Shivani Maharaj has been appointed as the chief creator officer at WPP Media Australia & New Zealand, she confirmed in a post to LinkedIn over the weekend. The news concludes Maharaj’s nearly four-year run as Wavemaker’s chief content and partnerships officer.
In the new role, she will lead creative and strategic vision across social media, influence marketing, and the broader creator economy, fusing culture, content and commerce and building “innovative frameworks that empower brands to show up authentically in the fast-moving world of new media”.
“In this role, I’ll be leading the charge at the intersection of social strategy, influence marketing, and creativity, shaping how brands connect with culture in real time. I’ll be focused on elevating creator-led storytelling and redefining how influence works in the new media landscape,” Maharaj wrote.
“The future of brand-building is collaborative, social-first, and creatively fearless, and I’m thrilled to help lead the way”.
The news comes just weeks after GroupM rebranded to WPP Media, uniting “media, data and production capabilities to deliver creative personalisation at scale for advertisers”.
In 80-something markets around the world, GroupM’s agencies, EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, have been brought together to serve as dedicated teams rather than distinct businesses. They’ll also operate under one profit-and-loss sheet. It will also see a greater use of WPP Open, the holdco’s AI-enabled marketing system. This centralisation and quest for efficiency, unsurprisingly, will have knock on effects on staff.
WPP Media has repositioned its business as an “AI-driven media company” that willWPP’s wider global agency networks and capabilities through WPP Open.
WPP Open is being backed by an annual £300 million (A$627 million) investment and partnerships with AI companies.
The aim is to fully integrate WPP Media’s offering to clients to “unify media, data and production and holistically manage their owned, earned, shared and paid activities to deliver personalisation at scale”.
Maharaj has been with the WPP Group since 2006, first joining Essencemediacom as a media buying assistant before advancing through the ranks and joining Wavemaker in 2017.
