Brief:

• Advertising giant WPP partnered with ad-tech firm InMobi Group in India to help brands with their mobile marketing and media plans. InMobi's cloud platform reaches more than 200 million mobile users in the country, including the lock screens of 36 million smartphones, according to a company announcement.
• WPP's GroupM unit will provide data-driven marketing and media planning while sharing its strategy for in-app mobile content marketing. WPP's Kantar will provide consumer research data and recommendations for delivery and engagement.
• The InMobi Marketing Cloud consists of Pulse, a mobile research platform, and InMobi's in-app programmatic buying platform.

Insight:

WPP's partnership with InMobi is another sign of the growing importance of mobile marketing technology to reach consumers in India, one of the world's fastest-growing economies. India's data usage per smartphone already is the highest in the world at 9.8 gigabytes a month, and will double to 18 gigabytes by 2024, per a report by telecom equipment maker Ericsson. Improved device penetration, affordable data plans and greater demand for data-intensive content like videos are driving much of the growth in India.

WPP and InMobi both stand to benefit from the new partnership. WPP's clients likely will have greater reach in a rapidly growing market, while InMobi will gain greater access to global brands represented by one of the world's largest ad holding companies.

India is emerging as a significant consumer economy with a middle class that's forecast to grow by 600 million people to total 1.1 billion by 2030 as incomes rise and living standards improve. Spending power by the Indian middle class will almost triple to $10.5 trillion during that period, per the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). India's middle class will be younger than in other Asian countries like China, making mobile marketing strategies more important to reaching tech-savvy adults.

Late last year, WPP announced a focus on four business areas it views as crucial to brands: communications, experience, commerce and technology. The goal includes reaching organic growth of at least 15% by the end of 2021, putting WPP on par with its agency peers.

As WPP looks to cut ancillary businesses that aren't part of its plan to boost growth with more agile and tech-savvy ad agencies, the company in July entered into an agreement to sell 60% of Kantar to Bain Capital for $3.1 billion. The deal is expected to close in early 2020.