As an organisation, it feels as though Wavemaker stood its ground in 2022: it again finished third for new business among media agencies, has roughly the same number of people, and an average turnover rate. On the whole, that’s not a bad thing as it continues to enjoy a solid grade among media agencies. 

While it would be nice to see more ‘pop’ in its innovation and client work, it’s careful to first take care of client needs. It did so this year by making strides in addressable media and by advising brands on how they could grow in a downturn through an exceptional thought leadership series. That probably isn’t enough to keep up in the fast-paced digital media world, hence some slight erosion in the score.

Category 2022 2021 Business B B+ Innovation B- B+ DEI and sustainability B- B- Creativity and effectiveness B B Management B B *2021 scores adjusted to new numeric scale. Read about the grading methodology

Business (B)

Wavemaker had another good year for business in 2022, but at a slower pace than the stellar growth rates seen the previous year. The GroupM agency once again finished third in the APAC Media new business league table, a good result.  But new billings growth slowed, as did the overall number of wins from 127 to 96, contributing to the downgrade from last year.   

The agency has been looking to win more regional business off its local relationships and succeeded in 2022 with big clients like Mondelez extending their remit from India and ANZ to Southeast Asia and Danone, where its Indonesia team played a strong role in winning a global remit, including expanded duties across Southeast Asia. There were multi-market wins too, including Under Armour, Audible and two other well-known new economy clients. 

On the other hand, there were significant losses as well, most notably its five-year relationship with ITC in India to Mediabrands. While Wavemaker hung onto L’Oreal in Indonesia and Philippines, it lost Malaysia and performance duties in Thailand to Publicis Media. Through no fault of its own (that we know of), Wavemaker’s work for Tiffany & Co was shifted to L’Atelier, GroupM’s specialist agency for LVMH. 

Overall, Wavemaker’s mix of local, regional and global clients and an uptick in diversified services (like its transformation work with Colgate-Palmolive to reshape its media management) helped the agency realise moderate growth in 2022. Despite the loss of ITC, India’s performance has been exceptional for Wavemaker, alongside Indonesia. This was important in a year when its key China market was challenged, and limited operations in the rest of North Asia remained sluggish.   

Innovation (B-)

The biggest boost to Wavemaker’s technology capabilities in APAC was in setting up its addressable practice hub in Jakarta, working in partnership with WPP production agency Hogarth. The new team of 10 is one of four hubs globally and builds off of previous client work and pilot projects in the region. It doesn’t sound sexy, but since the agency predicts 75% of all media will be addressable by 2025, it’s critical to have a dedicated team to bring key clients into the highly complex ecosystem while keeping up with more advanced media clients in this regard, such as Mondelez. Select gains we’ve seen (not for publication, sorry) in client sales and click-through rates look impressive, though the work is more likely to build incremental returns for clients over time.  

Unique to APAC is the agency's work on Front, its influencer service offering in China, which was launched in 2021 but fully taken to clients in 2022. The Chinese performance team works with clients to get the best results from influencers and social media platforms, including via a special partnership with Douyin data platform, Yuntu.  

Wavemaker’s work with clients (see Xiaohongshu below) via campaigns and innovation workshops (as with L’Oreal in Thailand) are a better gauge of its innovative role in helping brands than new product development. Nonetheless, much of the work highlighted in this section is work major media agencies are expected to be developing, so the grade reflects a good, but not exceptional score.  

DEI & Sustainability (B-)

With 62% of Wavemaker’s permanent staff female, the agency is continuing to promote more women to senior leadership positions. Of its five senior leadership appointments in North Asia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Hong Kong in 2022 at the MD or managing partner level, all are women promoted from within. As a result, nearly half its senior management are female and 50% of its APAC Exco is.  

Wavemaker leans on WPP and GroupM wellbeing initiatives like ‘Making Space’ for mental health and recharge days, but inclusivity initiatives appear to be largely left to individual markets. Indonesia created its ‘Unlock the Dress Code’ to openly discuss and remove stigmas around how people dress; China hosted a ‘Real Face’ art exhibition in Shanghai to celebrate social diversity while India launched their CARE programme to identify and overcome workplace stressors. While these aren’t exceptional, Wavemaker staff did tend to rank the agency higher than the WPP average in its survey of how well it embodies DEI. 

On sustainability issues, the heavy lifting around carbon reduction is being done by WPP and GroupM. Unlike many others, however, GroupM is striving to reduce emissions from media placement, a much larger footprint to tackle. In July GroupM launched its global carbon measurement framework to break down its media supply chain and attach measurement standards as it strives to decarbonise it by 2030. From this, it plans to build a new carbon calculator that could be used by the entire industry.   

Wavemaker and WPP do work with fossil fuel companies such as Chevron, taking the stance that it wishes to help them transition to cleaner, greener energy in the long term, but will not misrepresent their activities through greenwashing or take on any client work that frustrates the policies required by the Paris Climate Agreement.  

On both DEI and sustainability, Wavemaker retains its ‘good’ score as it still strives for better outcomes.  

Creativity & Effectiveness (B)

Wavemaker doubled its award haul in 2022 from 2021, winning more than 300 awards across APAC, helping it to keep its ‘very good grade.’  We must note that its big metal haul was buoyed in large part by its amazing AI-driven ‘Not Just a Cadbury Ad’ campaign for Mondelez in India in late 2021, which we recognised already in last year’s submission. Nonetheless, the work’s incredible success is even more apparent now after all the accolades including multiple Lions and India’s first Titanium win.  

Wavemaker’s work in 2022 wasn’t nearly as flashy. But just as the media agency had helped pandemic-hit small businesses in India with Cadbury, it partnered with L’Oreal to help keep hair salons busy by arranging more than 16,000 training sessions with nearly 300,000 hairdressers helping it to win Best in Show and Media Agency of the Year at Indonesia’s MMA Smarties.  

A good example of Wavemaker’s integrated media work was the Guidebook of Lovin’ Life that it created for content app Xiaohongshu. It used influencers to create practical how-to content for daily living that was amplified during the Spring Festival with the distribution of digital red packets. This, in turn, drove social media users over to the content (see film below), making Xiaohongshu the number one utility app during CNY generating a threefold ROI increase. Also notable was Wavemaker’s strong awareness results (+110% promoted awareness; +15% top-of-mind awareness) for Colgate’s ‘Smile Strong’ campaign in Australia.  

Management (B)

Wavemaker’s total headcount remained roughly constant in 2022 and its attrition rate, which we can’t publish, remains around the industry average. Among the turnover is the agency’s own people lead, with Lorraine Tan moving over from GroupM to become APAC head of People at Wavemaker. There are high hopes for Tan’s new leadership and already some new initiatives underway, including using Culture Amp as their new performance management tool. One popular initiative that has already started in 2022 is a new mobility programme, a GroupM first, that gives APAC employees a chance to relocate to new locations, which has already placed 21 people to different offices like Melbourne, Bangkok, Tokyo and Jakarta, with another 58 registered to move as well.  

New regional and local leadership programmes were developed in 2022, including ‘Ascend Leadership Development’ to develop future APAC leaders, its Flex programme in India to help client leaders meet brands’ digital transformation needs, and its ‘NexGen Client Leadership’ program in China to equip leaders with ways to meet the new expectations of brand clients.  

Wavemaker’s top management, including APAC chief growth officer Charlotte Wright, have delivered solid results for many years and it should be noted that regional CEO Gordon Domlija won APAC Agency Head of the Year for the second straight year. While the circumstances around his recent departure and the search for his replacement will be an intriguing storyline that plays out in 2023, they do not factor into this 2022 report card.  

Media planning & buying Ecommerce Content  Consultancy  *The agency declined to provide a business breakdown. Addressable Content  DCO Data Science/Analytics Ecommerce Precision  Tech Colgate-Palmolive Huawei L’Oreal Mercedes-Benz Mondelez Perfetti Van Melle Swatch Tata Vodafone Consumer electronics firm A: Go big, go new, go local has delivered amazing success in 2022, leading to our grade.