“Seventy-five percent of our revenues comes from things—$15 billion of nearly $20 billion—Don Draper wouldn’t recognize.”
—Martin Sorrell
In another restaurant where he’s well known, Milos on West Fifty-fifth Street, where the chef emerges from the kitchen to recommend dishes and the maître d’ automatically delivers a dry martini, Michael Kassan slipped into his seat on this May night fresh from having seen Hamilton a third time. Sipping his martini, Kassan came down from the up the musical inspired as he spoke of the difficult challenges confronting the agency world and its four largest holding companies in mid-2016: the lack of a rising new generation of leadership. “John Wren [CEO] of Omnicom is the youngest at sixty-four or sixty-five, Martin Sorrell of WPP is seventy-one, Maurice Levy of Publicis is going to be seventy-five, and Michael Roth of IPG just turned seventy. There’s no clear successor for any of them. You’ve got no identified next generation of leadership in this business.” He saw agencies as imperiled. “How does a traditional holding company deal with disruption? I’m not sure. The answer is that they’re at real risk. They’re not going out of business. But clients are chipping away.” And the more they chip away, he tells his staff, it is unavoidably true that “for MediaLink this is really good news. The opportunities for MediaLink become really robust as people come to rely on their agencies less.” And Jon Mandel’s speech, he knows, hurt agencies and helped MediaLink.
One can appreciate why what Kassan considers good news for MediaLink would anger the leaders of these holding companies. In this regard, the agencies are as one. Otherwise, there are certainly plenty of differences among the large agencies. WPP is the Goliath, ranked number one ($18.7 billion) among all world agencies in 2015 revenues, followed, in order, by Omnicom ($15.1 billion), Publicis ($10.6 billion), IPG ($7.6 billion), Horizon ($6.5 billion), Dentsu ($6.3 billion), and Havas ($2.4 billion). Each claims to have a distinct brand identity. Omnicom does not advertise that its CEO, John Wren, spends much of the year at his home in Palm Beach, but it does tout its award-winning creative work, and that by reorganizing its media agency endeavors under a new entity, Hearts & Science, they captured more new business in 2016 than any other holding company. Publicis lost more accounts than its competitors in 2016, but Maurice Levy says that his company is truly global and unlike most competitors, including WPP, doesn’t view the world through “Anglo-Saxon eyes.” Publicis was, he says, first to create a beachhead in China. Michael Roth, CEO of IPG, says, “The DNA of our company is entrepreneurial rather than command and control.” He touts the unusual digital work of one of its agencies, Bob Greenberg’s R/GA. Roth sees his role as an “allocator of capital,” and as the public face of IPG.
The other companies, though large, do not offer the same full range of services. Japanese-based Dentsu offers strong media agency services, but outside of Japan they usually partner with outside creative agencies. Bill Koenigsberg, the CEO of Horizon Media, also is focused on media services and partners with outside creative agencies. He says, “We don’t try to sell various services,” and because they are “privately held,” they are not preoccupied “with quarterly earnings,” leaving him to be concerned with “only two constituencies, employees and clients.” While France-based Havas is the smallest by revenue of the big marketing companies, Yannick Bolloré, the CEO, matches Koenigsberg’s claim that because his firm is family owned “we are not dependent on the market,” and he adds something that is easier to assert than prove: their culture “is more collaborative.”
No one is more vocal about the swarm of new competitors all of these players are combating than Martin Sorrell. Sorrell is less diplomatic and more nakedly competitive than Levy, Wren, or Roth. While the others express warm feelings for Kassan, Sorrell openly looks upon Kassan and MediaLink as a frenemy, as he does Facebook and Google.
This bristly, on-guard stance is part of Sorrell’s DNA. His Jewish grandparents immigrated to London from Ukraine, Poland, and Romania. In the poorer East End of London, his grandparents and parents felt the lash of anti-Semitism, a reason they changed the family name from Spitzberg to Sorrell. To help support his family, his father, Jack, dropped out of school at thirteen, abandoned his violin and the scholarship offered by the Royal College of Music, and went to work as a salesman for Max and Francis Stone, Russian Jews who owned appliance stores. By the time Martin was born in February 1945, Jack was the general manager of their 750 stores and the Sorrells enjoyed a measure of affluence. They lived first in a comfortable flat in northwest London, then upgraded to a bigger detached house in Mill Hill, a leafy suburb. After a brother died in childbirth, Martin remained an only child and the recipient of the full attention of his parents. His mother, Sally, devoted herself to being a housewife and caring for her son, carefully wrapping his school lunch sandwiches in plastic. His father was an amateur Shakespeare scholar and could recite entire passages from the Bard’s plays.
Jack Sorrell is still a presence in his son’s cluttered second-floor London townhouse office, located in a residential mews at 27 Farm Street in Mayfair. The largest photograph in the room, dwarfing all the small framed photographs on the credenza leaning against the bare white wall facing his desk, is of Jack Sorrell. It is unframed and slightly faded. The picture portrays a man of regal mien, his dark, full mustache trimmed, his eyes dark, his black hair combed straight back, his formal dark suit accompanied by a black tie with white polka dots and a white pocket square. There is a hint of a smile on Jack Sorrell’s closed mouth, as if he is suppressing it. There is little physical resemblance between father and son. Martin’s hair is greyer and shorter, he wears unframed eyeglasses, and he is mustache free. Unlike his father, he thinks of himself as an entrepreneur who is unabashedly proud to say he personally built the WPP from a wire basket company to the world’s largest advertising and marketing entity. Like his father, Martin does not suffer fools and carries a chip on his shoulder. “My father,” his son says, “never felt he had the advantages—because he had to leave school at thirteen, he couldn’t take the scholarship. He had a very good brain but he was probably upset that he worked like a slave but was not an owner. . . . We were so close because he wanted to give me the advantages he didn’t have.”
His dad pushed Martin to go to the right schools, and Martin pushed to make his dad proud. He also relied on his father as his consigliere. Jack Sorrell, he once told a Forbes magazine reporter, was “somebody you could talk to who doesn’t have an agenda but your interests at heart.” Apart from his wife, Martin said, no one filled that role today.
Esteemed historian Simon Schama, who met Martin when they were eleven-year-old students at the elite Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in northwest London, describes Martin as “exuberantly tough” and “full of a kind of cuddly warmth” that is often camouflaged. They were “brotherly close,” he says, with sterling grades when together they graduated Christ's College in 1963. On Fridays Martin’s mother would wrap a roast chicken in silver foil and plastic and put it on the train to Cambridge. “I would pick it up,” recalls Martin. “The chicken was still warm.” Schama would make risotto to accompany the chicken. The chicken was kosher, as was all their food. “We were slightly left-wing Zionists” living a semibohemian lifestyle, Schama says. Together, they edited and published a glossy magazine, Cambridge Opinion, which appeared six times a year, each edition devoted to a single subject. In 1964 the subject was America. With the assistance of a professor who was a friend of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Schama wrote the New York Democrat and arranged to visit when he and Sorrell went to America that summer. Moynihan wangled press credentials for them to attend the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The two nineteen-year-olds fervently supported Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater. The next summer, after their junior year, they traveled together to Vienna, Berlin, and Eastern Europe, seeking to better understand what Schama describes as “the ghosts” of anti-Semitism; their eyes flooded with tears visiting former concentration camps.
Among Cambridge classmates, it was common to aspire to be a writer, professor, or lawyer. Martin was different. An economics major, he had “a steely” determination to be a businessman, Schama says. “Martin always felt that Jack had been mistreated, he had been disadvantaged” by the Stone brothers and by early poverty. “Martin certainly wanted to vindicate his father by succeeding.” He graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA; he often says the case-study approach taught him to think like a CEO. After working for a consulting firm in Connecticut, he reintroduced himself to Mark McCormack, founder and chairman of IMG, an international agent for sports figures and celebrities, whom he had met when McCormack spoke at Harvard. McCormack remembered Martin as the brash young man who made it his business to converse after class, and offered him a job opening at an IMG office in London. Some months later, McCormack let him borrow his chauffeur and Rolls-Royce or Bentley, Sorrell can’t recall which, to impress a first date, Sandra Finestone, whom he would marry. They had three sons, were married for thirty-five years, and divorced in 2005. (The divorce cost him an estimated £30 million and a four-story townhouse.)
He left IMG in the mid-1970s with the idea, he told the Harvard Business Review, “to try to start a company with my dad, who was my closest adviser and mentor at that time. We didn’t find a business that made sense.” So he joined James Gulliver Associates as a financial adviser. The firm had invested in an ad agency that Saatchi & Saatchi acquired, and when Saatchi was searching in 1976 for a chief financial officer, Sorrell was recruited. For the next nine years he worked for Maurice and Charles Saatchi, often terrifying those sitting across from him as he crunched numbers in his head, stared down opponents, and orchestrated a spree of mergers that would transform Saatchi into a powerful holding company.
The pioneer who launched the “holding company” era was Marion Harper, Jr., president of McCann-Erickson, who acquired a number of agencies and by 1960 had placed them all under a new umbrella, the Interpublic Group. Advertising agencies began to go public, and attracted famed investor Warren Buffett, who in the 1960s took sizable positions in McCann-Erickson and Ogilvy & Mather. “You know the best business to be in?” Kenneth Roman, former chairman of Ogilvy said, recounting Buffett’s words. “It’s one where you’re shaving in the morning and can look in the mirror and say, ‘Today, I’m going to raise prices.’ And you can do it.”* As was true in most giant industries, the belief that size conferred advantages was rampant. Size conferred more leverage to raise prices and lower costs, provided a bigger global footprint to pitch clients anywhere, enabled synergies that offered efficiencies, and boosted profits by applying cost-cutting pressure on newly acquired assets to improve the parent company’s margins.
The Saatchis realized that the industry was evolving into two tiers, a handful of giants versus Saatchi and everyone else in the middle, where they were prey. Harper understood this. Andrew Cracknell credits—perhaps condemns is a more appropriate word—Harper’s push for a giant holding company because it subjected advertising to “the equivalent of its own industrial revolution.” In the future, he wrote, agencies would be measured by “the bottom line,” not the creative “quality of their work.” And by coining the phrase “marketing communications” to describe his agency, and bringing under his IPG umbrella marketing functions and charging clients for their distinct services, Harper had more of an impact than the great Bill Bernbach, in Cracknell’s view.*
Saatchi’s first major acquisition came in 1975, when they partnered with the London office of Garland-Communications, whose clients included Procter & Gamble and who owned a piece of Compton Communications, which was much larger than Saatchi. The maneuver, which was a reverse takeover, would over the next decade help propel Saatchi to eclipse IPG as the world’s largest ad agency. Sorrell was the financial engineer. “That was the cornerstone deal,” Sorrell says. “The brilliant deal we did”—he invokes the word brilliant three times in a single sentence to describe the deal—“was when we squeezed Compton advertising,” becoming the controlling owner. Under the terms of the deal, Compton would own 20 percent of Saatchi.
However, instead of paying Compton, Sorrell persuaded them to convert their one-fifth ownership into shares in a new subsidiary company Saatchi formed. Compton was a public company, and its market valuation generated a pool of capital for Saatchi to tap to make more acquisitions, including Compton’s U.S. business in 1982.
In the nine years he worked there, Sorrell was often referred to as “the third brother,” an identity he rejects because he says the brothers were shrewd strategists unto themselves and he was very clearly their employee. As the person who negotiated Saatchi’s deals, Sorrell could be intimidating. Jerry Della Femina, the creative force behind the agency Della Femina, Travisano & Partners, was eager to expand in the 1970s. “I had a reputation as a wild man,” he says. “I realized I would not get good packaged goods accounts, which is where the big dollars were. I decided in the seventies I had to buy an agency in the UK.” He checked out London agencies and was told Saatchi might sell. “I visited the Saatchi brothers and Sorrell. They lacquered me with praise. I was their hero. They talked about how I could buy them. I said to myself, ‘They are smart guys.’ After a while I realized, ‘They are smarter than I am. They would eat me for lunch!’” A few years later an Advertising Age reporter phoned Della Femina and asked for his reaction to news that Garland-Compton had acquired Saatchi. “‘No,’ I said. ‘Saatchi will own them.’ They did.”
“The great thing about the Saatchis is they let you do what you wanted to do,” Sorrell says, before adding, “as long as you got no public credit for it.”
“I don’t remember him being very happy,” Simon Schama recalls. Sorrell cited three reasons he was unhappy: he thought the Saatchis were brilliant strategists and ad men, but too “showy,” too unfocused on managing a now sprawling business, and “he didn’t have enough power.” Plus, he adds, “I left them because I wanted to do something on my own. I was forty years old and had male menopause.” And he aimed not to suffer the fate of his father. “Some things I found difficult to accept. My dad had always said to me, ‘Build a reputation in an industry you enjoy.’ And building a reputation means that people respect what you did and as a result you get some leverage and clout.” Until Jack Sorrell died in 1989, Martin spoke with his father daily.
With an eye on leaving, in 1985 Sorrell made a personal investment in a wire basket manufacturer, publicly listed as Wire and Plastic Products. When he left Saatchi the following year, he rechristened this shell company WPP and set up shop in a one-room London office he shared with an associate. His ownership stake in WPP amounted to 16 percent. Over the next eighteen months, WPP purchased eighteen companies. “We went from a market cap of 1 million pounds to 150 million pounds,” Sorrell says. Up until this time, ad agencies were gentlemanly, refusing to launch hostile takeovers. Martin Sorrell disdained these polite unwritten rules. By 1987, the shark was ready to swallow a whale: he made a hostile bid to take over the venerable but troubled J. Walter Thompson, whose revenues were thirteen times greater than WPP’s. Sorrell loaded up with debt and benefited from a Japanese real estate investment that was part of the acquisition and that helped him make the $566 million purchase, which included the world’s largest public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton.
Jeremy Bullmore, who was the chairman of J. Walter Thompson in London at the time, and would become a close adviser to Sorrell, says he wasn’t upset by the takeover. “I thought the company had become soft.”
Sorrell would build his empire, as Jack Welch would build General Electric in that period, by purchasing companies, not starting them. Unlike Marion Harper, who was terminated for financial profligacy, Martin Sorrell erected the first financially successful advertising holding company. Within two years, he doubled Thompson’s profits. By 1999, he engineered a hostile takeover of Ogilvy & Mather for $864 million, prompting David Ogilvy to publicly brand him “an odious little shit.” (Martin is five feet six inches tall and likes to say, “Same height as Napoleon.” Press accounts of Ogilvy’s attack changed “shit” to “jerk.”) Soon he would swallow two other huge agencies, Young & Rubicam and Grey. WPP would become the world’s largest advertising and marketing company, with 205,000 employees in 3,000 offices in 112 countries. By 2015, WPP enjoyed profit margins of 16.9 percent, the industry’s highest. He kept those margins high by aggressively diversifying WPP from a company reliant on North America and Great Britain to a company that produced up to 45 percent of its revenues “from the faster-growing markets of Asia Pacific, Latin America, Africa & Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe.” China is today WPP’s third biggest revenue producer, with 15,000 employees, and WPP has a 45 percent market share in India. Sorrell was knighted Sir Martin by the Queen in 2000, and chose for the motto on his shield, “Persistence and Speed.”
Sir Martin’s ambitions brought WPP perilously close to bankruptcy in 1991. A combination of taking on too much debt coupled with a worldwide recession slashed WPP’s stock price and revenues and menaced his dream. Banks were pressing him for payments. Schama recalls a lunch with him at the Connaught when Sorrell shared that WPP was “in real deep trouble and close to going under.” To extricate WPP, Sorrell humbly accepted a deal that reduced the company’s debt by granting WPP equity to the banks.
By 1992, WPP regained its stride. If Michael Kassan earned the title of “the connector,” Martin Sorrell earned his as “the consolidator.” WPP aggressively buys majority or minority stakes in marketing companies all over the world. According to WPP’s website, it owned all or part of 412 companies. Enter the bright yellow door to its two-story London townhouse, walk past a fake cactus plant, and settle on a short faux leather visitors’ couch, and you find yourself staring up at a massive mounted orange drum. On it in small black letters are the names of WPP companies. A sleek office building several miles away houses many of these companies. Its public relations holdings include Hill & Knowlton, Burson-Marsteller, and Finsbury; its data, technology, and polling companies include—in addition to GroupM—Xaxis, Kantar, the Benenson Strategy Group, and Penn Schoen Berland; its public affairs and lobbying roster includes the Dewey Square Group, Glover Park Group, and Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates; its various companies are major players in health-care communications, design, and direct mail. It owns sizable pieces of digital content companies like Vice Media, Refinery29, and Fullscreen. It owns a piece of the movie and TV production enterprise the Weinstein Company. It owns one fifth of a digital measurement company that competes with Nielsen, the combined Rentrak and comScore. Back when she was recruited by Sorrell to become CEO of Ogilvy & Mather and became a trusted colleague, Charlotte Beers says, “I disagreed with him buying all these below-the-line companies. I was wrong. It’s why my WPP stock is so strong today.”
Today, three quarters of WPP’s $20 billion in revenues spring from what Sorrell describes as “stuff that has nothing to do with Don Draper advertising” and everything to do with “communication services.” WPP, like the other ad and marketing giants, set out to acquire not just advertising but marketing agencies. Today, outside the United States, most marketing dollars are spent in England, France, Germany, Japan, and China. But late in the last century, one did not need a crystal ball to see that China and India would each house more than one billion people. The two countries now rank number one and number two in Internet users. “In Don Draper’s day,” says Sorrell, who has devoutly watched every episode of Mad Men, “he was wrestling with working with the New York office or the Chicago office or the Detroit office and would be very focused on the United States. The U.S. was the biggest market. It still is. But when I started thirty years ago, up to three quarters of worldwide advertising was controlled from the East Coast of the U.S. That’s no longer the story.”
Even Sorrell’s critics acknowledge he is a nearly peerless long-term strategic thinker. It is customary for him—in his annual reports, in meetings with analysts, in press interviews—to lambast corporations for their preoccupation with the short term. “It’s the demand for quarterly performance” issued by CEOs who only average six or seven years in office, he grouses. In an article he wrote for The Economist in early 2017, Sorrell assailed American corporations for share buybacks and dividends that in the year up to June 2016 exceeded their retained earnings. He claimed that corporations were choosing to reduce their investment dollars even though they sat on more than $7 trillion in worldwide cash. “One survey,” he wrote, “revealed that nearly 80% of executives admit they would ‘take actions to improve quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term value creation.’ In this environment, procurement and finance departments (rather than growth-drivers such as marketing and R&D) have the whip hand.”
Sorrell was early to see that data and technology and the ability to target individuals, as opposed to demographic or income groups, would one day transform marketing, so he invested heavily in data and tech companies. A turning point, says David Moore, was in 2007, when Google acquired DoubleClick, the automated digital ad-serving platform that buys and sells ads. Moore was a founder of 24/7 Media, a similar but smaller automated ad-serving platform. The DoubleClick purchase aroused Sorrell’s suspicions that Google intended to shove into the advertising business. “I wrote to Martin suggesting to him that we do a deal. He agreed,” Moore says. “He said he wanted to acquire us, not partner with us.” In 2011, Sorrell merged Moore’s 24/7 with Xaxis, a collector of data and an early programmatic advertising adopter. They were placed under the umbrella of WPP’s GroupM, and openly competed with DoubleClick and Facebook’s Atlas (which has since been abandoned by Facebook).
Those who work for Martin Sorrell, like those who worked for the younger Rupert Murdoch, always feel he is watching. Sorrell answers e-mails almost instantly on his BlackBerry, even when attending tennis matches at Wimbledon. Miles Young, before he voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Ogilvy, said, “I probably get three to four e-mails a day from him. I’m a great fan of his. He has an ability to be broad and strategic when needed, but at the same time he has the ability to be very detail oriented.” Sorrell is constantly in motion, jetting on commercial airlines to attend most ad conferences, be they in Los Angeles or Barcelona, to visit WPP offices in India or Brazil, to sit in on board meetings in Beijing or New York, to chair WPP’s four times yearly Stream conferences in Greece, Cannes, and elsewhere, to attend Google confabs in Sicily and Burning Man in Nevada.
The incessant e-mails help forge his reputation as a micromanager, as does his fecund memory for promised but unmet executive goals. More than a few WPP executives, not wanting to be quoted, complain that Sorrell nearly suffocates them with his over-their-shoulder attention to detail. Sorrell describes the claim that he is a micromanager as “a compliment,” explaining that the CEO of a company whose size is equal to “a ministate” must delve into details. Keith Reinhard, who orchestrated the ad agency mergers that became Omnicom, observes, “Omnicom is considered a holding company and WPP is a parent company.” Others disagree. David Sable, then in his sixth year as the CEO of Young & Rubicam, said, “Martin is an overrated meddler. Most people think he gets down in the weeds. I don’t think that’s true. Martin has rarely told me what to do.”
To understand Sorrell as a manager one has to begin with his self-identity as a founder, not a manager. He flicks aside the shareholder critics, not to mention former London mayor Boris Johnson, who railed against his steep pay—£43 million in 2014 and £70.4 million in 2015, making him the highest compensated executive in England. In an op-ed page piece he wrote for the Financial Times in June 2012, Sorrell declared, “I have been behaving as an owner, rather than as a ‘highly paid manager.’ If that is so, mea culpa. I thought that was the object of the exercise, to behave like an owner and entrepreneur and not a bureaucrat.” Today he owns 2 percent of WPP and chooses not to diversify his investments but to tie his wealth to how his company performs. “My dad said, ‘Invest with companies you know best,’” he says. Despite his rich pay, Sorrell rarely chooses to fly privately, insisting that it would cheat shareholders. He feels liberated to opine on most any subject, from Brexit to Donald Trump’s immigration policies (he was opposed to both), not to mention the unabashed joy he takes in belittling Maurice Levy, his Publicis rival.
Members of his WPP team bristle when he publicly disparages “the snooty” attitude of creatives, who play a diminished role in the advertising business. Interviewed by Michael Kassan before an Advertising Week audience in September 2015, he proclaimed, “Seventy-five percent of our revenues comes from things—$15 billion of nearly $20 billion—Don Draper wouldn’t recognize.” Often, he will declare that the folks who massage data, or buy ad time, or the financial types who shape an acquisition, or the engineers who devise ways to spread messages on social networks, are as creative as a copywriter. Miles Young doesn’t disagree that many marketing professions can be creative, as can a plumber. “But there’s a type of creativity concerned with ideas, and that’s what Martin probably doesn’t appreciate because he’s never worked inside an advertising agency.” It is not unusual to hear sneers that Sorrell is merely a suit, an accountant, as Bob Greenberg has described him. Jeremy Bullmore, who serves as an intellectual brain trust for Sorrell, would challenge that characterization. But he does disagree with Sorrell for bashing creative agencies: “That’s the wrong signal to send, and I don’t think it’s accurate.” He does not dispute Sorrell’s assertion that various parts of an agency can be creative. But his problem with the signal Sorrell is sending is that “it gets interpreted that we’re not in the advertising business anymore. That’s not a sensible thing to say because he is in the advertising business. The WPP group is an advertising group. He often has this irritating habit of saying things that on one level are obviously true, but their interpretation is not only wrong but dangerously wrong.”
Like any battle-scarred veteran, Sorrell has amassed detractors. In London, he is called “six twenty-one” behind his back, because June 21 is the year’s shortest night and he is thus "the shortest night." Michael Kassan believes the bad blood between Sorrell and Maurice Levy stems from when Levy and Sorrell were in a bidding war to buy the Cordiant Communications Group. “I was in the middle of it. That’s why Martin and I didn’t talk for three years,” Kassan says. He had not yet started MediaLink and was representing Cerberus Capital, the private equity firm whose specialty is making investments in distressed companies. Cerberus owned $79 million of Cordiant’s debt. But Cordiant had become overextended and slipped into default. Cerberus was unfamiliar with advertising agencies “and they brought me in.” Kassan spent three months in London, going back and forth between Sorrell and Levy. “Cerberus wanted to maximize its investment. Maurice and Martin were bidding against each other and Martin won. But it cost him more than he wanted it to cost him, and he blamed me. He made it personal. It wasn’t personal.”
Months after the deal closed, Kassan remembers walking into London’s Connaught Hotel with a client who spotted Sorrell and went over to say hello. Kassan followed and offered his hand. “He wouldn’t shake my hand.” Kassan says they only began to speak again some years later when he was hosting a dinner at Nobu for his client, AT&T, also a WPP client, and Kassan told his friend Irwin Gotlieb that Sorrell was not welcome—unless he apologized. He says Sorrell apologized. Told of Kassan’s account, Sorrell says he doesn’t recall the hotel incident or the AT&T incident. What he does recall is this: “Michael was not involved in the Cordiant negotiations. He was paid a fee by Cerberus for advice.”
Sorrell is famous for his intensity, which is almost exclusively devoted to WPP. His second wife, Cristiana Falcone, says he has few close friends, and even his oldest friend, Simon Schama, says they see each other maybe once a year. Longtime client Jack Haber of Colgate says of Sorrell, “I enjoy his company. He’s very funny. . . . I respect him.” But “I never for a minute don’t remember that Martin is my buddy because I’m an important client to him. It’s a billion dollars of business.” He remembers attending a cocktail party at the Consumer Electronics Show and he and three WPP executives agreed to go off to dinner. “I said, ‘Let’s ask Martin.’ They said, ‘Nope.’ He wasn’t going to be fun at dinner. I don’t mean any disrespect, but he’s a very tough, demanding boss.”
Cristiana Falcone likens her husband to the obsessive Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man. Seeking to add variety to his life, she booked a vacation to Uruguay for ten days. He quickly developed a routine. “We must go to lunch at one P.M. He would have a tantrum if we didn’t sit at the same table.” He would ask the waiter what the dessert choices were, but he always ordered the same dessert. His BlackBerry and iPhone and iPad accompany him everywhere. “This guy lives and breathes for WPP. He’s persistent. It’s what makes him successful.” Yet she takes care to introduce the testimony of three sons from his first marriage: “His sons say they had a great father.”
To understand Sorrell’s persistence, consider how he pursued Falcone. She was born in Rome in February 1973, the daughter of an airline pilot and senior Alitalia executive. After receiving an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, she worked for Shell and for the UN’s International Labor Organization. She eventually joined the World Economic Forum as a senior manager (and later, director) of the media and entertainment industries group, which coordinated with executives from these sectors who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos and elsewhere. When Sorrell laid eyes on the tall, slim, vivacious blonde with an Italian accent and a feisty I-don’t-bow-to-anyone personality, he was smitten. “For four years,” she says, “he invited me to join him for a drink in Davos and I did not go. He tried to convince me he was the right partner for me.” She had a Swiss boyfriend, and she declined. When she attended the Cannes Film Festival, she left a general message on her office phone that she was in Cannes. He showed up there. He pursued her by appearing at Forum meetings in South Africa, India, and Japan. Knowing that the Italian name her parents gave her was “Savage,” he says, “I named my dog [an Irish setter] after her.” He wore her down. She worried about the three-decade age gap, but was taken by his ardor, and his charm. She says, “He listens very well. He takes it in. He’s very inclusive.” He treated her like an equal. They married in 2008.
Charlotte Beers, who once reported to Sorrell and remains a trusted associate, vividly recalls his bitter divorce in 2003 and how unhappy he seemed. She went off to work in George W. Bush’s State Department and fell out of touch with Sorrell. When they reconnected after his marriage to Cristiana, she was struck by the change. “When I came upon him he looked ten years younger. He had a different energy. He had a delight in life. I think it’s from having a very happy union. He’s amused by it. He has a wonderful capacity for play. You’d never believe that because of how hard he works. But Cristiana is a player. She likes to dance. She likes to go to unusual things.” She lured him to attend Burning Man in the Nevada desert. She gave birth to their baby daughter in the fall of 2016.
One can fill notebooks with the criticism heaped upon Sorrell. But these don’t paint a complete picture. If we just froze the picture when David Ogilvy called him “an odious little shit” we would miss what happened next. After they met for the first time, Ogilvy wrote Sorrell: “To my surprise, I liked you. . . . I was flattered when you quoted my books, and even more so when you invited me to become chairman of your company, which goes by the name WPP. I accepted your invitation. . . . It remains for me to tell you that I am sorry I was so offensive to you—before we met.” When Ogilvy was dying of cancer, Sorrell visited him and promised to look after his wife. He did, and according to Miles Young, “it was Martin who paid for Ogilvy’s nurses. His image is as Genghis Khan of the ad world. But he’s really very caring.” When David Moore’s wife was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2007 and was being rushed by ambulance to a New York hospital, Moore was in London. He told Sorrell he had to rush back to the States to be with his wife. “When I landed I had three voice messages on my mobile phone from doctors Martin had called. They called me to offer their services.”
Sorrell’s vivid personality can overshadow his professional accomplishments. “He’s gone to places no one has gone,” Shelly Lazarus, who was CEO and is today chairman emeritus of Ogilvy, says. “He’s explored the future. He’s taken chances. He thinks long term. Everyone thought he was crazy when he invested in his first research company. He was right. He diversified WPP. He invested in programmatic buying when no one was sure what it was or where it was going. He is constantly traveling, soaking up information, figuring out the next thing.”
The Harvard Business Review ranked him as the fifth best CEO in the world in 2015. The only other marketing holding company executive to make the list of 100 of the best-performing CEOs was Maurice Levy. Sorrell had to be pleased that Levy only ranked thirty-ninth. In 2016, Sorrell was placed in the top three. All three were lauded for their courage in implementing long-term strategies.
Whatever their differences, there are many shared views in the agency world. They commonly believe advertising and marketing should be viewed as an investment in growth, not just a cost. They share a frustration that too many clients, led by procurement and chief financial officers, focus on the short term. By wrenching costs out of marketing budgets, they complain that clients are crippling agencies and failing to invest in their brands.
As Sorrell looks down the road, the two grave nemeses he sees to WPP’s business are the digital giants, like Google and Facebook, and the consulting and software companies. This is particularly awkward since the holding companies place billions of dollars worth of ads with Google and Facebook, and often employ the services of consulting and software companies. This is why Martin Sorrell popularized the phrase “frenemy” to describe companies that both cooperate and compete. On this point, at least, there is no disagreement between Sorrell and Maurice Levy, who says they are now going “directly to clients.” Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, especially in an age of turmoil and revolution.