How to Build Meaningful Media in a Noisy World – with Hamid Habib
Hamid Habib is Managing Director at Arena - the newly relaunched agency formerly known as Havas Entertainment. He joined me on The Six Sells Podcast to talk about blending creativity, media, data and culture into something more useful than a standard media plan.
This episode’s packed with insights on how to do better, more effective work in modern marketing.
From med school to MTV to media strategy
Hamid didn’t take the traditional route into advertising. He started out studying medicine, ran a nightclub, and ended up in PR, then marketing at MTV and Nickelodeon before finally joining the agency side at Zenith.
That client-side background shows. It’s clear he still sees the world through a marketer’s lens – balancing creativity, commercial sense, and practicality.
Today, he runs Arena with a clear focus: working with brands that live in culture, backed by the tools and tech of a network agency.
Key takeaways from the episode
We covered a lot of ground, but here are a few of the big themes:
1. Hiring for attitude, training for skill
Hamid hires based on cultural fit and passion for the client’s category – not just a textbook CV. In his view, you can teach media planning. You can’t teach curiosity or drive.
2. Flexible, not fixed, planning processes
Arena doesn’t force every client through the same rigid process. They flex their approach based on brand needs, audience behaviours, and campaign goals. Clients care about outcomes – not what your process is called.
3. Audience strategy built on propensity modelling
Instead of just targeting demographics, they focus on likelihood to buy. Using a mix of first-party and third-party data, their audience architects (yes, it’s a buzzword, but a useful one) find the people most likely to care – and weed out the ones who don’t.
4. Meaningful media over maximum reach
Arena is upfront about this: they’ll sacrifice some reach in favour of making the work more meaningful and interesting. Especially for culturally-led brands like Doc Martens, Bumble or Sega, being interesting matters more than being everywhere.
5. Integration matters
Media, creative, PR, social, content – if these elements don’t play nicely together, the whole campaign suffers. Clients increasingly ask for help stitching it all together. The best agencies now act as integration partners, not just media buyers.
6. Digital creative still has a quality problem
The standard of digital creative is too often an afterthought. Programmatic and performance teams focus so much on finding the right person at the right time, then serve them creative that’s irrelevant or dull. There’s huge upside in getting this right – and not enough people doing it well.
Why this episode is worth a watch (or listen)
If you’re a marketer working with agencies, or an agency leader trying to raise the quality of your output, this episode is full of ideas worth stealing.
We talk honestly about the gaps between media and creative, the slow decline of attention to digital craft, and how to navigate complexity without drowning in it.
Hamid’s got a sharp perspective, grounded in real-world results, not theory.
📺 The Six Sells Podcast is filmed in 4K using broadcast quality cameras, so why not watch this show on your connected TV via YouTube?
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