“We are open for acquisitions everywhere, including India, for talent and capability,” WPP chief AI officer and Satalia CEO Daniel Hulme told ET. “WPP has a history of growing strategically through acquisitions. We (Satalia) joined WPP because they know how to look after startups and entrepreneurs.”
Hulme also said India has incredible talent in both creativity and technology. “The WPP workforce here is not just strong in creativity but also in technology. We are going to see greater growth in those two areas and better collaboration between those two parts,” he added.
Around 10% of WPP’s India workforce comes from a tech background. The company has 11,000 employees in the country across multiple agencies.
In August 2021, WPP acquired Satalia, a technology company offering market-leading AI solutions, to bolster its capabilities in experience, commerce and technology.”The spirit of acquisition for WPP was to augment capability in solving problems across the supply chains. The WPP supply chain includes the creation of content, production and dissemination. Each part of that process requires a different type of AI,” he said.According to industry reports, the AI boom has had an impact on the advertising and marketing industries since agencies can now make data-driven decisions that promote the growth of their clients’ businesses.There is a lot of excitement around generative AI since it will allow ad and marketing companies to come up with content ideas and push that content across multiple channels to maximise desired success criteria.
“Generative AI allows us to create text, sound and image content, which will extend to video soon. It will allow us to speed up the process of ideation and production. We can also use generative AI to understand how audiences perceive content,” Hulme said.
Although generative AI is boosting efficiency in the advertising sector, some people are also concerned about data privacy and intellectual property infringement.
To tackle the issue of data privacy, WPP is building infrastructure to keep the data safe.
“The first concern that brands have is that if you train these models with your own data, that data then becomes available to other people. We are building walled gardens to ensure that that data is safe and secure,” Hulme said.
On tackling copyright infringement, Hulme said the company makes sure that it uses only those models that can demonstrate the provenance of that data, particularly for production-grade content.
A Forrester analysis predicts that by 2030, AI will replace 7.5% of the workforce at US advertising companies. Hulme, however, is confident that AI will free advertising specialists from mundane tasks so they can focus on more creative and strategic work.
