so clients can win in the new pathways to discovery and purchase.

GOC: What systems or processes do you have to anticipate, understand and react to new contenders, market disruption, geo-political, economic and technological change?

Adam Rattner: AI is undoubtedly the biggest disruptor facing our industry today, and while we don't know its ultimate impact, we're actively investing in understanding and harnessing its potential rather than simply reacting to it. The current trend is the notion that AI opens up the gates to do what we do currently, much cheaper than ever before. That's not a sustainable model for brands that want to grow. Everyone's heard the term of AI slop and that is increasingly what we're seeing from the global marketplace in terms of how AI-driven creative is appearing. There are efficiencies that we do want to drive, but ultimately, the world still needs creativity and effectiveness as key drivers in advertising. Otherwise, companies aren't going to grow, they're not going to build a stronger relationship with their customers and consumers, and they're not going to be able to differentiate.

This is precisely why we evolved our global strategy to Converged.AI, it's our answer to how agencies must transform to deliver in this new landscape. We're committing $400 million from 2024 to 2027 specifically in data, technology, and AI infrastructure. But critically, our approach is client-centric and data-agnostic, meaning we're compatible with all leading platforms. This allows our clients, regardless of their existing data ecosystems or business challenges, to move with speed and agility rather than being locked into a single vendor's vision of the future.

We've built a comprehensive platform that spans targeting and activation, advanced analytics, dynamic intelligence through agentic reporting, AI-driven planning and decisioning, and content personalization at scale. These tools allow us to anticipate market shifts, respond to competitive threats, and adapt to technological change in real-time.

While AI is a powerful strategic partner, it's the talent, creativity, and culture of our people that set us apart. We're building a model where exceptional people and well-defined AI agents work together in tandem, not a replacement for human ingenuity.

GOC: Which functional leaders and teams need to align and combine to execute growth plans and deliverables?

Adam Rattner: The short answer is it is everybody. The Chief Growth Officer plays a connective role across the entire organization. For example, we partner closely with our Chief Planning Officer to ensure we’re designing client-centric solutions and developing our products in the right way. We work hand-in-hand with our data and technology leadership, who are building the core platforms that power those solutions. And alignment with our Chief Operating Officer is critical to ensure we have the right talent, capabilities, and capacity in place to deliver for our clients. Growth doesn’t sit in one function, it’s fully integrated across the business.

GOC: What external and internal forces are most impacting your company’s ability to grow?

Adam Rattner: It's a double-edged sword and it comes back to the large-scale consolidation happening across the industry. On the one hand, this consolidation is making it much more challenging if you're a mid-market player, as these mega companies dominate scale in the marketplace and have a lot of pricing power – pricing other businesses out of the market. This creates monopolies on certain kinds of data sources, making it a lot more challenging to be in the mid-market. But in another way, it opens up opportunities, because there is a whole different raft of clients that also sit in the mid-market that might be working with those companies today that are now feeling undervalued. That opens the door for us to step in with a more tailored, high-touch approach that meets their needs in a way those larger players simply can’t.