Havas Market makes Warsaw its hub for Central and Eastern Europe

Havas Market, the e-commerce, retail media and performance marketing specialist inside Havas Media Network, has set up a Central and Eastern European hub in Warsaw. The Polish operation will act as the competence and operations center for six markets beyond Poland: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia.

Izabela Polańska-Sitarek has been appointed Central European hub group manager to run it. She reports to Beata Magdziarz, chief digital officer and board member of Havas Media Network in Poland. Polańska-Sitarek joins from Publicis Groupe, where she coordinated campaigns across 28 EMEA markets and worked on business transformation; earlier roles at Wirtualna Polska and NuOrder covered social, search, affiliate and e-commerce work for brands including Lindt, Microsoft, Stellantis, Dr Irena Eris, eSky, Lexus and Toyota.

The hub’s brief is to coordinate Havas Market’s activity across the region, share solutions between markets, develop local teams and roll out data-driven, automated and AI-based tools. Magdziarz said the network is building a model that lets it scale skills and service quality across the region in response to growing client demands. T-Mobile is cited as a client for which the Polish team already runs performance campaigns.

Why it matters

Havas Market launched in Poland exactly four years ago, on 1 September 2022, as a rebrand of Havas E-Commerce, with Tomasz Kwiatkowski leading e-commerce operations. Globally the unit says it operates in more than 30 countries with over 1,800 consultants and specialists, offering marketplace strategy, performance buying and proprietary tools such as Havas Market Forecast and Retail Insights across platforms like Allegro, Amazon and Zalando.

The decision to run smaller CEE markets out of Warsaw fits a broader pattern. Poland’s scale, talent pool and cost base have made it the default location for regional hubs at several networks, particularly in media, performance and production. For Havas, which has been building out its digital and commerce credentials to compete with the larger holding companies, a regional performance center is also a way to serve clients who buy across the region from a single point of contact.

What’s next

The immediate task for Polańska-Sitarek is business development across the six markets and building local teams that can execute a shared playbook. Retail media is the obvious growth lane: the region’s marketplaces and grocery chains are only beginning to open their data and ad inventory, and networks that can plug Polish expertise into Prague, Budapest or Zagreb will be first in line for that spend.