We just “met” with Sir Martin Sorrell at the Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s a guy who through brainpower, ambition, cunning, and brute force assembled in WPP the world’s largest advertising and marketing services agency. Imagine buying a controlling stake in the old-line, publicly listed U.K. Wire and Plastics Products company in 1985 and turning it into a global communications colossus? In short order, Sorrell acquired the fabled J. Walter Thompson agency through a hostile takeover in 1987 and subsequently collected giants such as Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, Burson-Marsteller, Cohn & Wolfe, and many others. Sorrell knew exactly what he was doing in purchasing the debt-free shell for his global designs.
Sorrell said he took inspiration from the LVMH “Maison” model that has historically housed high-end, competitor brands across numerous luxury-goods markets. He melded the LVMH concept with the reality of the Interpublic Group, which started as the advertising behemoth McCann-Erickson in the 1930s and devoured many firms over the course of the past century. Still, there was something about the scale, rapidity, and brand enormity of Sorrell’s acquisitiveness that remains breathtaking. Today, WPP, Interpublic, Omnicom, and Publicis comprise the “Big Four” of global advertising and marketing services.
Sorrell said today that, “Separate agencies (within one conglomerate) made sense from a market share perspective,” enabling the vast WPP portfolio to have served Proctor & Gamble through its Grey Global Group, for example, while representing P&G competitor Unilever through the J. Walter Thompson WPP subsidiary. It’s a powerful formula for managing through and around anti-trust matters and claims of anti-competitiveness.
My first reaction in thinking of Sorrell is biased. That’s because he left WPP in 2018 under a dark cloud with claims waged against him for employee abuse, astronomically high compensation, misuse of company assets, and a Young & Rubicam subsidiary’s work for the despot Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. It is hard to know the truth in the matters of employee abuse and misuse of WPP assets. I learned long ago, however, that the abuse claims – bullying people, screaming at them, ridiculing them in front of others, and otherwise acting in predatory ways – are often true. And I just cannot get past them.
That said, Sorrell forever changed the face of advertising and marketing. Even today, he continues with his S4 agency to define the frontiers of market research and digital marketing. You’ve got to hand it to him. He'd probably take it anyway.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.