Paul Frampton, the former CEO of Havas Media Group UK, has returned to the industry as President of Europe at Control v. Exposed, a US-based digital media start-up that is launching in the UK.
Frampton described Control v. Exposed (CvE) as “a refreshing antithesis to top-heavy, P&L-driven agency groups,” and said: “It’s time for a re-set. The traditional agency model is under threat, all growth in the industry is coming from digital, we are post-GDPR, facing the demise of the 3rd party cookie and Europe is crying out for innovation to counter all of this. The timing is also ripe for addressable TV and programmatic OOH.”
The venture marks yet another attempt to build a new agency model, and promises a whole checklist of services: “the audience planning and executional capability of a media agency, the solution-oriented and analytical expertise of a consulting firm and the engineering and coding skills of a tech company,” all delivered with “100 per cent transparency.”
CvE launched last year in the US as a spin-off from established marketing services company The Goodway Group, and opened in Asia Pacific a Singapore office in February. The agency’s US clients have included Nike, and interiors retail chain Crate & Barrell. It is set up so that most of its people work remotely.
Frampton left Havas in October 2017 at a time when a series of high profile media CEOs quit their posts, including Tracy De Groose of Dentsu Aegis Network, Pippa Glucklich of Starcom, and Nikki Mendonca of OMD.
The quadruple whammy led to a lot of industry soul-searching about the hard life of a media CEO, but none of them has strayed too far: De Groose is now executive chair of Newsworks, the marketing body for UK newspapers; Glucklich is CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi; and Mendonça is president of Accenture Interactive Operations.
Since June 2018, Frampton has been CEO of Tink Labs UK and Ireland — a Hong Kong based company that produces an IoT-enabled device called Handy.
