Tom Laranjo: At The Helm Of Serviceplan's Expanding UK Empire

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the agency world right now - about integration, about AI, about what exactly is the best future-proof route forward. Tom Laranjo isn’t buying it. 

The end of 2025 marked the announcement that Serviceplan Group is bringing its House of Communication model to the UK, which sees the integration of its growing constellation of creative, media, data, platform and experience businesses (Mediaplus, Behave, Plan.Net, Serviceplan) under one roof. 

And who better to lead the agency’s next era than a leader who’s no stranger to change and knows their surroundings like the back of their hand? Having spent over 20 years at the business with a range of roles and names (Total Media, Mediaplus), Laranjo shows a refreshing confidence as he explains the transition into his new role in the agency’s Soho office, in which he holds the new reigns as Serviceplan Group’s UK CEO, having formerly been CEO of its subsidiary Mediaplus Group UK. 

“The role isn’t easy,” he begins. “It’s about growth - assembling all of these elements in a way that genuinely serves clients and creativity. If we do that right, we’ll power ahead. It’s beyond exciting to be leading.”

In his new position, Laranjo will lead the expansion of the House of Communication agency model in the UK - something that is already active across Serviceplan agencies across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the US.

For Florian Haller, CEO of Serviceplan Group, Tom’s leadership is set to consolidate long-term success for the business in the UK’s ever-competitive market. 

“Tom is an outstanding leader and a true reflection of the values we hold at Serviceplan Group: strategic expertise, entrepreneurship, and collaboration,” outlines Haller. “Over many years of working with him through our partnership with Total Media, he has consistently demonstrated an ability to build strong teams, drive growth, and deliver meaningful work for clients.

“His recent promotion to lead our House of Communication UK is a testament to this track record – from successfully steering Mediaplus UK through a rebrand and its integration into Serviceplan Group, to expanding its behavioural planning capabilities. Under his leadership, our UK business has grown stronger and is well-positioned for long-term success in a competitive market.” 

Speaking to Creative Salon, Laranjo explains why the House of Communication model is being brought to the UK, the importance of integration, and why putting clients first will be the key to continued success.

Creative Salon: You’ve moved from running Mediaplus to leading Serviceplan Group UK and the House of Communication. What does the new role look like, and what excites you about it? 

Tom Laranjo: We now have a really powerful constellation of capabilities and talent within the group, offering genuine breadth and depth. Media and data is one part of it, but we’ve also brought in platform and experience capability, alongside creative and content. Each of those areas comes with fantastic talent and real capability.

The opportunity isn’t just to expand those individual businesses, but to work out how you stitch them together in the service of brilliant work and growth. That’s why we’ve been on a hiring spree, bringing in amazing people. The role isn’t easy, but it’s about growth - assembling all of these elements in a way that genuinely serves clients and creativity. If we do that right, we’ll power ahead.

I’m really lucky in terms of the opportunity. Within those constellations, it’s not about claimed competencies or perfection everywhere, but real strengths. In our creative ecosystem, we have a very powerful Serviceplan with a long legacy of strong creative work. The brand doesn’t yet resonate in the UK in the way it should, but the capabilities are there.

We have investment in Ace of Hearts who’re absolutely motoring. We have an investment in Silverside AI, a globally leading AI creative studio who have created the world’s most viewed fully-AI-generated ads.

That means we can genuinely sit down with a client and say: what do you need, where are you, and what’s best for you? Everyone talks about modular orchestration, but to actually be able to do it - and have that toolkit available - is a huge shift. 

It’s beyond exciting to be leading. Exciting feels like a poor word for it.

What do you think will be the biggest challenge in moving from running a specialist agency to leading a more integrated model with lots of different parts coming together?

I think the biggest challenge is making sure we stay focused on the client. It’s very natural for all of us to be biased towards - and deeply in love with - our own craft: what we come from and what we do. Creative is wonderful, powerful, persuasive, important and critical. Experience design and how consumers navigate your product feels like the most important thing. Media is ultimately about reach and impact.

The challenge is bringing all of that together to achieve superior advantage for clients, both in the medium and long term. Keeping that constant focus on the client and, crucially, their customers is what will be truly differentiating - but also naturally more difficult.

That focus has to run through everything: how we present ourselves, how we show up, how we build our agencies, and how we avoid overburdening ourselves with unnecessary competencies or overlapping capabilities we simply don’t need.

Why bring the House of Communication to the UK now? It’s a model that’s been used globally across different markets - what was the push to bring it here?

Two things. First, there’s an obvious opportunity for the holding company. They’re the biggest independent advertising group in the world, but until they bought Mediaplus they didn’t really have a presence in the UK, which is slightly absurd. How do you get that big without being here? 

There’s a clear structural opportunity. The UK is still, in everyone’s mind, at the forefront of creativity, innovation and development. It’s the place to be, and there’s a huge amount of opportunity to exploit.

We offer something that’s both honest and, in some ways, a powerful bridge between worlds - not just between competencies like creative, digital and media, which we’re very good at in the UK, but also between geographies. When I look at our businesses in the US and in Germany, we’re particularly strong at translating how those worlds can work better together and move forward together. That’s something the group recognises as well.

With that idea of bridging gaps, what will it look like in practice across all UK offices?

The House of Communication principle isn’t dogmatic. There’s a point where things do need to be under one roof, because you need genuine competencies in one space. The whole point is that interaction between disciplines generates the spark and the difference.

We want - and will have - those competencies in London, Birmingham and Manchester, but the exact composition will suit the local context. In Manchester, for example, they’re developing some interesting capabilities around social content creation because it suits the market. Birmingham is slightly different again.

What do you think this helps solve in the industry right now? Integration is something everyone talks about - so what’s genuinely different about this model compared to what other agencies are doing?

I’ll start with the boring answer. A lot of people talk about being integrated. Being connected, in and of itself, isn’t differentiating - doing it genuinely well is. Ultimately, how we deliver will be the real judge of everything I’m saying now. The proof will be in the work.

There’s an enormous opportunity to do much better work based on how we’re organised, how we collaborate, how we work together, and those things really underpin output and client performance. In 12 months’ time, the question will be: have we delivered amazing work that’s genuinely differentiated?

From a perception and narrative point of view, our ability to be truly unbound is very different. There’s no dogma, no organisational hangover, no structure constraining us. We can pull from the absolute best across our ecosystem to create what’s right for now. I can pull from an unbelievable boutique creative agency that’s forging ahead. I can pull from one of the world’s leading AI creative studios. I can pull from a powerhouse German global creative business that’s won multiple Cannes Lions. All of that can be brought together in the service of our clients.

That’s persuasive to me when I think about how clients want to show up and what they’re looking for. Increasingly, they don’t want someone to come in and say, ‘The answer is X’. They want someone to say, ‘What’s your problem - and here’s the solution’.

That’s very different from what I see in the market now, where everyone has extremely strong opinions about what the absolute answer is. In a world that feels, frankly, fucking ridiculous at times, going to clients with that level of certainty, saying, ‘The answer is exclusively algorithmic optimisation and AI’, or the opposite, ‘That’s all crap, it’s all about creativity and planning’, is naïve. If you want to be a global business, you can’t ignore platforms. Equally, you can’t pretend craft and creativity don’t matter.

What matters is going to clients and asking: ‘what’s the shape of your business? What do you actually need?’ In some contexts, AI-driven creative will be exactly what’s required and it’ll be brilliant. In others, it will be an absolute disaster - and what’s needed instead is craft, guile, creativity and thinking of a different order.

That ability to pull from the full toolbox is what will be truly differentiating. For me, it sits in that unbound space. I don’t feel constrained, and that’s what excites people. It’s why I can bring someone like Daniel Lipman here - which is kind of ridiculous. He’s an absolute genius.

It’s about saying: go for it. What are the rules? You’ve tested all the ones that mattered. Now you’re an entrepreneur - do what you want. That’s exciting. It’s scary. But it’s exciting.

It’s not absurd for me to say that ChatGPT could be gone in 18 months. It’s unlikely but it’s not absurd. You’ve got closed models versus open models, competition emerging from all sorts of directions - and yet entire segments of our industry are going, ‘This is definitely the answer’. That’s fucking ridiculous.

There are huge gambles being made with real certainty and a lot of money, and that’s naïve. The value, for me, is in having the ability to stay nimble, flexible, modular and orchestrated.

What I love is that when I say that to clients, it’s not because we’re impoverished or lacking capability, or because I’m searching for different language to cover gaps. We have all of it. The question is: what am I putting it together for, and in whose service?

In some instances, it doesn’t make sense. In others, it’s perfect.

Do you think this approach genuinely helps prevent dull, repetitive creative output? If everything is so integrated, how do you stop it becoming the same thing over and over again?

In part, yes, but it’s also determined by the client, which is the other part of the magic. It’s the client coming to you and saying, ‘This is my problem’, and that problem being different from the one they needed solved before.

If you solve every problem in exactly the same way - whatever the issue, you apply the same process - then, yes, it’s going to be tedious. And you’re probably not solving their problem either; you’re just optimising for your own bottom line. If you’ve got a product that can solve every problem with one solution, good luck to you. I’d love to copy it, but I just don’t see that.

If you’re genuinely getting to the heart of what a client wants, then by definition the output will be different - and it will keep you fresh.

What’s client reaction been like? There seems to be a real appetite for this kind of model.

We’re still forming it, particularly in terms of the narrative we’ll take to market. But I’ve always been clear - and this was the same at Behave - that I don’t want claimed competencies.

It was really important to me that we had Silverside, Ace of Hearts, Serviceplan, Daniel Lipman and all of this amazing talent and these businesses operating and working together before I started going out and telling people how amazing the offer is or how mind-bending our capabilities are.

Clients don’t want to hear that. They want to see what you’ve actually done. What have you created? What have you built? What’s your process? How are you different? How are you going to operate differently?

Having all of that come together first has been brilliant, and it’s allowed us to start forming that story properly.

Where does the centre of gravity lie in terms of market-facing presence? You mentioned there’s still some work to do with Mediaplus - people loved Total Media, but Mediaplus still isn’t immediately recognised.

There’s definitely a lot of work to be done.

The direction I’d like to go - and where we have permission to push - is much simpler: House of Communication. That’s the narrative and the space that excites me.

I’d like us to lead with House of Communication, then move into the work we do, and then talk about the individual brands if necessary. For me, the brand should only exist to the extent that clients recognise a specific badge or depth of competency. I don’t want to ever have to talk about Planet, Mediaplus, or Serviceplan upfront. I want the conversation to be about House of Communication, and the creative, experience, or media work we deliver.

If clients want more detail, then we can reveal, ‘Oh, that was Silverside, or Serviceplan, or Daniel Lipman’, but the overarching story is House of Communication.

How much, within the House of Communication, will you be talking about Behave as an entity or as people?

Behave is going to be very central to how we pull everything together. Behave brings behavioural planning expertise, but also deep competency in other areas. That knowledge informs both our platform and experience business and our creative business. In more customer-friendly terms, their understanding of customer behaviour is significantly more advanced than what competitors offer, giving us a real advantage across creative, media, and platform work.

It’s going to be a key part of how we compete. It’s already been a real weapon for us in media. For clients who value that expertise, it’s a clear choice: you either have this, or you have that.

Looking into the future, how do you want to measure the success of this integration?

It varies, but first and foremost, I want us to be people that others adore working with. I want clients, colleagues, and partners to come in and say, ‘I love working with them. They’re so good’. We won’t always be right, we won’t always win, and not every idea will land - that’s fine, but I want people to genuinely enjoy working with us and feel that point of difference. That’s really important to me.

Financially, I want us to be focused as a House of Communication. There will always be a need to look at different businesses in isolation for cost management and P&L reasons, but the major driver has to be collective performance. All ships rising is massively important to me. Output matters too - not just creative or effectiveness awards, but genuinely brilliant work.

The fourth part is bringing everyone with us. We’ve put in place a multidisciplinary training program: creative teams will learn aspects of media and platform experience; platform experience teams will learn creative and media skills. Our AI campus, combined with in-person training, is all designed to help people become rounded, multidisciplinary, smart practitioners who can use AI to amplify their strengths. If people lean into that, we can bring everyone along with us.

We’re in a great position - profitable, performing well, growing, and investing in talent. There’s no pressure to cut costs, so people can lean in and thrive. I’m clear with the team: if you don’t want to do that, that’s fine, but for those who do, we’re creating a structure where everyone can flourish.