Mr. Arup Bansal – Managing Director, Wavemaker – “we are expecting technology to play an ever increasing role in digital media”

January 19, 2018

Representing Indian entrepreneur community, Mr. Arup Bansal – Managing Director, Wavemaker had a great statement about the hottest topic of Top 100 International Business Style Awards 2018.

Could you please share with us about your present business area?

Wavemaker is a billion dollar-revenue next generation agency that sits at the intersection of media, content and technology. We are a part of GroupM, WPP’s global media investment management company.

What is your business philosophy? What are the advantages/strengths of your company?

We are obsessed with the customer’s purchase journey and is what connects our mission directly to our client’s business challenges. We invented WM Momentum, the world’s most comprehensive study into how people make purchase decisions and have conducted over 375,000 surveys in 70 markets and across more than 30 categories. We are a business that is powered by the creativity and curiosity, united by our PACED values. Our ambition is to become the most distinctive and admired media, content and technology agency in the world.

Could you please share some difficulies that you have to faced with in business, and how you overcomed them?

The key challenges we are facing in the market are: Audience fragmentation, Digital supply chain complication, Management consultants and commoditization of media services.

We are planning to overcome this by mastering and connecting the skills that will shape the future of the industry. We are learning to operate at the intersection of 3 critical places

Media – using our obsession for purchase journey and rich data that momentum brings in and combined that with the insights of mPlatform, we are finding and selecting ways that are effectively addressing the audiences that will deliver growth for our clients

Content – we are precisely identifying where the content and experiences powerfully serve the purchase journey and ensuring that content is curated for the place and platform where it happens

Technology- through technology we will bring the best products and tools available to our people for bring in more productivity. We have improved our ability to use tech to understand audiences better and integrate various sources of data to make it more meaningful. Finally we came up with tech enabled solutions that cut SHORT the purchase journey from awareness to purchase immediately.

Could you name some achievements that both individual and the company have gained in your business? Your contribution to the society?

Arup have led and sustained the transformation of WAVEMAKER Vietnam by setting the objective on making the agency an “agency of choice” focused on 5 pillars – people, client, growth, partnerships and industry.

Purpose inspired by locally-crafted vision “Be the best we can, always”; executed by a people-first strategy. Arup’s “hand-picked champions” led product-transformation in digital/content. Happy clients and creative partners, happier employees and superior product delivered best-in-class performance.

Apart from fuelling business, Arup was recognized by GRPUPM in the ANNUAL EFFIE 2017 award in the Focused on Excellence category.

Arup has been committed to further the knowledge and awareness about the media agency business. There is very little formal education regarding media in Vietnam. As industry leader in media services, under his leadership WAVEMAKER Vietnam took it upon itself to bring this knowledge and awareness about media agency and its business. To this end, WAVEMAKER Vietnam took various initiatives like blogs on brands Vietnam, advertising Vietnam and was speaker at various forums like mobile marketing association, M2: Media and Marketing events, etc.

Your plans, intention for the company’s development in the future?

2018 will be a year of change. We have now stood up to the challenge and our opportunity is in becoming “future makers” centered around integrating media content and technology. We will bring this alive by our obsession with purchase journey which helps us translate consumer insights and behavior into consumer actions. This will be backed by our insights from our proprietary audience management platforms. We are planning to implement 2 strategic shifts in the market:

– Client Centricity- Reignite our growth by aligning our people and solutions with the essential business needs of our clients

– Product Transformation- Transform our product solutions by leveraging & scaling our most valuable, differentiating and future-ready capabilities

Which business areas are you prefer to connect with in Viet Nam market?

Media, Communication, Marketing, Business, Training.

What do you think about the topic “Digital technology & sharing economy” of Top 100 International Business Style Award this year? What are your expectations of the Honor Ceremony of Top 100 International Business Style Awards 2018?

As we enter 2018, digital technology and sharing economy is a very relevant topic. In the last 18 months digital media marketing has come under a lot of pressure due to trust erosion owing to brand safety, ad fraud, digital trading transparency. Things are beginning to settle down and we are expecting technology to play an ever increasing role in digital media.

In the past 10 years, though I have been part of this for only a year, the honor ceremony of Top 100 Business Style Awards 2018 is becoming bigger and stronger. The initiative to recognize business effort in the Vietnam market has given center stage due this this award ceremony. Like always, I am expecting it to be a grand event.

According to Business Style Magazine