Havas U.S. Launches Brand Insight and Culture Consultancy TRIPTK

Joint Venture with Ex-Flamingo/Omnicom Team Further Expands Havas’ Capabilities for Modern Brands

NEW YORK – Modern brands require innovative research and brand strategy to inform powerful marketing. Seeking to fulfill this need as the partner to the modern CMO, Havas U.S. is enhancing its offering by announcing a new joint venture with revolutionary consultancy TRIPTK, a culturally immersed, strategic brand advisory firm based in New York. Sam Hornsby, former Flamingo/Omnicom NY Managing Partner, will serve as Chief Executive Officer. The team provides experience-driven consultancy that focuses on answering looming cultural questions brands face every day and offers profound insight into contemporary consumer behavior.

“This insights offering takes our client strategies to new heights and puts more value on the qualitatively rooted skillset of problem solving, storytelling and interpretation.”

TRIPTK’s capabilities include consumer, cultural and category market intelligence, trend understanding, innovation, ideation and brand strategy. The agency specializes in breaking down brands’ thorniest cultural challenges and questions by leveraging social sciences, art, and literary theory and criticism. The results of this process develop or refine the brand’s core positioning and purpose to set a clear agenda for future marketing.

“Our goal is to break tradition of what it means to be a creative network focused on partnering with today’s modern CMO by developing and activating strategies in an ever-changing consumer culture,” said Paul Marobella, Chairman and CEO, Havas Creative, U.S. “This insights offering takes our client strategies to new heights and puts more value on the qualitatively rooted skillset of problem solving, storytelling and interpretation.”

With 10 years of insight and brand strategy experience in the U.S., Europe and China, Hornsby co-led Flamingo New York, which counted as clients some the world’s most prominent brands and organizations including Diageo, PepsiCo, Marriott, Viacom, Estee Lauder and Nike. TRIPTK encompasses an extensive global expertise and brings together a cross-disciplinary team of researchers, strategists, semioticians, futurists and designers to uncover opportunities for businesses in today’s brand marketplace. It’s a go-to for brands in need of game-changing strategies and ideas, as it’s driven by an empathetic understanding of people, unparalleled fluency in the cultural dynamics affecting brands and a high-touch partnership approach.

“My team travels the world with cameras and pens observing people and environments to understand cultural dynamics and breakthrough, undiscovered opportunities for brands,” said Hornsby. “I’m excited to partner with Havas to develop an unmatched best-of-both proposition: a global boutique with the clout of a major network. The possibilities are endless and this is just the beginning.

“The name TRIPTK came about because we were inspired by the ‘rule of three,’ a universal phenomenon that speaks to the hidden patterns of human culture and psychology and is a guiding force in design. We think of TRIPTK as a system of three related elements—like the pieces of a Triptych—rather than a monolithic and fixed ‘word mark’.”

In addition to partnering with major brands and agencies, TRIPTK sees real intellectual advantage in the engagement of non-traditional clients such as entrepreneurs, VC firms, arts institutions and social impact organizations that are disrupting categories, shifting culture and demonstrating purpose.

About TRIPTK

TRIPTK is an insight and strategy consultancy at the forefront of culture. We decode and recode culture for brands. Our studio of researchers, designers, semioticians, data scientists and cultural theorists help brands learn, grow and transform. With headquarters in New York and deep global experience, we leverage an ever-expanding toolkit of disruptive methodologies to solve our client’s most complex—and fascinating—challenges. Visit us at www.triptk.co and contact us at [email protected].

About Havas U.S.

Havas U.S. is a progressive agency focused on being the most valuable partner to the modern CMO. It offers a comprehensive mix of capabilities that aren’t what you’d expect to find in a creative firm, such as experience design, cognitive, data and technology. With Villages in New York and Chicago, Havas U.S. brings nearly 2,700 of the most talented people in the business. As the most modern, flexible and agile agency in the U.S., Havas U.S. reinforces the following five key pillars in everything it does: creativity, culture, community, consumer experience and commerce. We are creators. We are data. We are social. We are ideas. For more information, visit havas.com or follow Havas on Twitter (@havas), Facebook (facebook.com/havas) and Instagram (@havas).