India is our most creative market globally: Toby Jenner, Wavemaker

A few weeks ago, WPP's decision to bring together two of its agencies – VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson – raised many questions about the effectiveness of mergers. Wavemaker, on the other hand, is a glowing example of a very successful merger carried out by the same holding company a few years ago.

Toby Jenner, Global CEO of Wavemaker, spoke to Neeta Nair during his first India visit post the pandemic. He spoke about India’s steady rise to the top three growth markets of Wavemaker and treading on steady ground despite WPP’s surprise revenue decline in Q3. Jenner also explained why India was the media agency network’s most creative market globally.

Excerpts from the conversation:

What is the secret ingredient for a great merger? And today, when you look back, would you say you've achieved much more as Wavemaker than what MEC or Maxus could have?

I joined Wavemaker post-merger. So, a lot of the challenging elements of putting a merger together had already been done. What I had the opportunity to do, while working with some amazing people in the organisation, was to really just figure out what are the things we want to keep in the ‘new’ Wavemaker and what are the things we want to throw away; understand what are the decisions we need to take today and what can be taken once we are down that path.

I think we took a lot of tough decisions straight away. We reduced the size of the leadership team, from 23 to 12. We decided to build a very clear narrative around this idea of ‘positive provocation’. We built a modular approach to how we plan rather than a sequential one, which many clients and agencies adhere to. As we went into a pandemic, being able to dive deep into different parts of that modularity benefited our clients. I wanted to create an attitude which empowered our people to have a point of view on our client's business rather than just take orders and book media. That was the genesis behind the idea of ‘positive provocation’. In short, making tough decisions on the big issues, building a great team and having a very clear proposition of what you want to stand for – these three things have stood us in really good stead.

WPP has suffered a surprise Q3 decline in 2023 with revenue down 1.8% from £3.6bn in Q3 2022. Mark Read spoke about how GroupM was impacted largely because technology clients were cautious about their spends. How has Wavemaker fared in this particular quarter?

I am looking at it from a full-year lens where I feel GroupM will grow significantly. We have a number of large tech businesses, but we'll still see significant growth on very, very large other businesses. We represent one in three ads around the world and dollars invested. So, any kind of growth that you see on that scale is equal to many millions of dollars. Wavemaker is a cornerstone and we have underpinned that along with our sister agencies. So, we'll see good growth this year.

How much are you estimating that Wavemaker will grow by in 2023? H1 after all has been outstanding for you with regard to New Business Wins, with the agency topping the COMvergence ranking both globally and in India specifically.

Well, we've got six weeks to go. We're currently 240 million dollars ahead of number two. So, I've got my fingers and toes crossed as well, that we'll finish the year as number one and that will obviously be of more impact next year, as a springboard for growth rather than this year. But this year looks good for us.

What are the new avenues for growth for the agency network globally, and specifically India?

Some of the things we've discussed with Ajay Gupte and the team here are that we've been optimising media, audiences and platforms since forever, and now we ought to have a strong role to play in optimising content on those platforms. We've built some good resourcing capabilities with George Kovoor coming in from Ogilvy to help us in that area. I also feel we've got an opportunity in performance, commerce and influencer marketing. I would love to see us build further in those areas. We have a very strong base in India, which is certainly one of our best-performing markets in the world. So, anything we do is off a high base. But I think that the idea of social commerce and influencer marketing coming together should really see us power some clients' performance and drive growth in sellers.

Last year when you spoke to IMPACT, you said three very interesting things — 1) APAC market can lead to double-digit growth for Wavemaker. 2) India can lead that growth in APAC for Wavemaker. 3) India has the potential to become the highest-growing market of Wavemaker globally. In the past year, how much of that has already happened?

I would say I have got two out of three right a year later. So, India is definitely leading growth for Wavemaker around the world. I'm sure there are some smaller markets with higher growth, but of our top 10 markets, India absolutely is growing at the highest percentage, so it is fantastic. APAC has bounced back in the past six months of this year and India in particular has powered a lot of that. So, I'm thrilled by that. I think India will become one of our top three markets, either this year or next year. We'll see how the numbers pan out for the next couple of weeks, but then next year I certainly see it being in the top three from the perspective of growth that we're expecting in the business. So, I think my predictions were worryingly accurate for once.

Wavemaker has always placed innovation at the heart of what it does, the Shah Rukh Khan ad for Mondelez last year was globally Wavemaker’s only Titanium win, and this year the same campaign was the only Grand Prix win at Cannes Lions (for Creative Effectiveness). How would you rank Wavemaker India when compared to your other markets on ‘media creativity’?

India is probably our most creative market. I think the market, as a whole, does two things very well – humour and purpose. And both these things land very well in Cannes. So, I think from a media creativity perspective, having those two components infused into the work that you do, really leads the charge. So, India I would say is probably our most creative market globally. 

Watch the full conversation here: