Everyone stop what you’re doing: Sir Martin Sorrell has something to say.
Do you ever notice how Martin Sorrell’s predictions always get quoted in the press despite being utterly crapulent?
Every few months he comes along and predicts recessions to be certain shapes (‘L’, ‘V’, ‘Bath’, ‘Dog’, ‘Fanny’ etc.), then we watch as at least one of the several possibilities comes true. It’s like aiming at a target with a shotgun: only a complete idiot could fail to hit the bullseye.
But, y’know, he’s Sir Martin Sorrell, and people have to fill media sections of newspapers with something, so they keep on quoting the guy who can see the future about as well as Stevie Wonder can see his socks.
This time he’s telling us how much advertisers and readers will be looking forward to a Sun on Sunday.
I guess he’s right. It will indeed sell quite a few copies to the many people who miss reading that newspaper that listened in on the voicemails of a murdered teenager and printed the diary of a bereaved mother without her permission just to make some more money for a billionaire. But then I could have predicted that. In fact that’s what I just did a couple of sentences ago, because it’s completely fucking obvious.
And yes: advertisers will also be looking forward to placing their messages somewhere that lots of people will read them. The SoS will be an extension of The Sun, so if compamies don’t have a problem advertising there on Thursday then they’re unlikely to have a problem advertising there on Sunday.
Unlike Dickhead (see the comments section of the ‘Brand of the Free’ post below), I don’t have a problem with him ‘abusing his knighthood’. I find knighthoods quite funny because they have little or no actual value: a bunch of people think you did something good or owed you a favour and decided to give you some letters to go before or after your name. Nothing else changes. You get no more power. Many, many, questionable people have been given them and some people use the award as an excuse to behave like giant bells. So where’s the merit in that?
Anyway, back to Sir Martin of Sorrell: of course the diminutive tycoon wants to promote the Sun on Sunday. It means that WPP’s clients will be spending more media and production cash through his agencies, lining his pockets still further AND giving him the opportunity to slurp Murdoch’s bunghole again.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
All it would take is for some people – OK a lot of people – in agencies to stand up and say no, let’s not fund Rupert’s latest piece of total shite. Not going to happen is it. So Sir Shortarse will go on pontificating and people in agencies will go taking the contemporary king’s shilling and the world will carry right on.
The sad part is that the ones that might make a difference stopped being a part of it a while back, went elsewhere and those remaining, some worthy, try to pretend that there is still something to hang on to.
Despite ever-mounting evidence that there isn’t.
I still see a tiny amount of great work, more and more I just wonder how the fuck they managed to do it.
PS. How naive can you get?
Having worked for a number of agencies in Sir Martin’s empire, I am assured he is just as unpleasant in real life as I imagined him to be.
But that was obvious, wasn’t it.
I really like this post Ben. It is funny how people like Sir Martin become ‘gurus’ for the industry. Like a shorter version of Gordon Gekko but with a lot less charm and a much thicker skin, allegedly.
Ciaran, I too, wonder how anything great is made. Obviously, I understand that 94.2% is scam, but there is the odd thing out there that is actually real. How. The. Fuck. Does. It. Get. Made?
It probably doesn’t hurt that News International have just elected to spend a fuckload of cash (technical term) with WPP.
A lot of people with nothing to say can get away with saying it for years. In some case they can carry on after they’re dead. The Ogilvy office is plastered with David Ogilvy quotes. Not a single one of them is interesting and most are banal beyond belief.
‘A campaign without an idea will pass like a ship in the night’.
Er… thanks Dave.
I have it on good authority that the Sun on Sunday are struggling to shift their ad space. Get it up ye Sorrell.
Nice piece. The extent to which media outlets such as the Today programme lazily reach for Sorrell’s phone number whenever they want a perspective on the advertising industry has allowed his alarming sense of his own profundity to get out of hand.
And why is the Poison Dwarf so enthusiastic about the launch of The Sun on Sunday? Because WPP holds the £28m News International account, that’s why.
I think the bigger problem is the connection of media and advertising world. In my country literally 5-6 people control all.
There is systematic “dumbing down” to promote a buying mood. The “journalists” are cheerful girls with a lot of makeup, and the content is carefully noncontroversial, intellectually light, and demagogic
There a lot of fake scandals and the rest is advertorials — advertisements disguised as news. So on such landscape “sirs” and “gurus” thrive.
What happened to the guest blog on the Yoda ad?
I hope he hasn’t said anything about me.
Crapulent means ‘hungover’, Ben.
Does it really?
Well, you live and learn. I think it should change to being a la-di-dah alternative to crappy and this is my opening salvo in that battle.
1. Journos are lazy
2. Sir Martin has established himself as the ad industry’s ‘business voice’ (In the same way that Sir John and Trevor are the ‘creative voices’).
3. When the Lazy Journos need a business soundbite about the ad industry who do you think they are going to turn to? Exactly.
4. All he has to do is keep the PR hand outs coming and the column inches will follow.
You may not like him And he won’t give a flying fuck if you don’t. But he knows how to play the game.
‘But he knows how to play the game.’
The game as he understands it. And Dan W. plays the game as he understands it.
As Omar said:
… the game is out there. It’s either play or be played. That simple.
Rumour has it that WPP owned CHI has been asked to pitch for the Sun. Coincidence?
I don’t like The Sun. As a Liverpool fan that is a given, but I wouldn’t like it anyway. Even if they hadn’t written ‘The Truth’ on 16th April 1989. It’s a rag that preaches hate. And I have never met Sir Martin Sorrel, maybe he’s a lovely cute squirrel like creature, that like to read Beatrix Potter, but I doubt that very much. Anyway that quote about ‘either play or be played’ assumes that to achieve anything in life you have to be an utter utter C*nt. Which of course you don’t.
I believe sorrel has seen a link between the gunn report and share price. Expect a flood of wpp scam at Cannes this year.