‘The South is a vibrant market for WPP’

Chennai is the third WPP campus in India after Mumbai and Gurgaon, and is home to our global enterprise IT team, which is being scaled up. Chennai is also home to our largest content production hub. And the city has been home to our agencies. We felt it was a good opportunity to create a campus there. And, of course, given the potential Chennai offers us, in terms of being a talent hub, especially tech and creative talent, we feel it’s a good time to invest in that market.

The enterprise IT team is located in a centre of excellence for IT and IT support for WPP’s global operations. We have a massive global footprint, with over one lakh employees, so the enterprise IT team in this new campus is really the backbone of global IT support and it will be scaled up.

To start with, the campus will be occupied by the enterprise IT team. The other part, which is still in the works and set to open sometime next year when we scale up our presence in Chennai, will see other disciplines as well.

Given the way the industry has evolved and with the amount of technology that’s come in, and given the need for skill sets in data today, there are centres like Chennai, Coimbatore, and, of course, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, that are proving to be good destinations for companies like ours to invest in.

I would say in one to two years.

No. It will be called WPP campus only... globally it is so.

The South is obviously a very strong part of the overall mix and will continue to be so. You have start-ups as well as the more traditional advertisers and, in fact, a lot of them are also extending their brands or getting into new lines of business. And, the South is also a thriving market for cinema, music, entertainment, sports, which are all kind of adjacent to our business, because we overlap in those areas. The other shift in our industry is that earlier you would have teams close to clients... the biggest spenders were in Bombay and Delhi NCR, and we had large teams there... Today, we live in a very different era where most of it is digital and it doesn’t really matter where our teams sit.

Firstly, if you look at all four states, whether in terms of infrastructure, spends, consumption across different categories and services, it’s always pretty much ahead of the national average. So, to that extent, I would say it’s a very fertile kind of territory for any business... and for the advertising industry as well.

On the one hand, we have the extremely well-established traditional businesses, including some of the large family-owned businesses, which have continued to thrive over decades. The younger generation is coming into senior management positions, diversifying, getting into newer areas and so forth. It combines the best of both worlds, the traditional and a robust way of building a business. And then you have the other end of the spectrum — a very vibrant startup ecosystem in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai. You also have extremely strong retail clients... it includes local regional brands as well, all of whom are kind of leaders in their own territory.

The South is also very interesting for us because of the way the content, movies and the music ecosystem has evolved and the kind of talent that is available there. Coke Studio — one of our largest clients in India... and the kind of talent we have from the South and the kind of songs we’ve been able to create — is an example of how we’re able to leverage the ecosystem, the talent.

It’s a global strategy of WPP for the last 6-7 years to get our people and agencies to co-locate in campuses and, today, a majority of the WPP global workforce works out of campuses. I would say it’s worked extremely well because, first and foremost, just getting all our agencies under one roof drives so much more collaboration.

It drives us to stitch together more solutions for our clients because everyone’s sitting together. We have ensured that in all our campuses there’s a lot of collaboration space, where people from different disciplines work jointly for clients. And the other fact is the kind of amenities and other things we have in our campuses, it ensures very good employee engagement. There are all these benefits we have by being in campuses, which is why our plan is to expand into other cities as well. And if you look at our total employee base of around 11,000 in India, roughly 50 per cent work in agencies, servicing clients in India, and 50 per cent work in these CoEs (centres of excellence) and hubs that either service global clients or the global organisation.

India continued to be the fastest growing market for WPP for the last several years. In fact, we were not even in the top 10 markets for WPP 7-8 years ago. Today we are firmly in the top five in revenue terms and, the rate at which we are growing, we should, in the not-so-distant future, be in the top three markets for WPP. We’ve had decent growth rates, of course. The US, UK, China, India and Germany would be the top five markets for WPP.

The reason for this is we have an extremely strong roster of clients and some of these client relationships in India go back many decades; and we’ve been able to go deeper and offer many more services and continue to be their lead partner.