Will Martin Sorrell Be Remembered for Saving the Ad Industry, or for Crushing Its Soul?

In the wake of Martin Sorrell’s departure from WPP—and the agency’s cryptic, murky handling of it—one thing is undeniably clear: Over the course of more than three decades, he remade the ad industry in his own image. And almost everyone else had no choice but to follow along.

“There are lots of people with axes to grind with Sir Martin,” said SoloUnion founder Matthew Bull, who formerly served as CCO at mcgarrybowen and CEO of Lowe London. “[But] he was a courageous guy, make no mistake. He had a vision about how he thought the industry should work, and he worked relentlessly to achieve it.”

But that vision didn’t always square with other leaders—especially creatives.

Did Sorrell truly marginalize creativity?

IPG officially started nearly 25 years before WPP, so Sorrell certainly didn’t conceive of the holding group.

Bull described these original company runners as “backroom guys” managing “amorphous brands.” And it was Sorrell who made WPP the dominant name in advertising, arguably at the expense of better-known properties like Ogilvy, JWT and Y&R. Perhaps even more importantly, he split creative and media work into two distinct functions, with media providing a far larger share of profits. One longtime WPP executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the move a “marginalizing of creative agencies.”

Bull echoed the sentiment, adding: “All of a sudden, if you’re Ogilvy, your measure of success is your margin, not how great your work is. For a guy like me, that is deeply upsetting.”

In short, the quality of the product itself mattered less to WPP investors than the profit margins to be had in securing its placement. But how much of this shift can be attributed to Sorrell himself?

“Detractors have already said he ruined the industry, ran it like an accountant and destroyed creativity,” said Tom Denford, co-founder of international search consultancy ID Comms. But Sorrell was simply answering clients’ demands by separating the “transactional” business of media buying from retainer-based services like creative, PR and design … and thereby achieving greater cost efficiency.

This shift de-emphasized creativity and encouraged the widespread commoditization of media agencies. “Media became all about pricing, but Sorrell was responding to advertisers. He wasn’t leading them toward that,” Denford said. He also noted that we have no way to know how creative shops, some of which had financial problems of their own, would have fared under independent management.

The unnamed, longtime WPP leader said that while Sorrell unquestionably “let money rule,” he also “put a lot of emphasis on how important it was to win at Cannes, in a good way.”

“He rescued [the agencies he acquired] from the abyss,” said the former executive. “The industry forgets that.”

The ad industry was already moving away from traditional concepts of creative excellence, Denford said, adding: “A new golden age of creativity will not happen. It’s too automated and technologically driven now.”

This business was always personal

Even Sorrell’s detractors can’t deny his outsize influence.

“He was always looking forward. He wasn’t afraid of innovation or technology. He was a very inspirational guy,” said Truth Agency founder and CEO Mary Keane Dawson, who first met Sorrell to discuss the sale of Spafax to WPP in 2000. “We basically believed that WPP was the most exciting business in the marcom sector at the time.”

But the atmosphere was very different 15 years later, when Dawson encountered Sorrell again while serving as U.K. managing director at Neo@Ogilvy.

“There was a lot of politics, a lot of unhappy senior people,” she said. “It was very focused on meeting the numbers, and you couldn’t meet the numbers the old-fashioned way. Clients aren’t spending money on creative in the way that they once did. The whole edifice was quite adversarial.”

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Erik Oster

@ErikDOster

Erik Oster is a staff writer for Adweek.

Lindsay Rittenhouse

@kitten_mouse

Lindsay Rittenhouse is a staff writer at Adweek, where she specializes in covering the world of agencies and their clients.

Patrick Coffee

@PatrickCoffee

Patrick Coffee is a senior editor for Adweek.