WPP Media Leaders Cool the AI Hype and Bet on the Basics

Generative artificial intelligence is supposed to be rewriting advertising from the creative brief down. Yet when three of WPP Media’s senior leaders in India were asked about it on the record, each kept steering the conversation back to less fashionable ground: a cricket tournament, a skills gap, and a marketing discipline most brands still get wrong.

The agency group, rebranded from GroupM in May 2025, now plans close to $60 billion in global media spend a year. Its India bench is not waving AI away; the message is that the technology has settled into daily work while the harder questions stay open, namely how to scale human strategy and how to teach brands the basics. For a sense of scale, India’s sports economy reached $2.13 billion in 2025, and the call on where that money actually performs is still a human one.

The One Live Event India Still Watches Together

Start with the property no media plan in the country can ignore. Vinit Karnik, Managing Director of Content, Sports and Entertainment at WPP Media South Asia, frames the Indian Premier League less as a sports broadcast and more as a national habit that brands rent access to every summer.

A Festival on the Calendar

“IPL is an additional festival in the lives of Indians and Indian families,” Karnik said. “Every summer, it is a calendar-sized, activity-characterised tournament and it just comes together with all the holiday season.” The point underneath the line is simple. No other property gathers the whole country around the same screen at the same time, so brands keep paying for the privilege even as the rate card climbs.

The Reach Brands Cannot Replicate

The numbers explain the loyalty. According to the 2025 India sports sponsorship report, the market has nearly doubled since 2021. Television still carried the larger load that year, but digital grew faster, near 24%, as connected TV (CTV, internet-delivered streaming on a big screen) ad rates climbed about 30%.

• 89% of India’s sports economy now flows to cricket, up from 85% a year earlier.
• Media spends alone account for 51% of total industry value, the single largest contributor.
• ₹4,500 crore (about $540 million) in advertising ran across IPL television and digital feeds in 2025, a jump of roughly 50% year on year.

That growth held even after the Online Gaming Act of 2025 pushed real-money and fantasy gaming brands out of mainstream sports advertising, erasing an estimated ₹1,500 crore to ₹2,000 crore in annual league-linked spend. New categories simply filled the hole, which tells you how much demand sits behind the tournament.

AI Has Moved Into the Daily Workflow

Where Karnik defends a live asset, Deepa Jatkar deals in the machines reshaping how that asset gets sold. As India Lead for WPP OpenDoor, the group’s dedicated client practice built around Amazon, she watches AI move from demo to default.

From Pitch Deck to Production Line

“There are workflows in which AI now sits as a very integral part,” Jatkar said. “It is not just something which is shown on a slide or a pitch presentation.” The industry data backs the shift. The trade body’s 2025 advertising data benchmark describes agencies entering a “run” phase, with 72% of marketers now naming generative AI the most important consumer trend of the year. Live experiments such as the recent ChatGPT advertising pilots run through agency partners show how fast the plumbing is being laid.

The Human-at-Scale Gap

The unsolved part sits one level up, in judgment. “What is not being understood is how to power AI with human intelligence at scale,” Jatkar said. “When you have to create an ad for five cohorts who all think differently and are in different parts of India, and then scale that, everyone is still trying to figure out the best way.” The block is partly people. McKinsey’s research on enterprise AI adoption finds most firms strong on automating production yet stuck on the strategy layer, and surveys put the skills shortage at the heart of it, with only 39% of agencies saying they have meaningfully integrated AI into daily operations.

If you do not know it, you are living under a rock. But it is not a magic wand.

That was Jatkar’s verdict on the technology, delivered without the usual hedging. She gives the picture two years to clarify, a window worth marking on the calendar.

Performance Marketing’s Maturity Divide

The third leader draws a sharper line, this one between brands that understand performance marketing and brands that only think they do. Gurpreet Singh, Head of Performance at WPP Media India, says the split is wide and easy to spot.

The advanced end is crowded with consumer sectors that have done the work. “These sectors are utilising first party data, automation and full funnel marketing,” Singh said of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), e-commerce and travel brands. “It is an absolute ROAS they are looking for and hence it becomes very sophisticated for them.” Return on ad spend (ROAS, the revenue earned for every rupee of media) is the metric they build around, and in practice the mature operators share a few habits:

• They run campaigns on first-party data they own, not borrowed audience proxies.
• They automate bidding and creative versioning across the full funnel, from awareness to checkout.
• They judge every rupee against a hard return target rather than raw reach.

The rest are still finding the floor. “A lot of different players are jumping in but they do not have that maturity,” Singh said. “They largely rely on reach and frequency and need to be hand-held to understand that performance marketing is not just boosting a post and hoping something good will happen.” The platforms are not waiting for them; AI ad engines such as AppLovin’s Axon optimisation platform are automating the tuning that laggards still do by guesswork.

Three Verdicts, One Through-Line

Put the three views side by side and a single argument emerges. Each leader is pushing back, gently, against the idea that the newest tool automatically wins.

The through-line is that capability is becoming cheap while judgment stays scarce. AI lowers the cost of making the ad; it does not yet lower the cost of deciding what the ad should say to five different audiences. A live crowd of hundreds of millions is rare, and the skill to use it well is rarer still.

What WPP Media Is Betting On

The rebrand from GroupM to WPP Media in May 2025 was not cosmetic. The group folded its separate media agencies into one structure and built a five-year plan around what it calls predictive performance, the use of AI and pooled data to plan and measure campaigns across platforms.

Its WPP Open agentic marketing platform is the engine, pitched as a single workspace that strings strategy, creative and media together with AI agents. The bet behind all of it is that AI becomes the baseline every agency runs on.

If that holds, the edge has to come from somewhere else: the data a firm owns, the live properties it can lock up, and the strategists who decide what the machines produce. That is why all three leaders, asked about technology, answered with fundamentals.

Jatkar gives it 24 months. If the next two years prove AI can carry strategy as cleanly as it now carries production, the agency’s headcount math changes fast and that $60 billion in media spend gets cheaper to deliver. If it cannot, the firms that kept their strategists, their first-party data and their grip on the one tournament India watches together will be the ones still setting the price.