As the sweep of Ogilvy took place today, Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of mother ship WPP, was in Athens with a select group of 250 staffers and other “smart people” to brainstorm about the future of the business.
Well, what are these high level thinkers doing? According to Business Week, there are jugglers to get people’s creative juices flowing. The Nintendo Wii is manned by ad execs and others are listening to an executive from Britain’s Guardian newspaper give a presentation entitled “Oh My God, the Internet Ate My Business!”
Your mouth went try at the mention of jugglers and by now, you are probably gagging a little bit. Anyone in the trenches of the ad industry should be appalled and dismayed right now. Can you believe that the guys in charge are just now getting a lesson about the internet? CEOs of digital agencies? Don’t feel bad about that shit eating grin you’re sporting. Clearly, the death star agencies are farther behind the curve then we all thought.
What’s Sorrell’s plan? “Sorrell is now pushing for every one of his 133,000 employees-along with the 15 heavyweight members of his board-to embrace digital technology like there’s no tomorrow.”
Fucking christ. You fucking joker. Embrace digital! You should be ashamed! Come on. For how long has there been internal pressure at WPP do just that? How many staffers have left to join digital shops or head into the tech sector because you guys have been asleep at the wheel? Buying up digital agencies isn’t going to save you.
“WPP has set up digital training courses for 3,000 managers to find ways to engage customers with tools like Twitter and Facebook, among other new channels.”
You’re already too late on this on, papi. If you get myopic and just focus on digital, mobile and gaming are going to leave your ass in the lurch in just a few short years. Lets not even talk about real world issues like identity, expression, feminism and race in the US that are going to catch you out in the cold in the same amount of time. Lets not talk about the ever present need to do good that continues to face down your clients. Are you ready to confront all these issues as well?
In the article, the writer goes on to discuss how Marty wants more cooperation between his firms. Blah, blah, blah. Sorrell is basically admitting that WPP has become irrelevant. That they’ve done it to themselves and the solution? From what this article says, they really have no solution at all.