Collaboration is the core ingredient to achieve excellence: Niraj Ruparel, GroupM

As technology evolves with each passing day, there is a lot to catch up on for marketers. Niraj Ruparel, Head Of Mobile & Emerging Tech - GroupM India Emerging Tech Lead - WPP India, believes that learning from each other is the way forward. "The era that we are leading into is the era of collaboration," he averred.

This year the WPP Commerce event, held in Mumbai on Wednesday also saw winners of the WPP Ignite Awards being felicitated. The awards recognised creative and tech brilliance across WPP. The inaugural awards received over 250 entries.

Ruparel won the Spark, an individual award which was given to the person who drives creative and tech excellence across WPP companies through collaborative efforts. He said he was surprised to win this award and it is a result of teamwork.

Ruparel has built an extended reality studio in which to try out these ideas. And he coordinates a 110-strong team from across the WPP network that has already created close to 80 activations and workshops.

At the event, this team set up a place where one could experience new-age emerging tech interventions on commerce. The event was attended by more than 200 brands.

Ruparel said that he wanted to build a team that will cater to each need of the brand under one umbrella. He said, “Collaboration is the core ingredient to achieve excellence. We have a team of young and hungry-for-learning people who loves to come up with new creative solutions intertwined with technology.”

Speaking on building a team that collaborates technology with creativity, Ruparel, said, “When you talk of collaboration, dial up the fact, there are so many diverse areas of expertise and knowledge involved now – VR, AR, virtual worlds, web3, gaming, and all the others – that it is the power of WPP to convene talent, expertise, and partners that make up to be able to do these amazing things.”

He shared that there is a lot of experimentation and learning as a result of these collaborative sessions – trial and error is celebrated and very much part of the process. “And when the results are as trailblazing as the data-driven campaign for Cadbury, you know the system is working”, he added.

Media planning which is an integral part of any advertising campaign as well as making the brand most visible has seen some major changes over the years with digital space coming into existence. Ruparel said that he wants his team to upskill themselves technologically and uplift creative minds thereby transforming them into creative technologists who will be ‘The Future Team.”

The team had creatively come up with solutions for many brands by joining hands with emerging technology. While Shah Rukh Khan - My Ad was a big hit with purpose-driven storytelling amalgamated with technology, Ruparel shared more such campaigns that were a part of the team’s creativity.

Here are a few that he mentioned:

Mindshare India conceptualises electric vehicle launch on metaverse for Volvo. Mindshare collaborated with other WPP agencies including Hogarth, Yonder, Grey, and Genesis BCW to deliver Volvoverse, to efficiently access specialist companies in the group to achieve their objectives with a single point of contact.

Sharing an AR + OOH + Metaverse integration for Mondelēz Cadbury silk, Ruparel said that it created a large impact. "This drove massive headlines globally," Ruparel stated.

"Here’s how we made our Cadbury ad also an ad for hundreds of small local businesses across the country. That’s why we called it ‘Not Just A Cadbury Ad.'"

GSK ENOLAND - Metaverse use case on Inclusion & Diversity

"We got all top food influencers from all over India to come together on this platform - used food as the unifier across our Indian diverse culture," he said.

ENO marks 50 years in India with metaverse stand-up comedy show

Ageas Federal Life Insurance With WPP India created an 11-year-old Sachin Tendulkar, the cricket legend, by using AI Video Regeneration Tech.

The process involved 4 months of AI training and dozens of technical and artistic experts across India and Spain.

No photographs or videos of young Sachin existed, so the team performed painstaking archival research to find AI training material.