You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. So that was the original vision, Bob. I mean I worked at such As. I was in the hot house, just like Harvard Business School would be in the hot house. And really you describe such as as being one of the largest advertising agencies in the world with the brothers, with Morrison Charles, with what was then called wire and plastic products. We were trying to emulate that. I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to another episode of Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontiers and marketing. Today, we have someone who built the biggest advertising holding company in the world and one that fully embodied both math and magic, and he started it all with a tiny wire basket company. One of the great media and advertising entrepreneurs all time, Sir Martin Sorel. Sir Martin grew up in London, educated at both Cambridge and Harvard, where he got his NBA. He had a great career in advertising before he struck out in his own creating w PP. He was the star financial wizard behind Sachi and Sachi, which during his tenure became one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. He worked with legendary sports agent Mark McCormick, and he also covered the nineteen Democratic Convention in Atlantic City for a school newspaper. Most important, he has keen insights, strong opinions and is not shy about sharing them. Welcome, sir Martin, delighted to be with you. You know you have had your own front row seat for history in the advertising business, are very few people have THEIRS aspect if you do. But first, I want to do a little feature which is exploring you in sixty seconds. You're ready, I'm ready. Do you prefer London or New York? I would offend so many people by something many other I like them both. Cricket or rugby, cricket, Cambridge, England or Cambridge Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sunrise or sunset, sunrise, beach or mountains, beach, spring or fall, call or text, text jazz or blues jazz. David Ogilvie or Don Draper David smartest person you know, well, the smartest, but I didn't know it was my dad favorite film. First job a salesman for my father in one of his radio and electrical stores. If you could have one superpower, what would it be to be even faster in terms of response. That's impressive. By the way, you are very impressive with how quickly would you respond to emails anytime I reach out? Muses exactly. So let's jump into where you and I met. I think the years seven you were just beginning to put together this enormous company w P P. And you owned about almost five percent of J Walter Thompson. I had a group we owned about five percent of J Walter Thompson. I think someone I never forgot who it was, said, Okay, it's clear you guys are trying to do a takeover of j w T. So is Martin Sorrel. You guys should be and so we set up a meeting with Lou Wasserman, Sid Sheinberg, who ran m c A. Who were my partners, You and a couple of folks. You said, you know, we could do this together. You do all that creative stuff you want to do, but I'll do the financial and structure. Now I've never asked you this, Was that really true or were you just trying to get us in? Well, Bruce Boston said to me, we actually earned I think eight percent we bought in the market eight percent of j W T, and Bruce said to me, go and find out what they're thinking of doing. So Robert Lowell, who was our CFO and I we walked on. Got to get this into perspective. So Robert level and I've been working on wire and plastic products for a year or so. We started in a D five eighty six, and this was the middle of eighty seven, and here we were in New York. We made our first deal in in America, which was a small real estate advertising agency, and we were walking down Madison Avenue or wherever it was, and we were walking into this building, this huge building, and we were shown into your office where you were with Stid Sheinberg, and I always remember we started to talk about a deal or work together with you, and I was there as Bruce suggested to try and find out the most that I could about what your intentions were, what they weren't. And I remember Sid Sheinberg at some stage slightly raising his voice and said to me, but sorrel or mark him, whatever you called me, you haven't even been elected yet. And you know, he was implying that I was almost a thing, as though we owned j w T already. And it was very funny and I left the room with Robert Lowell, and as we got to the elevator, I remember saying Robert, well, I forgot to ask them something. And I went back into the room. I don't know whether you remember this, and I stuck my head round the door and I said, by the way, one thing, I forgot to ask you what sort of price you had in mind, because we were talking about doing some form of joint deal, and you never responded with a price, and I walked away. You know, I said thank you very much. I came away from that meeting thinking that you weren't serious. I was there to try and find out whether you were a potentially competitive bid. My feeling from the meeting was that you weren't. You know, I was sent there and now I might have been totally wrong. You have to tell me what the truth was. Yeah, it's interesting. I think we started buying the stock, as I recall, somewhere in the twenties, and he got up into the fifties by the time the deal was done. And I think you, I think, had a better idea of all the assets. What we missed was that there was that Tokyo real estate that was about a third of the value of the company, and I think have we known that, we would have been more eager to go ahead. But a fifty dollars a share, we started saying, you know, we've got a nice profit here. But it was fascinating, and of course I was interested in it because of the media transformation going on at the time with this new technology called cable, and the advertising was available there, and I thought I knew something that the rest of the world didn't really understand. Having come out of MTV Networks, of course, you had a much bigger vision of what you had in store. So tell me when you were putting this together and you had this vision, give me just two seconds on what the original vision was for WPP. I mean, there's no way you could have understood or thought it was going to be as big as it actually turned out to be. If you go to the original document, it says our objective was to build a major multinational marketing services firms. So that was the original vision, Bob. I mean I worked at sarch As. I was in the hot house. Remember Bruce Wasserstein saying to me that Sarches was a hot house just like Harvard Business School. To be in the hot house. And really you describe Sarches as being one of the largest advertising agencies or holding companies. I think at one stage it was the largest in the world with the brothers with Morrison Charles, and we were trying to emulate that with what was then called wire and plastic products. We didn't know, as you suggest, that we would grow so so significantly and we will make such an impact as we did. But you know, we were very ambitious, and just like with S four, which is our new digital vehicle that we started two years ago, here we are what two billion pounds too and aft to point six billion dollars the market cap two years on. And when people say to me, what do you think we can do with S four, I'm hesitant to lay out specifically one. I think it is possible because, as Morris and Charles used to say it Sarches, nothing is impossible, but nothing is impossible. Let's jump a little bit and I'm going to come back to some of the w PP, but I'd really like to get into some influences all of us, and certainly I know you do this. You learned a lot from every situation you were in and every person you encountered what did you learn from Mark McCormick, the biggest sports agent of his time and the founder of i MG, And you spent some time with him very early in your career. He basically spent his life doing what he enjoyed doing. You know, he was a scratch golfer. I think he met Arnold Palmer at Wake Forest. Arnold Powler was a ten percent shot at shareholder in i MG, which I think used to drive Jack Nicholas nuts. Mark represented Arnold power, Jack Nicholas and Gary Player, the big three all at the same time. And I think Jack resented a little bit the fact that every time you played Arnold was was interested in ten percent of his winnings things. But I think one of the principal things about Mark was that there was no defining line between work and business. I mean, what he did he really enjoyed. It was fun. You know. He was a lawyer by training. He loved golf and he applied his legal training to golf. I remember the case at the Harvard Business School that that's how I met Mark. He was the subject of one of the cases in a course called Management of New Enterprises M n E. And I remember that in that case study it referred to how Wasserman when he managed m c A, he managed talent. There was a famous conductor, band conductor orchestra conductor who he managed, and at every concert Wasserman made sure that his baton was there. And Mark used to say, if Arnold Palmer I had six and half shoes or whatever it is, he would make sure that Arnold always had the right shoes at the tournament. And his attention to detail. That was the point. Not only your career should be around what you regard as being fun, but also attention to detail. Let's jump to the SARChI brothers, Maurice and Charles. They, as you point out, created the biggest ad agency at the time, and they were the first big disruptors of the modern day ad business. What did you learn from them? Very interesting thing about them. They were not members of the i p A, the Incorporated Practitioners of Advertising, because there was an unwritten rule that you didn't pitch for each other's business if you were a member of the i p A. So they weren't members of the i PA because they pitched everybody's business and they were disruptors. And what did I learn from them. I learned that nothing was impossible and think that was one of Morris's favorite phrases. But again, you know it was about fun. I mean that era of Sarches in the seventies, that era from about nineteen seventy seven five was an incrediblera. I mean every week campaign magazine would cover another account win. In those days of million pounds was a lot of billings, and every week on a Thursday morning, the headlining campaign would be Sarch's Winds another one million, two million, three million pounds account. They were very ambitious, so I would say nothing is impossible. Global ambition, speed, persistence, all those sort of things were really important in a SARCHY framework. They did win an enormous amount of business. Were they winning an ideas or on price? Now they were doing on ideas. I mean there was an aura. It came from the advertising that Charles was always credited with originating around the work they did for the Jaffer account, or the Israekie citrus fruit account, the Pregnant Man, and there of course Manhattan Landing for British Airways, that very extravagant, expensive set of TV commercials of British air Ways I mean there was a mystique, you know, the work they did for the Conservative Party, the relationship that Tim Bell forged with Margaret Thatcher being credited with labor isn't working that famous outdoor post of that long wavy line of unemployed people and the headline laborers and working that that resonated culturally to an incredible degree. So it was the creative reputation of Sargeants that were so strong. Let's stay on ideas for a minute. Let's talk about what did you learn from someone who you fought with initially and then became your friend. David Ogilville. Well, David, you know I met through the Ogilvie deal in he famously called me. According to the Financial Times, it was an odious little jerk. Actually it was odious little ship that at that time the Financial Times wouldn't print four letter words. But we knew that he was going to be quite vitriolic when we launched our so called facts attack. We launched it on a Friday evening, pressed the button on me, the Bear Hugg letter, as it was called, to Ken Roman, who was the then chairman and CEO of Ogilvy. We knew that they were aving away day in upstate New York, and we're sending it by facts. And it was also the day that they were moving the Ogilvy headquarters from one part of Manhattan to the other to Hell's Kitchen to their new building. The last paragraph of the letter contained an offer to David Ogilvy to become chairman of the combined company, of the combined w PP and Ogilvy Company. And of course David, when Ken Roman told him about the Facts attack or the bear hugged letter, came out with this odious little ship comment. Never met me and we've never spoken a word together. So I asked to see David and I met with him, and you know, I mugged up on all of his books and went to see him with our lawyer Phil Reason one or two others. And I think I disarmed him a bit by being able to quote significant chunts of his own writing from him. But the interesting thing about the meeting was I said to him during the course of the meeting, after we're talking about fifteen or training minutes, I said, have you seen our letter? And he said, yes, I've seen the letter. And I said, have you seen the last paragraph? And he said, what do you mean the last paragraph, And I said, well, in that last paragraph we suggested that you become chairman of the joint company. And he had been sent the letter, but Ken Roman or whoever, had removed the last paragraph from the letter, so he was not aware of the fact that had been offered the chairmanship. Now we knew there was friction between Ken Roman and David, you know, purportedly they got a well, but we knew from our our own intelligence that that was not the case. And that was one of the ways of unlocking that particular situation because David was keen on becoming chairman and he helped me a lot in those years as chairman of the company. That's a great story and I'm not sure I've heard it in that detail before. So let's jump to what did you learn from your dad, who I know you admired love so much and was a businessman who really pulled it all together and built his career himself. Well, I would say everything. I mean, some of the elements that mentioned in relation Tom McCormack or the Sarchie brothers, or indeed David Ogervie, I mean, were elements that he taught me that he was a retailer. He ran seven hundred fifty radio and electrical stores in the fifties and sixties. This was a division of an industrial holding company called Firth Evelandend a bit of stock in it, but really didn't have an ownership interest, but he treated the businesses though it was his own. He worked seven days a week as a retailer. He would go to the office on a Saturday. I mean he came from an Orthodox Jewish family, but he used to travel on the Sabbath. Would slightly lighted on the Saturday, but on the Sundays, but a full day. He had to leave school when he was thirteen because he was one of six family of six, so you had to go out and earn a living. Despite the fact that he left school at such a tender age that he could recite the Talmud and Shakespeare. When I say recite significant chunks, not one sentence like friends, romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, but I mean speeches and fantastic memory for detail. He was also a very good musician. He was a violinist. He got a scholarship to the Royal School in Music when he was thirteen as a violinist, but couldn't take it up because again he had to go off. So you know, I'd go through all that because you know, it sort of taught me a lot about the importance of education. I was a spoilt child from a Jewish background in the ghetto as I call it, at Northwest London. I was born in Golders Green in a block of flat school queens were re coort and we graduated through mill Hill, which was also in north as lom so I would say a traditional education at I started at Asmanian Prep School, which was a Jewish primary school, then went to Goodwin as we moved to mill Hill, and then on to have an ASHES and then as you said, to Cambridge and and Harvard said, my father really made it possible for me to have an education that he didn't, and he valued it extremely highly and laid a path out for me. Often described as having come from a fairly wealthy background, but I didn't really mind. My father really really fought his way up and never had any of the benefits that he gave me. And my relationship with my father was very close. For example, when you and I were tussling over j W two, I would talk to my father probably four or five times a day about what was going on. He knew nothing about the business, but he knew about people. Maybe it's the fact that he had been in a salesman a sales manager. It dealt with people in a consumer industry selling radios and televisions and fridges and whatever. Began to moraccle facility to understand people their emotions, objectives, and likes and dislikes. Learned a lot, but basically he was a counselor. You did very well on the parent lottery. More on math and magic right after this quick break. Welcome back to math and magic. Now let's hear more from my conversation with sir Martin Sorel. So let me jump a little bit from your dad. What kind of influence or or what did you learn from your competitors in the advertising business. I mean, you've had legendary competitors, Maurice Levy, John Wren, Michael Roth, etcetera. Well, how did that shape you? They all had different characteristics. Michael Roth, you know picked up it was I think a non executive director at IPG. He'd been an insurance business beforehand. But you know he's done a good job, particularly in the latter years, but taken IPG from very difficult position to a much stronger position. It's not one of the biggest of the Big six, but they've done extremely well. And then Omnicom and John Wren. I don't think he has a strategic bone in his body, but he executes tactically extremely well. It's a bit more of a black box. There's very much less disclosure on Omnicom and the way that it works and others, and I think that works to its detriment. But it's key assets around BBDO, tv W, A, DDB amongst the finest, if not the finest, creative assets, but maybe more of the traditional variety. And they haven't adapted strategically as much as perhaps they should have done. Publicists I think strategically very strong. Mostly he took what was a very small agency, the French agency, and you build the business phenomenally well and strategically strong. And say, if Omnicom was more about tactics and strategy, I think publicism was more about strategy than tactics. So you answer to your question is you know you learned different things from different people. Let's move a little bit to probably the biggest disruption of your life and mind, which was the emergence of the Internet. Suddenly we have digital advertising, we have data. I mean here you are today as four is focused on that as the future. How did you see that initially and what surprised you about the way it turned out? Well, I I think there are two buckets here. I mean, one is the geographical bucket. I think you know w pople Sarchie model was about globalization. It goes back to Ted Levitt in his article in the Halvard Business of View in three I think it was in October of eighty three where he laid out this theory that consumers are going to consume everything in the same way everywhere. I mean w PP was about the continued growth of globalization. But the other part of it, the other bucket, it was the technology bucket, and we started to see that ninety ninety seven. I think I remember being interviewed by Harvard Business Review and we're talking about the role of the Internet around I think it was and we started to build our business around technology. And when I left him in two thousand and eighteen, you know, we it was very difficult to calculate what the true digital share of the business there was a w people. We we calculated around. We sent an objective to grow it by one percent a year. It's share of our business by one percent a year. What am I surprised about? What I'm surprised about the fact that we're now seeing a little bit of the dismantling of globalization and this friction with the U S and China and then on the web. You know, you always underestimated the speed at which this was going to change. And if I have regrets, it would be that we didn't move further faster at w VP to adapt to the technological development. We move fast enough on the geographical side. You know, we had the Chinese market fifty percent of the Indian market. But what we're seeing now is the potential growth of two technology systems and the friction around by way, the friction around TikTok or emblematic of the desire of the the the US to have its technological system and the desire of the Chinese to have their technological system. And then we may even have a third system. You know, you see the index wanting to buy a bank, and you know we may have a third Russian based system. So this makes it much more complex from a geographic core point of view and of course from a technological point of view. So changing from analog to digital has been exceptionally difficult, and you almost have I mean with the advertising hold income is they're not fit for purpose anymore. The market has changed that past their sell by dates. Coming back to where we started our relationship, that was about consolidation, I think there should be deconsolidation. Now let's jump to a sport. You said you're focusing on the holy trinity digital content, programmatic, ad delivery, and first party data. Tell me exactly how you see that and how you're putting it together. Well, we said, we've got four basic principles. Firstly, we've focused as I said, this is a growth model. We think that that what markets concentrate on and private equity and everybody else's total shareholder return. It's true, which which includes share price and and dividends, etcetera. But essentially the driver of TSR now is like for like topline growth, not to the Truman and margin. Margin is still important, but it's not as balanced as it used to be, and it's really more about top language. That's number one. Number two is we have this holy trinity model that first party data driving the creation of digital advertising, content and programmatic. So that's the holy trinity. The third basic operating principle is faster, better, cheaper agility d key corporate attribute, So agility and then better means understanding the digital ecosystem that is Google, Facebook, Amazon, tens and Alabama TikTok, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, s A P Pinterest, Twitter, Snap, LG, Samsung jall me by the Heart Radio epic. Understanding all those companies and understanding how the balance is changing between the platforms, between the hardware companies and the software companies. And then the last fourth principle is unitary structure an out spent work. You have to bring together people into a fully integrated structure. It doesn't work to out people separated by announced You know, we're interested and as for in people, not only people want to sell out. We're interested in people who want to buy in to the idea of building a new age, new era advertising and marketing services model and a model that disrupts the old. I mean there's a missionary zeal here to disrupt the older. As I said, we think that model has past itself. By date has to change. Let's jump for a minute to you. You have strong opinions, You've always since I've known you have a strong point of view. Got me. Jeff Bezos famously talks about disagree and commit. How does dessent fit into a company that you manage? Well, I think you know today. You know, every day we have a meeting for half an hour and hour with a top eight people in our company, which talk about people. We talk about our clients, we talk about financis. Everybody expresses their view and then we make on our minds about where we're going to go. So you people do have different points of view. We're talking yesterday. There were differences of you, but we hammered it out and we came up with what we thought, well, that was the best point of view given the fact we're trying to build a unitary company. That makes us very different to the holding company model, where it is by its nature fragmented and diffuse. And so this is really important in terms of that fourth principle of unitary structure, so you can have descent and look good. People are by nature difficult, average people by nature cooperative, you know, because they co operate because they're average. Now that's a dangerous thing to say, because you know, average people sayn't think it would would be good. They should be difficult. But getting great people who are team players is very difficult. Those are the exceptional people. And I think you know as for we do have people who are team players, and they are exceptional in that they are extremely good at what they do. They are entrepreneurial and therefore are by nature, going back to your question, full of dissent, and they have different views about how to doing, but they're coming together and they're bound together by this mission to create the new, new age, new era model and to disrupt the old. We have a point to prove of and and the point we're trying to prove is the model we're coming up with is a different one, uniquely positioned for today's times. So you're dealing with first party data's quite different than the third party data that's out there. There are three big pools of first party data from the big digital giants. Do you think the government steps in to break up that control of that first party data? Well, be careful what you wish for. The GDPR legislation in Europe really has made those three Google, Facebook, Amazon, and those ones you're referring even more powerful, and so it hasn't really hindered them because the small medium sized companies and not coming at it, you know, to try and compete with them, as perhaps the regulators in Europe wanted. I'm not sure that increased regulation or splitting them up is the answer. I think they have responded. I think Facebook as a responded and Google has responded. Twitter has responded, Amazon responded. As they've crossed a trillion dollars in terms of market cap, they obviously attract a lot of regulatory attention and with power comes responsibility. For example, Facebook, they will band political advertising a little before the election, but they've hired thirty five thousand people to monitor content. They've changed the algorithms, They've got rid of some of the the extreme groups, the boogleoo groups and things like that, so they have may change. Google band political advertising. Twitter have done the same, so they are responding. Some people would say not enough. I don't think boycotts get you very far. I think the best way to deal with situations like this is like the w done all the ana have done just recently in relation to hate speech, is engaged with the platforms effectively. What you do is you firmly say what you think you need and work with them. And the other thing I think that is really important is that these platforms are the engines of entrepreneurship in the West. It's six of the AD revenues of Google and Facebook and Amazon come from small and mean sized businesses. And so be careful what you wish for. I'm not wishing, I know you generate you you'd be careful because these these companies are generating opportunities for smaller sized businesses, which, as Jack mar says, is the engine room of the economy and creates a lot of unemployment. So let's talk a little bit of just a second before we finish up in IBC, We're on a podcast. I'm going to ask about podcasting. You know, it was video for so long, it's been searched, it's been social, and suddenly audio has its moment and podcasting, I mean, and our company all the way AD revenues down. We announced in second quarter are AD revenue and podcasting was of a hundred percent. We're racing quickly to build this. What do you think of podcasts? Well, I think another good way of our clients developing their media programming, if you like, and another good way to engage with consumers. Now whether it becomes mainstream or not is another question. It's a bit like influencer marketing, you know, in terms of content, I see influencers being a subset of content and the development and creation of content. So I think important, but not mainstream necessarily, which is probably not what you wanted to hear. But no, no, no, no, I'm look, I'm interested in your opinion, and it is. We're on the it's probably the only thing right now we're on the front end of And it reminds me back at the days I went to a o L in the mid nineties and I was at Century twenty one real estate briefly, and I remember someone who is very smart said, I know why they want you, but I can't imagine why you want to leave Century twenty one for a O L. And that's what That's how little people thought of the future of the Internet. Fortunately things turned out differently. Hey, we end each episode by focusing on math and magic, the analytics and the creative sides of marketing, and you had this unique perspective. Usually ask people about people who are analytical or creative in your case, I want to ask you about past or present. If you had to pick an agency that you thought was the best math agency all about analytics, which one would you give that to? Well, I had to say Mighty Hive okay, which is part of this four? Okay? That just aboard, and I'd say I would say Essence would be the one that I know came back on the math side of it, I would say Essence and Mighty Hive okay. So let's flip to the other side. What's the greatest creative agency? The magic I think SARCH is in its early days obviously media amongst today, which is the other part of the content part of S four. But if I went back in a history, I think SARCH is from when I was there from seventies seven, and before I was there, it was probably even better. But you know when I was there and I knew it well. From seventy seven through to stand Sir Martin, this has been fantastic. You have wonderful stories, and you're continuing to build your legacy and continuing to stay at the forefront of what's going on. Thanks for joining us, and thanks for thank you for I loved it. Great fun and good good to catch up with you again. Well we were caught up over the years, but we go back to eighty seven seven seven that that seems like yesterday to me, But I guess it was a woman. I can still see you with stip Si Sheinberg and telling me I wasn't elected. That's very funny. Good luck. By the way, everything new. Here are a few things I've picked up in my conversation with Sir Martin. One, pay close attention to your adversaries. As Sir Martin says, you can learn something valuable from every encounter, even with your competitors. By paying close attention to rivals, like David Ogilvie, he learned that there can be various strategies that lead to a successful company. To dissent is an important tool. There's a difference between what Sir Martin refers to as average people who stick to the status quo and team players who are willing to disagree to aid in company growth. Although team players might be difficult, they're more successful because their way of thinking is naturally entrepreneurial. Three. Nothing is impossible. When asked what S four is capable of Sir Martin hesitates to answer because he doesn't want to hinder its potential. He picked up this philosophy from the Sacchi Brothers, whose key to success wasn't the size of their accounts, but they're limitless ideas. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki Etre for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor, Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,

You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. So that was the original vision, Bob. I mean I worked at such As. I was in the hot house, just like Harvard Business School would be in the hot house. And really you describe such as as being one of the largest advertising agencies in the world with the brothers, with Morrison Charles, with what was then called wire and plastic products. We were trying to emulate that. I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to another episode of Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontiers and marketing. Today, we have someone who built the biggest advertising holding company in the world and one that fully embodied both math and magic, and he started it all with a tiny wire basket company. One of the great media and advertising entrepreneurs all time, Sir Martin Sorel. Sir Martin grew up in London, educated at both Cambridge and Harvard, where he got his NBA. He had a great career in advertising before he struck out in his own creating w PP. He was the star financial wizard behind Sachi and Sachi, which during his tenure became one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. He worked with legendary sports agent Mark McCormick, and he also covered the nineteen Democratic Convention in Atlantic City for a school newspaper. Most important, he has keen insights, strong opinions and is not shy about sharing them. Welcome, sir Martin, delighted to be with you. You know you have had your own front row seat for history in the advertising business, are very few people have THEIRS aspect if you do. But first, I want to do a little feature which is exploring you in sixty seconds. You're ready, I'm ready. Do you prefer London or New York? I would offend so many people by something many other I like them both. Cricket or rugby, cricket, Cambridge, England or Cambridge Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sunrise or sunset, sunrise, beach or mountains, beach, spring or fall, call or text, text jazz or blues jazz. David Ogilvie or Don Draper David smartest person you know, well, the smartest, but I didn't know it was my dad favorite film. First job a salesman for my father in one of his radio and electrical stores. If you could have one superpower, what would it be to be even faster in terms of response. That's impressive. By the way, you are very impressive with how quickly would you respond to emails anytime I reach out? Muses exactly. So let's jump into where you and I met. I think the years seven you were just beginning to put together this enormous company w P P. And you owned about almost five percent of J Walter Thompson. I had a group we owned about five percent of J Walter Thompson. I think someone I never forgot who it was, said, Okay, it's clear you guys are trying to do a takeover of j w T. So is Martin Sorrel. You guys should be and so we set up a meeting with Lou Wasserman, Sid Sheinberg, who ran m c A. Who were my partners, You and a couple of folks. You said, you know, we could do this together. You do all that creative stuff you want to do, but I'll do the financial and structure. Now I've never asked you this, Was that really true or were you just trying to get us in? Well, Bruce Boston said to me, we actually earned I think eight percent we bought in the market eight percent of j W T, and Bruce said to me, go and find out what they're thinking of doing. So Robert Lowell, who was our CFO and I we walked on. Got to get this into perspective. So Robert level and I've been working on wire and plastic products for a year or so. We started in a D five eighty six, and this was the middle of eighty seven, and here we were in New York. We made our first deal in in America, which was a small real estate advertising agency, and we were walking down Madison Avenue or wherever it was, and we were walking into this building, this huge building, and we were shown into your office where you were with Stid Sheinberg, and I always remember we started to talk about a deal or work together with you, and I was there as Bruce suggested to try and find out the most that I could about what your intentions were, what they weren't. And I remember Sid Sheinberg at some stage slightly raising his voice and said to me, but sorrel or mark him, whatever you called me, you haven't even been elected yet. And you know, he was implying that I was almost a thing, as though we owned j w T already. And it was very funny and I left the room with Robert Lowell, and as we got to the elevator, I remember saying Robert, well, I forgot to ask them something. And I went back into the room. I don't know whether you remember this, and I stuck my head round the door and I said, by the way, one thing, I forgot to ask you what sort of price you had in mind, because we were talking about doing some form of joint deal, and you never responded with a price, and I walked away. You know, I said thank you very much. I came away from that meeting thinking that you weren't serious. I was there to try and find out whether you were a potentially competitive bid. My feeling from the meeting was that you weren't. You know, I was sent there and now I might have been totally wrong. You have to tell me what the truth was. Yeah, it's interesting. I think we started buying the stock, as I recall, somewhere in the twenties, and he got up into the fifties by the time the deal was done. And I think you, I think, had a better idea of all the assets. What we missed was that there was that Tokyo real estate that was about a third of the value of the company, and I think have we known that, we would have been more eager to go ahead. But a fifty dollars a share, we started saying, you know, we've got a nice profit here. But it was fascinating, and of course I was interested in it because of the media transformation going on at the time with this new technology called cable, and the advertising was available there, and I thought I knew something that the rest of the world didn't really understand. Having come out of MTV Networks, of course, you had a much bigger vision of what you had in store. So tell me when you were putting this together and you had this vision, give me just two seconds on what the original vision was for WPP. I mean, there's no way you could have understood or thought it was going to be as big as it actually turned out to be. If you go to the original document, it says our objective was to build a major multinational marketing services firms. So that was the original vision, Bob. I mean I worked at sarch As. I was in the hot house. Remember Bruce Wasserstein saying to me that Sarches was a hot house just like Harvard Business School. To be in the hot house. And really you describe Sarches as being one of the largest advertising agencies or holding companies. I think at one stage it was the largest in the world with the brothers with Morrison Charles, and we were trying to emulate that with what was then called wire and plastic products. We didn't know, as you suggest, that we would grow so so significantly and we will make such an impact as we did. But you know, we were very ambitious, and just like with S four, which is our new digital vehicle that we started two years ago, here we are what two billion pounds too and aft to point six billion dollars the market cap two years on. And when people say to me, what do you think we can do with S four, I'm hesitant to lay out specifically one. I think it is possible because, as Morris and Charles used to say it Sarches, nothing is impossible, but nothing is impossible. Let's jump a little bit and I'm going to come back to some of the w PP, but I'd really like to get into some influences all of us, and certainly I know you do this. You learned a lot from every situation you were in and every person you encountered what did you learn from Mark McCormick, the biggest sports agent of his time and the founder of i MG, And you spent some time with him very early in your career. He basically spent his life doing what he enjoyed doing. You know, he was a scratch golfer. I think he met Arnold Palmer at Wake Forest. Arnold Powler was a ten percent shot at shareholder in i MG, which I think used to drive Jack Nicholas nuts. Mark represented Arnold power, Jack Nicholas and Gary Player, the big three all at the same time. And I think Jack resented a little bit the fact that every time you played Arnold was was interested in ten percent of his winnings things. But I think one of the principal things about Mark was that there was no defining line between work and business. I mean, what he did he really enjoyed. It was fun. You know. He was a lawyer by training. He loved golf and he applied his legal training to golf. I remember the case at the Harvard Business School that that's how I met Mark. He was the subject of one of the cases in a course called Management of New Enterprises M n E. And I remember that in that case study it referred to how Wasserman when he managed m c A, he managed talent. There was a famous conductor, band conductor orchestra conductor who he managed, and at every concert Wasserman made sure that his baton was there. And Mark used to say, if Arnold Palmer I had six and half shoes or whatever it is, he would make sure that Arnold always had the right shoes at the tournament. And his attention to detail. That was the point. Not only your career should be around what you regard as being fun, but also attention to detail. Let's jump to the SARChI brothers, Maurice and Charles. They, as you point out, created the biggest ad agency at the time, and they were the first big disruptors of the modern day ad business. What did you learn from them? Very interesting thing about them. They were not members of the i p A, the Incorporated Practitioners of Advertising, because there was an unwritten rule that you didn't pitch for each other's business if you were a member of the i p A. So they weren't members of the i PA because they pitched everybody's business and they were disruptors. And what did I learn from them. I learned that nothing was impossible and think that was one of Morris's favorite phrases. But again, you know it was about fun. I mean that era of Sarches in the seventies, that era from about nineteen seventy seven five was an incrediblera. I mean every week campaign magazine would cover another account win. In those days of million pounds was a lot of billings, and every week on a Thursday morning, the headlining campaign would be Sarch's Winds another one million, two million, three million pounds account. They were very ambitious, so I would say nothing is impossible. Global ambition, speed, persistence, all those sort of things were really important in a SARCHY framework. They did win an enormous amount of business. Were they winning an ideas or on price? Now they were doing on ideas. I mean there was an aura. It came from the advertising that Charles was always credited with originating around the work they did for the Jaffer account, or the Israekie citrus fruit account, the Pregnant Man, and there of course Manhattan Landing for British Airways, that very extravagant, expensive set of TV commercials of British air Ways I mean there was a mystique, you know, the work they did for the Conservative Party, the relationship that Tim Bell forged with Margaret Thatcher being credited with labor isn't working that famous outdoor post of that long wavy line of unemployed people and the headline laborers and working that that resonated culturally to an incredible degree. So it was the creative reputation of Sargeants that were so strong. Let's stay on ideas for a minute. Let's talk about what did you learn from someone who you fought with initially and then became your friend. David Ogilville. Well, David, you know I met through the Ogilvie deal in he famously called me. According to the Financial Times, it was an odious little jerk. Actually it was odious little ship that at that time the Financial Times wouldn't print four letter words. But we knew that he was going to be quite vitriolic when we launched our so called facts attack. We launched it on a Friday evening, pressed the button on me, the Bear Hugg letter, as it was called, to Ken Roman, who was the then chairman and CEO of Ogilvy. We knew that they were aving away day in upstate New York, and we're sending it by facts. And it was also the day that they were moving the Ogilvy headquarters from one part of Manhattan to the other to Hell's Kitchen to their new building. The last paragraph of the letter contained an offer to David Ogilvy to become chairman of the combined company, of the combined w PP and Ogilvy Company. And of course David, when Ken Roman told him about the Facts attack or the bear hugged letter, came out with this odious little ship comment. Never met me and we've never spoken a word together. So I asked to see David and I met with him, and you know, I mugged up on all of his books and went to see him with our lawyer Phil Reason one or two others. And I think I disarmed him a bit by being able to quote significant chunts of his own writing from him. But the interesting thing about the meeting was I said to him during the course of the meeting, after we're talking about fifteen or training minutes, I said, have you seen our letter? And he said, yes, I've seen the letter. And I said, have you seen the last paragraph? And he said, what do you mean the last paragraph, And I said, well, in that last paragraph we suggested that you become chairman of the joint company. And he had been sent the letter, but Ken Roman or whoever, had removed the last paragraph from the letter, so he was not aware of the fact that had been offered the chairmanship. Now we knew there was friction between Ken Roman and David, you know, purportedly they got a well, but we knew from our our own intelligence that that was not the case. And that was one of the ways of unlocking that particular situation because David was keen on becoming chairman and he helped me a lot in those years as chairman of the company. That's a great story and I'm not sure I've heard it in that detail before. So let's jump to what did you learn from your dad, who I know you admired love so much and was a businessman who really pulled it all together and built his career himself. Well, I would say everything. I mean, some of the elements that mentioned in relation Tom McCormack or the Sarchie brothers, or indeed David Ogervie, I mean, were elements that he taught me that he was a retailer. He ran seven hundred fifty radio and electrical stores in the fifties and sixties. This was a division of an industrial holding company called Firth Evelandend a bit of stock in it, but really didn't have an ownership interest, but he treated the businesses though it was his own. He worked seven days a week as a retailer. He would go to the office on a Saturday. I mean he came from an Orthodox Jewish family, but he used to travel on the Sabbath. Would slightly lighted on the Saturday, but on the Sundays, but a full day. He had to leave school when he was thirteen because he was one of six family of six, so you had to go out and earn a living. Despite the fact that he left school at such a tender age that he could recite the Talmud and Shakespeare. When I say recite significant chunks, not one sentence like friends, romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, but I mean speeches and fantastic memory for detail. He was also a very good musician. He was a violinist. He got a scholarship to the Royal School in Music when he was thirteen as a violinist, but couldn't take it up because again he had to go off. So you know, I'd go through all that because you know, it sort of taught me a lot about the importance of education. I was a spoilt child from a Jewish background in the ghetto as I call it, at Northwest London. I was born in Golders Green in a block of flat school queens were re coort and we graduated through mill Hill, which was also in north as lom so I would say a traditional education at I started at Asmanian Prep School, which was a Jewish primary school, then went to Goodwin as we moved to mill Hill, and then on to have an ASHES and then as you said, to Cambridge and and Harvard said, my father really made it possible for me to have an education that he didn't, and he valued it extremely highly and laid a path out for me. Often described as having come from a fairly wealthy background, but I didn't really mind. My father really really fought his way up and never had any of the benefits that he gave me. And my relationship with my father was very close. For example, when you and I were tussling over j W two, I would talk to my father probably four or five times a day about what was going on. He knew nothing about the business, but he knew about people. Maybe it's the fact that he had been in a salesman a sales manager. It dealt with people in a consumer industry selling radios and televisions and fridges and whatever. Began to moraccle facility to understand people their emotions, objectives, and likes and dislikes. Learned a lot, but basically he was a counselor. You did very well on the parent lottery. More on math and magic right after this quick break. Welcome back to math and magic. Now let's hear more from my conversation with sir Martin Sorel. So let me jump a little bit from your dad. What kind of influence or or what did you learn from your competitors in the advertising business. I mean, you've had legendary competitors, Maurice Levy, John Wren, Michael Roth, etcetera. Well, how did that shape you? They all had different characteristics. Michael Roth, you know picked up it was I think a non executive director at IPG. He'd been an insurance business beforehand. But you know he's done a good job, particularly in the latter years, but taken IPG from very difficult position to a much stronger position. It's not one of the biggest of the Big six, but they've done extremely well. And then Omnicom and John Wren. I don't think he has a strategic bone in his body, but he executes tactically extremely well. It's a bit more of a black box. There's very much less disclosure on Omnicom and the way that it works and others, and I think that works to its detriment. But it's key assets around BBDO, tv W, A, DDB amongst the finest, if not the finest, creative assets, but maybe more of the traditional variety. And they haven't adapted strategically as much as perhaps they should have done. Publicists I think strategically very strong. Mostly he took what was a very small agency, the French agency, and you build the business phenomenally well and strategically strong. And say, if Omnicom was more about tactics and strategy, I think publicism was more about strategy than tactics. So you answer to your question is you know you learned different things from different people. Let's move a little bit to probably the biggest disruption of your life and mind, which was the emergence of the Internet. Suddenly we have digital advertising, we have data. I mean here you are today as four is focused on that as the future. How did you see that initially and what surprised you about the way it turned out? Well, I I think there are two buckets here. I mean, one is the geographical bucket. I think you know w pople Sarchie model was about globalization. It goes back to Ted Levitt in his article in the Halvard Business of View in three I think it was in October of eighty three where he laid out this theory that consumers are going to consume everything in the same way everywhere. I mean w PP was about the continued growth of globalization. But the other part of it, the other bucket, it was the technology bucket, and we started to see that ninety ninety seven. I think I remember being interviewed by Harvard Business Review and we're talking about the role of the Internet around I think it was and we started to build our business around technology. And when I left him in two thousand and eighteen, you know, we it was very difficult to calculate what the true digital share of the business there was a w people. We we calculated around. We sent an objective to grow it by one percent a year. It's share of our business by one percent a year. What am I surprised about? What I'm surprised about the fact that we're now seeing a little bit of the dismantling of globalization and this friction with the U S and China and then on the web. You know, you always underestimated the speed at which this was going to change. And if I have regrets, it would be that we didn't move further faster at w VP to adapt to the technological development. We move fast enough on the geographical side. You know, we had the Chinese market fifty percent of the Indian market. But what we're seeing now is the potential growth of two technology systems and the friction around by way, the friction around TikTok or emblematic of the desire of the the the US to have its technological system and the desire of the Chinese to have their technological system. And then we may even have a third system. You know, you see the index wanting to buy a bank, and you know we may have a third Russian based system. So this makes it much more complex from a geographic core point of view and of course from a technological point of view. So changing from analog to digital has been exceptionally difficult, and you almost have I mean with the advertising hold income is they're not fit for purpose anymore. The market has changed that past their sell by dates. Coming back to where we started our relationship, that was about consolidation, I think there should be deconsolidation. Now let's jump to a sport. You said you're focusing on the holy trinity digital content, programmatic, ad delivery, and first party data. Tell me exactly how you see that and how you're putting it together. Well, we said, we've got four basic principles. Firstly, we've focused as I said, this is a growth model. We think that that what markets concentrate on and private equity and everybody else's total shareholder return. It's true, which which includes share price and and dividends, etcetera. But essentially the driver of TSR now is like for like topline growth, not to the Truman and margin. Margin is still important, but it's not as balanced as it used to be, and it's really more about top language. That's number one. Number two is we have this holy trinity model that first party data driving the creation of digital advertising, content and programmatic. So that's the holy trinity. The third basic operating principle is faster, better, cheaper agility d key corporate attribute, So agility and then better means understanding the digital ecosystem that is Google, Facebook, Amazon, tens and Alabama TikTok, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, s A P Pinterest, Twitter, Snap, LG, Samsung jall me by the Heart Radio epic. Understanding all those companies and understanding how the balance is changing between the platforms, between the hardware companies and the software companies. And then the last fourth principle is unitary structure an out spent work. You have to bring together people into a fully integrated structure. It doesn't work to out people separated by announced You know, we're interested and as for in people, not only people want to sell out. We're interested in people who want to buy in to the idea of building a new age, new era advertising and marketing services model and a model that disrupts the old. I mean there's a missionary zeal here to disrupt the older. As I said, we think that model has past itself. By date has to change. Let's jump for a minute to you. You have strong opinions, You've always since I've known you have a strong point of view. Got me. Jeff Bezos famously talks about disagree and commit. How does dessent fit into a company that you manage? Well, I think you know today. You know, every day we have a meeting for half an hour and hour with a top eight people in our company, which talk about people. We talk about our clients, we talk about financis. Everybody expresses their view and then we make on our minds about where we're going to go. So you people do have different points of view. We're talking yesterday. There were differences of you, but we hammered it out and we came up with what we thought, well, that was the best point of view given the fact we're trying to build a unitary company. That makes us very different to the holding company model, where it is by its nature fragmented and diffuse. And so this is really important in terms of that fourth principle of unitary structure, so you can have descent and look good. People are by nature difficult, average people by nature cooperative, you know, because they co operate because they're average. Now that's a dangerous thing to say, because you know, average people sayn't think it would would be good. They should be difficult. But getting great people who are team players is very difficult. Those are the exceptional people. And I think you know as for we do have people who are team players, and they are exceptional in that they are extremely good at what they do. They are entrepreneurial and therefore are by nature, going back to your question, full of dissent, and they have different views about how to doing, but they're coming together and they're bound together by this mission to create the new, new age, new era model and to disrupt the old. We have a point to prove of and and the point we're trying to prove is the model we're coming up with is a different one, uniquely positioned for today's times. So you're dealing with first party data's quite different than the third party data that's out there. There are three big pools of first party data from the big digital giants. Do you think the government steps in to break up that control of that first party data? Well, be careful what you wish for. The GDPR legislation in Europe really has made those three Google, Facebook, Amazon, and those ones you're referring even more powerful, and so it hasn't really hindered them because the small medium sized companies and not coming at it, you know, to try and compete with them, as perhaps the regulators in Europe wanted. I'm not sure that increased regulation or splitting them up is the answer. I think they have responded. I think Facebook as a responded and Google has responded. Twitter has responded, Amazon responded. As they've crossed a trillion dollars in terms of market cap, they obviously attract a lot of regulatory attention and with power comes responsibility. For example, Facebook, they will band political advertising a little before the election, but they've hired thirty five thousand people to monitor content. They've changed the algorithms, They've got rid of some of the the extreme groups, the boogleoo groups and things like that, so they have may change. Google band political advertising. Twitter have done the same, so they are responding. Some people would say not enough. I don't think boycotts get you very far. I think the best way to deal with situations like this is like the w done all the ana have done just recently in relation to hate speech, is engaged with the platforms effectively. What you do is you firmly say what you think you need and work with them. And the other thing I think that is really important is that these platforms are the engines of entrepreneurship in the West. It's six of the AD revenues of Google and Facebook and Amazon come from small and mean sized businesses. And so be careful what you wish for. I'm not wishing, I know you generate you you'd be careful because these these companies are generating opportunities for smaller sized businesses, which, as Jack mar says, is the engine room of the economy and creates a lot of unemployment. So let's talk a little bit of just a second before we finish up in IBC, We're on a podcast. I'm going to ask about podcasting. You know, it was video for so long, it's been searched, it's been social, and suddenly audio has its moment and podcasting, I mean, and our company all the way AD revenues down. We announced in second quarter are AD revenue and podcasting was of a hundred percent. We're racing quickly to build this. What do you think of podcasts? Well, I think another good way of our clients developing their media programming, if you like, and another good way to engage with consumers. Now whether it becomes mainstream or not is another question. It's a bit like influencer marketing, you know, in terms of content, I see influencers being a subset of content and the development and creation of content. So I think important, but not mainstream necessarily, which is probably not what you wanted to hear. But no, no, no, no, I'm look, I'm interested in your opinion, and it is. We're on the it's probably the only thing right now we're on the front end of And it reminds me back at the days I went to a o L in the mid nineties and I was at Century twenty one real estate briefly, and I remember someone who is very smart said, I know why they want you, but I can't imagine why you want to leave Century twenty one for a O L. And that's what That's how little people thought of the future of the Internet. Fortunately things turned out differently. Hey, we end each episode by focusing on math and magic, the analytics and the creative sides of marketing, and you had this unique perspective. Usually ask people about people who are analytical or creative in your case, I want to ask you about past or present. If you had to pick an agency that you thought was the best math agency all about analytics, which one would you give that to? Well, I had to say Mighty Hive okay, which is part of this four? Okay? That just aboard, and I'd say I would say Essence would be the one that I know came back on the math side of it, I would say Essence and Mighty Hive okay. So let's flip to the other side. What's the greatest creative agency? The magic I think SARCH is in its early days obviously media amongst today, which is the other part of the content part of S four. But if I went back in a history, I think SARCH is from when I was there from seventies seven, and before I was there, it was probably even better. But you know when I was there and I knew it well. From seventy seven through to stand Sir Martin, this has been fantastic. You have wonderful stories, and you're continuing to build your legacy and continuing to stay at the forefront of what's going on. Thanks for joining us, and thanks for thank you for I loved it. Great fun and good good to catch up with you again. Well we were caught up over the years, but we go back to eighty seven seven seven that that seems like yesterday to me, But I guess it was a woman. I can still see you with stip Si Sheinberg and telling me I wasn't elected. That's very funny. Good luck. By the way, everything new. Here are a few things I've picked up in my conversation with Sir Martin. One, pay close attention to your adversaries. As Sir Martin says, you can learn something valuable from every encounter, even with your competitors. By paying close attention to rivals, like David Ogilvie, he learned that there can be various strategies that lead to a successful company. To dissent is an important tool. There's a difference between what Sir Martin refers to as average people who stick to the status quo and team players who are willing to disagree to aid in company growth. Although team players might be difficult, they're more successful because their way of thinking is naturally entrepreneurial. Three. Nothing is impossible. When asked what S four is capable of Sir Martin hesitates to answer because he doesn't want to hinder its potential. He picked up this philosophy from the Sacchi Brothers, whose key to success wasn't the size of their accounts, but they're limitless ideas. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki Etre for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor, Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,