I said last week that WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell was in ‘a very exposed position’. Sure enough on Saturday he resigned from the global advertising giant he created and had run for more than 32 years. ‘But he didn’t “create” it,’ one ex-employee told me, illustrating the internal resentments that seem to have contributed to Sorrell’s downfall. ‘He just made a lot of acquisitions and counted the pennies.’ Whatever he did or didn’t do, his departure was undignified and ill-explained. After he’d gone, WPP’s board announced that its investigation into an allegation of financial misconduct against him had concluded, but ‘did not involve amounts that are material’ and would not be mentioned again. That left the world thinking that the resignation swiftly rebadged as ‘retirement’ was really about WPP’s falling share price, driven by sentiment that the top man’s time was up.
Pundits are now asking whether WPP’s conglomerate model from the 1980s can survive without Sorrell in a fragmented new world of advertising that’s obsessed with the sorcery of social media and ‘big data’.
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