Havas pharma agency Bastion Brands announces leadership transition

Herd MSL Australia has partnered with search specialists from Publicis Groupe ANZ to launch Elevate, a new AI search visibility, authority, and measurement service.

Designed to help brands strengthen visibility, credibility, and consideration, Elevate addresses what the agency describes as the challenge of how brands are framed, trusted, and recommended across fragmented, AI‑powered search environments.

The service assesses the quality of a brand's representation, identifying both strong and weak signals of credibility, relevance, and authority, while highlighting where investment in owned content and earned media can influence outcomes.

Speaking on AI search's evolution into a reputation engine, CEO of Herd MSL, Skye Lambley, said: "It doesn't just decide who appears - it shapes how brands are described, trusted and recommended.

"Winning isn't just about showing up more - it's about showing up better. The brands that perform strongly are backed by credible, high quality earned and owned authority: trusted coverage and content, expert validation and consistent third-party proof points. That takes more than content output or disruption - it requires a sophisticated earned and owned strategy and execution to shape how a brand is represented, not just whether it’s mentioned."

Elevate connects three specialist Publicis Groupe ANZ capabilities within a single service:

• Category‑level search intelligence: Understanding what people are searching for across a category, how demand is forming, and where brands, competitors and third‑party sources are showing up - revealing gaps, risks and opportunities to influence discovery.
• AI search strategy and content structuring: Identifying priority question clusters, decoding the signals AI systems use to generate responses, and defining what needs to change to improve how brands are selected, framed and explained in AI‑search results.
• Earned & owned authority building: Designing and delivering insight‑led owned and earned programs that efficiently build third‑party validation, expert presence and credible references - strengthening the signals AI systems rely on when generating responses.

Nilesh Pritam has joined Veeam Software as its Director of Corporate Communications for Asia Pacific. Based in Singapore, he oversees the company’s regional communications activities, including media relations, executive communications, employee engagement and analyst relations.

Nilesh spent more than 15 years at Verizon, most recently as Head of Corporate Communications, Asia Pacific. He has also held senior communications roles at Ogilvy and Tandberg. 

Global cleaning technology company, BISSELL, has tapped creative communications agency, History Will Be Kind (HWBK), to join its first ANZ agency village, as the company looks to strengthen its brand and marketing strategy for the year ahead.

HWBK will lead editorial as the brand's retained PR agency, while Nunn Media will spearhead BVOD and SVOD media strategy and buying, and Hellions will lead creative. The group joins an existing roster of specialist partners, including Jellyfish, Frontier Australia, Andzen, and Digital Next.

The agency village has been tasked with driving authentic differentiation to strengthen brand growth, deepen cultural relevance, and position BISSELL as a category leader across ANZ.

BISSELL's Senior Manager, Marketing Oceania, Nathan Dixon, said: "We've had long-standing relationships with some of our agency partners, but have been intentionally building out our full village with a focus on engaging best-in-class specialists who can collaborate and complement our holistic marketing efforts. It's a big year for BISSELL and this agency village will help us take the brand to new heights in this market."

History Will Be Kind's Managing Director, Edwina Brook, said: "BISSELL is an iconic brand with boundless opportunities, making it a brilliant match for our integrated comms capabilities and ability to infiltrate culture with intent and purpose. We work with some of the world’s most recognised brands operating in increasingly competitive respective markets. We love the creative and strategic challenge of helping these brands find authentic connection with audiences based on differentiations they actually care about."