Can Martin Sorrell Change WPP Faster than the Ad World Changes Itself?

On Sunday, the ad world — those paying for ads, those crafting them and those profiting by serving them up — will takeover Cannes for the 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the Oscars of advertising.

While much of the media attention will focus on the campaigns that win the prestigious Lion prizes (here are AdWeek's picks), the major discussions won’t be around the creatives, but the changes in the business. Where do Publicis and Omnicom go next after their abandoned merger? How big can content marketing/native advertising get and who wins? Has the bubble burst in ad tech? How will the emergence of data-empowered CMOs change the relationships between brands and agencies?

The man who many will turn to for the answers is WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell. At 69, Sorrell has not just seen the changes in the ad industry, he’s led them. Sorrell set in motion the drive to build scale by turning the former Wire and Plastic Products company into the planet's largest ad agency and he's been on the forefront of embracing data in all forms and top emerging markets as the keys to growing even bigger.

A few weeks before Cannes, Sorrell stopped by LinkedIn’s NYC offices to talk about the state of the economy, the massive changes in advertising driven by the vast collection of data — and how he's reorganizing WPP in the face of both.

Here are some excerpts.

How the ubiquity of data has changed the ad world — and why it’s time to bury for good the Mad Men image of advertising (see his post today, “Don Draper Wouldn’t Recognise 75% of What We Do”):

[This year at Cannes] for the first time, they will be including awards for data and data visualization in addition to health care. So Cannes is sort of expanding into areas which Don Draper wouldn't recognize. In fact, there's about three quarters of our business in digital, media planning and buying and data. Sort of our $18 billion, projected $19 billion of revenues for this year, three quarters of it is stuff that Don Draper in the '60s wouldn't have known of. So this balance — of mad men, math men, of art and science, left brain, right brain — is really very important and we have to understand it.

Why he thinks American Express’s recent decision to shift 100% of its online ad buying to programmatic is a sign of creativity:

The financial services companies tend to be amongst the most sophisticated in the use of online and digital and John Hayes who's the CMO of AmEx has been in the forefront along with Ken Chenault, the CEO, of building their reputation online — not just in programmatic buying but in understanding the importance of targeting. That's creativity. [I]t's not about a 30-second TV ad, [but] that doesn't mean that that's not highly creative and on the forefront and cutting edge.

On instituting “horizontality” at WPP – the concept of having one client's work spread across WPP offices and brands, with a "client leader" overseeing each of the 41 largest accounts, responsible for 1/3 of WPP’s revenue. (Sorrell delights in calling the nearly merged Publicis-Ominicom Group, "POG.")

We haven’t pulled it off yet… I think we're getting better at it and I think we're better than POG — or the failed POG or the dead POG — and the others. For one-plus-one to be more than two, we have to get value: Value for our clients and value for our people. Our clients because we'll be more effective and more efficient, and for our people because they will learn more by interacting with people inside the company… I'm convinced that this is the best structure.

On why the work in reorganizing WPP is taking time — and how he sees that as a sign that he's hired the right people.

It's very difficult sometimes to find good people, excellent people who are cooperative. You find average people are cooperative. It's a very difficult and dangerous thing to say because… the average people think that to be good, they have to be difficult. So it defeats the purpose. But it really is difficult… At the end of the day, the real acid test is whether you can manage very strong people who have very strong track records. And I have to admit, it's very difficult. So I would say a third to 40% is selling in, two-thirds really is making it work.

Photo: Chip Cutter / LinkedIn