Starcom’s next chapter: Matt Houltham on focus, growth and 'doing less, better'

Four months into the top job at Starcom, CEO Matt Houltham is done waiting for the right moment to speak.

After a period of rewiring across team structure, values and ways of working, the agency is stepping back into market with a sharpened positioning, a challenger mindset and a new operating philosophy Houltham calls “focus for growth”. It is not a revolution, he says. But it is a decisive evolution.

“Our aspiration is to be the growth engine for forward-thinking clients,” Houltham says. “Clients are operating in a really complicated environment. Budgets are going backwards. Funnels are collapsing. There’s uncertainty everywhere. The challenge isn’t what they could do – it’s what they should do.”

That tension between abundance and constraint is what sits at the heart of Starcom’s reset. Under Houltham, the agency is reorganising around a single unifying idea: that sustainable growth now depends on doing less, but doing it better.

The agency’s new framework is built around four levers that Houltham believes drive disproportionate business impact: high-value audiences, high-value media, high-value ideas and high-value metrics. Together, they form the backbone of the “focus for growth” model now being embedded across the business.

“The philosophy is focus, and it’s supported by a way of working that touches everything – how we structure teams, how we use data, the tools we deploy and even how we’ve refreshed our values,” Houltham says. “It cascades right through the business.”

A core shift is how success is now measured. Rather than optimising against traditional media KPIs alone, Starcom is building what Houltham calls “single source of truth” dashboards that align media activity directly with business metrics.

“The only metrics that really matter are business outcomes,” he says. “Media metrics can become vanity metrics very quickly. By refocusing everyone around what moves the client’s business, whether that’s short-term sales or long-term brand metrics, you gain speed and clarity.”

That alignment, he says, creates agility not through speed for its own sake, but through precision. When everyone is optimising to the same commercial outcome, decision-making accelerates.

“Speed is absolutely a competitive advantage. But you can’t move fast if you’re working to three-month reporting cycles. You need daily and weekly adjustments based on what’s actually working.”

The shift is already influencing how Starcom structures its teams and engages clients. While a full restructure is still playing out, Houltham says the agency has begun rolling the new model into major projects and new client engagements.

“We’ve been testing this already. There’s great work happening across the agency, but it’s historically lived in pockets. What we’ve done is crystallise what makes us future-fit and simplify it into a consistent framework.”

Behind the framework sits a deeper investment in data, analytics and predictive modelling. Starcom is now integrating rich identity data and audience intelligence into the earliest stages of planning, not just activation.

A key example is the agency’s use of Lotame’s identity graph, which provides behavioural and media profiles on a significant portion of Australian digital consumers. Lotame was a key acquisition made by Publicis earlier this year.

“We use that to build what we call high-fidelity audience profiles,” Houltham says. “That informs not just media choices, but partnerships, messaging and even how creative work is shaped. If you’re not going after the right audiences, you’re wasting money. If you don’t understand how to engage them, you’re also wasting money.”

Creativity, he insists, becomes more, not less, important as systems become more data-rich.

“In an environment where people are exposed to more advertising than ever, how you show up creatively is everything. Media isn’t just a distribution channel anymore. It’s the amplification engine for the idea. If you get that combination right, you create disproportionate emotional impact.”

Positionally, Starcom is leaning harder into its challenger identity within the broader Publicis Groupe system.

“I’d happily call us a challenger brand,” Houltham says. “We want to be more provocative. We want to move fast, not recklessly, but fast enough to stay ahead of an opportunity. And we think this philosophy applies to both challenger brands and large incumbents looking to reinvent parts of their business.”

That shift also marks a change in how the agency presents itself to market. Houltham says Starcom has been “relatively shy” in recent years, but that is changing.

“We need to start dating again,” he says. “Our way of working won’t be right for every client. But for the ones it is right for, it requires a new level of collaboration and openness. It’s not passive media delivery, it’s joint ownership of growth.”

Internally, the reset is being reinforced through a new business strategy, refreshed values and clearly defined behavioural expectations.

“Often values sound good on the wall but no one knows how to practise them day to day,” Houltham says. “We’ve mapped behaviours directly to our strategy so people can actually see how they contribute.”

For Houltham, the credibility of the model is grounded in hard-won perspective. After two decades in agency leadership, he spent time client-side in a technology scale-up - an experience he says fundamentally reshaped how he views media’s role inside a business.

“We see maybe 10% of a client’s world. The other 90% is product, pricing, distribution, operations. We need to appreciate that we’re not the most important tool in the toolkit, even if most of the budget flows through media. That means we have to be precious with our client’s time and deeply respectful of how their businesses really work.”

Now, four months into the role, Houltham is clear-eyed about the pace and scale of change ahead.

“We’re not reinventing Starcom,” he says. “We’re polishing it and shining a light on what it already does really well. But the principle we’re applying, both for ourselves and our clients, is very simple: do less, better.”

And heading into 2026, he believes that discipline will be the defining advantage.