India could emerge as Wavemaker’s third-largest market, says exec

The India arm of global media agency Wavemaker has added new business worth ?1,750 crores in the first six months of the year at a time when the firm is investing heavily in building capabilities in emerging areas like tech, data, and content, a top company official said.

“We won ?700 crore worth of new businesses in 2022. This year, our new business wins are almost 2. 5 times as many as last year,” Wavemaker South Asia CEO Ajay Gupte told ET.

Some of the new clients onboarded by the agency include Reckitt Benckiser, Star Health Insurance, Abhi Bus, and Havmor, among others. The agency also serves clients like Mondelez, L’Oreal, Perfetti Van Melle, and Tata Consumer Products.

Gupte said the media agency has been heavily investing in data, technology, and content in the last few years. He added that 30-35% of Wavemaker India’s employees are involved in these three areas.

“At least 90% of the people we hired in the last year are in transformation areas,” Gupte said, adding that media planning continues to be the core of the agency. He also said GroupM has the lowest attrition rate in the media agency ecosystem, and within that, Wavemaker has the lowest attrition rate.Wavemaker India, which has 800 employees across five offices, is part of GroupM, the media investment arm of advertising behemoth WPP.Davies claimed that due to the aggressive compensation packages offered by these businesses, media agencies have been losing talent to tech behemoths like Meta, Google, and Amazon.

“Some of that talent has come back because they have very narrow roles in those companies, whereas in agencies you have a lot more latitude to work across various things,” Davies stated.

He also stated that the agency has set a global target of earning 25% of its revenue from diversified services.

“The media agency business is in good shape. We started the year with a $4.5 billion pipeline, which is all the live pitches we have in the world,” Davies said.

The ad veteran said India is one of the most important markets for Wavemaker both strategically and commercially due to its demographics and the fact that there is a massive opportunity to build new brands.