Molly Hop on building visibility in the age of AI discovery

Hop’s perspective was shaped by her time building commerce media at Publicis, where she integrated retail into the broader media organization just as the pandemic put it under the spotlight. “There were about five of us in a huge company that everybody suddenly wanted to talk to,” she recalls. The pressure forced her to set up frameworks for measurement, retailer investment and technology that still guide her today.

At Havas, she has carried over a few core principles. One is the importance of visibility as a metric alongside ROAS or incrementality. “Across key retailers, you should be able to see how your brand shows up both in-store and online and optimize against that,” she says. Another is the need for careful retailer prioritization. “For any given brand, you really need to weigh the position, the category opportunity and the competitive pressures before deciding which retail partners to lean into.”

She also elevated organic strategy within Havas, moving SEO out from under SEM and connecting it to media and AI. Her team mines keyword queries across Amazon, Walmart, Target and other retailers to spot behavior patterns, new product bundles and early signs of consumer shifts. Those insights then guide assortment, launch timing and even the language brands should use.

Culture, commerce and the next big platform

Hop believes the next frontier is at the intersection of retail, affiliate and influence. “I think TikTok should be considered a retail media network,” she says, pointing to how younger consumers in Asia already shop directly through social. The trick, in her view, is to design measurement and programs that match how people actually behave, instead of forcing old models into new channels. “Some of the mistakes we’ve made in social commerce were treating it like an extension of a media buy. That’s not how people shop.”

To make that real, Havas pairs its influencer specialists with Hop’s data-driven market team. When keyword analysis shows a change in how people shop a category, the culture team digs into the why and the two groups adjust together. “It’s happening both ways. We’re connecting cultural triggers to commerce and making sure we can read the impact.”

Her goals for the year are clear: integrate Channel Bakers, the Amazon boutique Havas acquired; build solutions for the new discovery journey “from audience identification all the way through activation;” and turn the influencer-affiliate-retail nexus into something actionable. She calls the vision “culture to commerce.”

Hop is pragmatic about hype. Shiny new tools get filtered through a test-and-learn agenda that weighs lift, cost and output before committing. She also pushes back on retail networks that promise unique capabilities. Amazon Marketing Cloud, for example, has delivered insights, but sometimes at a cost that outweighs the value. “It’s our job to be the ones who say, I don’t know if that’s true.”

Looking ahead, she expects retail media networks to look more like full ad networks with better closed-loop measurement and she is certain influence will keep growing. “Affiliate and influence are becoming more connected. That makes it easier for agencies and clients to scale, even if we have to protect some of the authenticity along the way.” And somewhere out there, she suspects, is a new platform waiting to explode. “I really do believe there’s a next TikTok we’re not paying attention to yet. I keep an eye on what my nieces and nephews are doing.”