DS Group launches DCODE 2.0 with WPP Media and MICA

NOIDA: Digital marketing playbooks rarely arrive with this much firepower behind them. DS Group, the FMCG conglomerate best known for Rajnigandha and Catch, has teamed up with WPP Media and MICA to launch DCODE 2.0, a substantially expanded second edition of its digital marketing guide. The pitch is simple and rather timely, artificial intelligence has stopped being a bolt-on curiosity and has become the operating system of modern marketing, and this playbook wants to prove it.

Unlike its first edition, DCODE 2.0 refuses to treat AI as a standalone chapter. Instead it threads AI across search, paid media, performance marketing, and content and creative, reflecting how thoroughly the technology has embedded itself into the marketer’s daily toolkit. That is a sensible call. Marketers do not experience AI in silos, they experience it everywhere at once, and a playbook that mirrors that reality is doing its job properly.

The real upgrade, though, is the addition of MICA, the Mudra Institute of Communications in Ahmedabad. Pairing DS Group’s corporate weight and WPP Media’s industry muscle with MICA’s academic rigour gives the playbook a credibility that pure practitioner guides often lack. It is not just about what works, it is about why it works, and that dual lens should make DCODE 2.0 useful to students and senior marketers alike. The Paid, Owned and Earned framework has also been refreshed to be more intuitive, and the whole document has been reorganised for easier use, a signal that this is meant to be read and applied, not filed away.

Rajeev Jain, senior vice president, corporate marketing at DS Group, called it an effort to translate a fast-moving transformation into practical knowledge marketers can actually use. Prasanth Kumar, chief executive of WPP Media, South Asia, went further, arguing that marketing is shifting from fragmented channels to a connected, intelligent ecosystem, and that AI’s real value lies in how well it is stitched across the entire consumer journey rather than bolted onto one part of it. Jaya Deoras Deshmukh, director and chief executive of MICA, added a more philosophical note, describing an emerging age of imagination in which marketers move from merely discovering demand to actively creating it.

The numbers back up the urgency. India’s total advertising revenue is projected to grow by 9.7 per cent in 2026 to Rs 2,01,891 crore, an incremental addition of Rs 17,844 crore over 2025, according to the TYNY 2025 report by WPP Media. Digital already accounts for 68.1 per cent of that pie, with commerce-led advertising the fastest-growing segment at 24.2 per cent, powered by retail media, quick commerce and social commerce. Other digital channels are set to grow 11.1 per cent, out-of-home and cinema 8.9 per cent, television a modest 3.1 per cent aided by connected TV, and audio 1.5 per cent on the back of streaming. AI-powered search, voice and agentic discovery round things off with 8 per cent growth, a tidy confirmation that the playbook’s central bet is not misplaced.

DCODE 2.0 will be available as an open-access resource, aimed at corporate and agency marketing teams, media planners, students and academics alike. For an industry often accused of chasing buzzwords over substance, a playbook that pairs boardroom pragmatism with classroom rigour looks like exactly the corrective it needs.