Aiming to capitalise on the entrepreneurial spirit of Indian start-ups, advertising conglomerate WPP is to house new-age firms at its two co-location campuses in India ― Mumbai and Gurugram. The world’s largest advertising and communication group is looking to provide platforms for change in India, with tech-agile and integrated teams powering the road ahead.

India has been “one of the standout markets for WPP in the past year, delivering 10 per cent growth”, according to Mark Read, CEO of WPP.

“India today, by revenue, is our fifth-largest market globally. Entering the top-5 rank is an important milestone,” Read said, at his first media interaction within WPP’s Mumbai campus.

Further highlighting the importance, he added India is also the first market, apart from London and New York, to host WPP’s international meetings. WPP’s global executive committee leaders are in the city to celebrate WPP’s campus inauguration in Mumbai.

Read insisted India is well-placed with its "technology overdrive" to deliver on WPP’s notion of creativity, which he termed is its “secret sauce”.

“WPP is as much a technology company as it is a creative company and that’s really critical to our growth in the future. India’s role as a technology, production and media hub is well-known and we are now looking to incorporate and distil the creativity here, powered by technology, to meet the demands of the marketplace,” he added.

Noting that technology is rapidly reshaping the marketplace and presenting challenges, the CEO said WPP is adapting at speed to capture the many opportunities.

CVL Srinivas, WPP’s Country Manager for India, said, “One of the things that the group was not very well known for was the data and technology prowess that we have in India, thanks to all the capability centres of global delivery. We used to call them delivery hubs earlier. We are now calling them capability centres, which are across different areas of the value chain ranging from marketing, automation to analytics, quantam production to performance marketing, etc.”

WPP’s India office will look to leverage the capability centres that have been built over the years.

Alluding to the focus areas at WPP, Srinivas said, “Client centricity is foremost, followed by capability building with data and technology. Building a strong talent culture and agenda for the market and how to make ourselves more efficient and nimble are also high on the ranks.”

The Innovation Hub on the second floor of WPP’s Mumbai campus will now be extended to start-ups, which will be allowed to sit inside the campus. Apart from providing brainstorming sessions to the different divisions of WPP spread across the campus’ eight floors, the start-up connect programme “or partner programme will ensure a lot of learnings and improvement in skills sets”, said Srinivas, “given that talent and culture are important parts of WPP’s overall strategy”.

He added the group was in the midst of developing the guidelines to initiate the move. Along with the 50-seater hub in Mumbai, WPP is to flag off its second campus in Gurugram by the end of this year, which will also encapsulate and house start-ups. The hubs are intended to drive adoption of new technology.

The advertising behemoth, which has cornered 50 per cent market share in the media and advertising industry, recently won the global mandate for Intel, which spends around $1.4 billion in advertising and marketing every year.

Reiterating the strategy and streamlined structure at WPP, the CEO said it incorporates a simpler, agile conglomerate that is designed to capture opportunities of a changing marketplace. He described WPP’s approach as a “radical evolution”, with the organisation taking decisive action and implementing change even as it continues to evolve.

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