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Jan
6
Sorrell says his crew doesn’t believe in Digital
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Signage, digital ooh
Short post but a goodie if you believe the media business is suffering from “commoditization” and is too hooked into what they know and afraid of venturing into new territories.
From Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP (which owns an enormous amount of the agencies you know, if you weren’t aware):
“We don’t believe, given the pace of activity in digital and online, that our existing businesses can move fast enough….”
After today’s rumours of a 10% head rolling at WPP across the board, it will be interesting to see who pays attention at his companies…especially with the rank and file.
Martin has been trying to steer his agencies this way for a while but “les traditionelle” (the old guard) and the culture his companies are built on have stymied his efforts to “get there faster”.
Read this article…for anyone in the digital business - any digital business - Internet, mobile or DOOH, it’s almost scary…(teach me how to upload a video????)….but it will give you a great idea as to why it takes so long for new mediums like ours to get adopted - if your leaders don’t even understand the problem……
For you brands out there reading this, you’ll get a (cultural) idea as to why you don’t hear about new “stuff” and opportunities earlier (no true top down understanding of the very very quick shifts we all have to deal with with consumers) but you should also know that you need to know this stuff too…if you’re ignoring the new mediums, you’ve got a mid-term crisis coming for the growth of your brands. What’s the definition of insanity?
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result
Sound like the media business? 
Martin isn’t alone. Aegis is really the only one I’ve seen from the outside that culturally embraces (or is trying) the new media triad. There’s not a lot of full blown understanding out there about any of this “new” but man is it screwing with the “old”.
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Kudos to Sir Martin for seeing where things need to go, but it is a bit scary that powerful people at the agencies, who by definition are presumably “plugged into” culture, have to be introduced to Facebook and Twitter by a juggler. Clearly, these same people go home and TiVo their own campaigns out of the conscious realm. One would think they’d be be beating the drum for a better way to build client brands. The digital OOH industry needs to be a big part of future branding campaigns, and needs to make its value clear to agencies AND their clients. We all have work to do.