When WPP Media unveiled its annual This Year Next Year report on the state of the advertising industry, the spotlight extended beyond expenditure forecasts to artificial intelligence, signalling a shift in focus for the agency network.
At the presentation of the report at its suburban Mumbai office last week, discussions were dominated by AI, the technology reshaping businesses worldwide. Of the 10 key trends expected to influence Indian advertising, three centred on AI, including the rise of an agentic ecosystem, the evolution of search advertising and the use of AI to target audiences more precisely.
Upali Nag Kumar, president, strategy at WPP Media, stated during a press briefing, according to a report by Mint, that professionals no longer only need to learn how to use AI tools but must become orchestrators of them.
As AI tools disrupt multiple industries, network agencies are also adapting, with advertisers increasingly relying on AI not only for creative generation but also for market research and end-to-end campaign management. Investors have responded to the shift, with shares of WPP Plc declining more than 60% over the past 12 months, while rival Publicis Groupe has seen its shares fall nearly 28% over the same period.
Two other competitors, Omnicom and Interpublic Group, merged late last year to counter rising competition from technology companies, particularly AI platforms. Meanwhile, consumer AI applications have been expanding in India through partnerships. This week, OpenAI announced search partnerships with streaming platform JioHotstar and online travel aggregator ixigo, Mint reported.
Reflecting the shift, WPP Media has reclassified advertising channels for the first time. Digital advertising now includes digital extensions of traditional media such as streaming platforms of television channels, audio streaming applications and online versions of print publications. Search, increasingly disrupted by AI chatbots, has been reclassified as intelligence, while traditional physical formats such as billboards and cinema trailers fall under location advertising.
The revised framework offers a new lens on global advertising. More than 57% of global advertising was driven by content, and over 80% of all global advertising categories, including content, originated from digital channels, including digital extensions of traditional formats such as television, print and audio.
Driven by growth of more than 10% in intelligence and over 9% in commerce, global advertising revenue rose 8.8% in 2025 to nearly $1.2 trillion, excluding US political advertising, according to the WPP report. It is projected to grow a further 7.1% this year.
India, however, outperformed global markets, with advertising expenditure rising 9.2% to ₹1.84 trillion, led by a 24% surge in commerce advertising, including e-commerce applications, financial portals and online travel aggregators. Unlike global trends, all major advertising channels in India posted growth in 2025, including print and audio, which grew 4.4% and 1.5% respectively. Globally, print declined by more than 5%, while audio remained nearly flat.
WPP stated that India is expected to grow 9.7% in 2026, surpass ₹2 trillion in advertising spend and outpace mature markets such as the US and UK. According to the report, only Brazil is projected to grow faster at 14.4% this year.
Despite robust expansion, advertising expenditure accounts for just 0.5% of India’s GDP, marginally higher than 2020 levels, compared with 1–1.5% in mature markets across Europe and North America.
Prasanth Kumar, chief executive officer, South Asia at WPP Media, told Mint that AI now informs three key priorities for agency networks: generating and incorporating insights, creating advertisements and targeting audiences, and enhancing measurement and learning processes.
Addressing concerns over the relevance of traditional network agencies, Kumar stated that clients continue to seek real-time speed and the ability to course-correct campaigns while they are live. He informed that broader and deeper insights would enhance the ability to deploy budgets effectively and generate returns, with AI activation becoming central to that process.
Shekhar Banerjee, president of client solutions at WPP Media, told Mint that organisations with greater access to data and the ability to adapt behaviour would hold an advantage, noting that those with first-mover advantage or extensive repositories of information are likely to succeed.
The report underscored that although India’s advertising market has outpaced global peers in 2025 and is expected to maintain momentum, AI remains at the core of industry discussions.
Vishal Jacob, president of Choreograph South Asia, WPP Media’s data and technology arm, stated that tasks assigned to AI agents have grown significantly more complex over the past few months. He explained that increasingly, multiple agents must collaborate to complete a task, describing this as an agentic ecosystem. Jacob added that WPP Media has been deploying such ecosystems, including a deep researcher, to conduct market research and address complex client queries relating to consumer behaviour and category dynamics.
First Published on February 22, 2026, 13:00:21 IST
