 Good afternoon. I have with me today Mr. Stuart Bowden, Global Chief Strategy and Product Officer at WaveMaker. Thank you Stuart for taking the time out. Stuart, firstly, when you took over as a Global Chief Strategy and Product Officer in 2021, your job profile read as this, to ensure clear communication, continuity and free flowing provocation between strategy where ideas are created and product where ideas are converted into growth for the agency's client. That's quite a read, but WaveMaker has had an impressive run since then. So what have you done right? Oh, well, yes, I think we have built the right tools and the right training to be able to bring positive provocation to our clients. It hasn't been an easy few years for many businesses, for many industry sectors. And I think as they start to think forward about how they uncover growth, how they find new audiences, how they create more value, they know they need to do things differently. And so our ability to bring them fresh data, fresh perspectives, fresh audience opportunities, I think, is critical to our mutual success. Stuart, now everywhere we go today, it's the 360 degrees consumer journey and life cycle is what is discussed. But when we go back a few years, WaveMaker with you as the driving force was an early adopter in making the consumer journey central to the way the agency and the brands operate. What have been the key learnings and what have been the implementations, any things that you've implemented? I'd like to take credit for our focus on journeys, but I think it's almost 14 years now that the agency has been really investing in understanding how consumers navigate paths to purchase and the foundational data for that is proprietary research that we've been carrying out annually. I think we're close to 1.4 million individual interviews that we've gathered over that time in some detail, 45 minute interview, we try and understand exactly what people thought they were going to do and the journey that they took through to purchase. Obviously over the last four or five years that journey and that purchase has become fully digitized and more complicated and so we've had to work quite hard to bring in fresh data sources and integrate them into the way that we research and think about customer journey planning. So the team have been working quite hard to bring in live platform data to bring in secondary research data sources and integrate them into our provocative planning process so that when we talk to clients we can see right the way through to the retail aspects of the funnel and we can really understand what that whole paid-owned-earned experience has been like for an individual consumer. You used the word complicated. Now with a consumer present across so many platforms and basically we live in an omni-channel environment, how do you ensure a consistent performing, sorry consistent communication and messaging across platforms? Yeah, I think it's such a challenge for marketers in particular I think. Planning across platforms is relatively straightforward from an investment point of view. We can bring the right modelling, the right analytics and the right data to help solve that question about how we budget and how we move consumers through that journey. I think executing consistently for clients themselves is quite difficult. They probably have separate agencies that work in different parts of the funnel, different parts of their own business perhaps work with PR, work with onsite, work with retail and work with advertising. So I think it's an integration task and almost an organisational redesign task as much as it's a technical challenge and obviously I think organisational challenges are usually harder to fix than technical challenges. Mindset? Yeah, I think it is mindset. I think organisations aren't used to integrated thinking, most organisations are structured into departments or into divisions. Those divisions have their own P&L and their own leadership and sometimes unpicking some of those tensions inside our organisations or in client organisations is the hardest part of the task. But I think if the business really wants to get it right and increasingly clients and agencies are understanding they have to get this right, they have to give a consistent experience across all of their touch points with the consumer if they really want to take them through to purchase. If the wills there inside the business then I think we're seeing clients restructure around that. Just a follow-up question to what you said. Everybody is operating primarily in silos and integration is the way forward. So any example you can share where this has been done and how it has worked out? I think we try and support it by building platforms that lots of different clients can join us to co-work on. So inside the WaveMaker business we launched the WaveMaker OS about three years ago now which is a single home for the 9000 WaveMaker people. All of our tools and our data systems are available there. All client projects are open to people who work on that client around the network and I think that first step to democratising data and democratising access to what's happening is critical. We're just launching WPP Open this year which is a client specific version so that different clients from different divisions in their own business can get a better understanding about all the work that WPP is doing on their behalf because if you can't see the information it's very hard to integrate. Just if you could just elaborate a little bit more on any of your upcoming or current or recent proprietary tools which we've launched which helps clients drive growth and engagement. We've got a very interesting roadmap through the end of this year into 2024. We're really trying to drill down into more MMM driven thinking across the whole funnel. I think we know that it's a difficult time for marketers at the moment. We know that efficiency and effectiveness are increasingly important and we're automating the collection and the modelling of sales data through the funnel and making that an integral part of our planning process so that every dollar that's being planned is being given the same attention based on its business effect as performance media would do and I think that would be one of the big trends is how do people think about their brand media with the same care and attention and optimisation mindset that they think about lower funnel conversion work. We're also in an era where there's constant disruption. Every six months you hear this sub as you would say there's a new technology which is taking over, people are talking about this it's kind of the spotlight syndrome. On the other side, a lot of people also say that the consumer is always at the top of, he's always in the front and the brand and the agency is always trying to catch up when it comes to technology. In this situation, how do you keep the agency and the client up to speed with the way the consumer is evolving at such a rapid pace? Thankfully we've got some amazing strategists and insight teams right the way across the WaveMaker network and between us we have I think a broad enough set of capabilities and skills to be able to respond across AI to platform innovations to retail to different forms of media planning capability. I think it's impossible for any one person to really have enough deep insight to be able to either build product or work with clients across all of those areas so I think diversifying our talent, diversifying their skillset diversifying their understanding of cultures and communities so that we're really able to bring enough breadth of thinking to clients is a really important part about how we try and organize our community. Also a word on the in what are you going to be your focus areas looking ahead and WaveMaker's investment where are you where is the money going in terms of proprietary tools if you could just give us an idea. Absolutely. We're very focused on how we can take clients data and how we can take our first party data and start to model those more effectively with second and third party data owners to give more choices really about how we invest clients budgets backed by data as opposed to backed by panel data or sales. That's obviously a very time consuming budget consuming exercise to build and evolve and train those platforms I think that will be the main focus both of WaveMaker but also of GroupM over the next 12 or 24 months is really continuing to build out that platform make sure it works globally and make sure that we're giving all of our people access to the right data to help them do the work with clients. Finally coming to your Indian team a word on them and they've had some impressive wins in the recent past what do you believe sets apart the Indian team from the competition or even from the other networks in your organization? You've met the team at a business there it's a brilliant leadership group Ajay is a fantastic leader and he brings in superb talents, superb specialists strategy to talent I'm delighted that our CSO in the market Premchit Soda is now being moved on to becoming our global head of analytics we've just hired a new Chief Creator Officer there so it's absolutely the spirit inside that group is unstoppable you sense it when you go into the office you can feel it when they're with their clients and I think when you're turning up to work every day with that talent and that energy then you're going to win year after year and that's just what they've done Last year was a phenomenal leader for WaveMaker in India how are they going to keep up with the pace? What's been your, is there any specific goal that you've given them for this year? I'm sure they're going to find a way I think they are doubling down on creativity and they're doubling down on analytics and those are the two power drivers of our business and our industry if we're consistently smarter and if we're consistently more creative in our problem solving we're always going to be a partner that clients will want to come and work with Finally you mentioned Indian creativity is there anything you believe from India that could travel across the world to the other markets in your network or even in terms of talent do you believe that that can also travel across something you've seen from India in terms of people, in terms of the work they've done 100% we probably show more work from our Indian team around the network than from any other market internally and to clients I particularly love the way that they keep doubling down on areas of core competence and specialism so they've got a great centre of excellence around generative AI and how data works into that and they've gone again and again in that area there is some great work for Centrefresh in February this year some on-pack QR generative voice AI and I think that capability having a demonstrable centre of excellence with a real body of work to back up our claims is really important and the rest of our network look at that capability and look at the success that the Indian team had deploying it for clients and I think it inspires everybody to want to get to that level of expertise and that level of confidence Thank you so much Stuart for your time it was lovely meeting you