Karthik Nagarajan steps down as CEO of WPP Production India

CHENNAI: Karthik Nagarajan is calling time on his innings at WPP Production, stepping away from the CEO chair after three and a half transformational years at the helm in India. It is a departure that closes out one of the more eventful chapters in the Hogarth turned WPP Production story, one Nagarajan himself credits almost entirely to his team, describing them as magicians at the confluence of craft and technology who are, in his words, barely getting started.

The numbers back the sentiment. Under Nagarajan, WPP Production tripled in size within three years, a pivot built squarely around embedding AI into the business while staying true to its role as a trusted content and production partner to clients. That is no small turnaround for an organisation navigating the messy, fast moving collision of automation and creativity that has upended production houses globally.

Nagarajan’s exit caps a career built almost entirely on spotting inflection points before the rest of the industry caught on. At GroupM, he built branded content into one of the agency’s fastest growing profit centres, and before that, as chief content officer at Wavemaker, drove disruptive growth across sports, digital, experiential and content businesses, forging partnerships with the likes of Banijay Asia to create original content for Myntra. Earlier still, as practice head for content and social media at GroupM, he pioneered India’s first branded content upfront event, Brew, and built products including the GroupM Command Center and RADAR, a rural insights data platform well ahead of its time.

His credentials as a social media pioneer run deeper still. Nagarajan built GroupM’s social media practice into India’s largest by revenue, growing it over 100 per cent year on year for four straight years, and made GroupM the first Indian agency to offer a social listening product. Before that, at NM Incite, the Nielsen McKinsey joint venture, he launched Buzzmetrics, India’s first social listening product, and at Nielsen itself introduced AdRelevance and AdEffectiveness, the country’s first digital advertising measurement tools, alongside a strategic Facebook partnership that brought Brandlift to Indian advertisers.

Beyond the corner office, Nagarajan hosts the Filter Koffee Podcast, now in its seventh year, and sits on the boards of I-COM Global and the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies. As he moves on from WPP Production, the industry will be watching closely for his next act, given a track record of building categories, not just businesses.