Martin Sorrell, the head honcho of advertising behemoth WPP, was last mentioned on Danwei in the article Socialistic anarchists eating our own babies, which quotes him criticizing free online content.
Today he is in the news again talking about online advertising and Google. From Marketingvox.com:
WPP’s Sorrell: Online Advertising Boom Ahead
The proportion of WPP Group’s internet advertising business will double within 10 years, its founder and CEO Sir Martin Sorrell tells the New York Sun. And he’s particularly bullish about the industry as a whole for the next couple of years, citing the Beijing Olympics and U.S. presidential election, which he says will add two percent to overall ad spending – or some $24 billion of the $1.2 trillion worldwide.
Sorrell says about $1.5 billion of WPP’s 2005 revenues of $10 billion were related to online: “About 15 percent of our business is internet, and this will be 30 percent in 10 years,” he is quoted as saying. He also touches on the disruptive Google phenomenon.
“We’re Google’s third-biggest customer. They want us to buy more. At the same time, they are threatening to compete with us by setting up electronic platforms to buy and sell media,” he is quoted as saying.
Sir Martin is also quoted in another article on Marketingvox.com about mobile phone advertising:
Mobile Ads ‘Quickly’ to Become Mainstream
Cell phone and media companies expect mobile advertising to soon become a sizable market and will offer, inter alia, ad-subsidized mobile video services, according to top executives at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit, Reuters reports. Viacom is working with major operators and planning mobile ad trials; Sprint wants to offer subsidized wireless video and local ads on phones.
“It’s a major opportunity,” Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group, said at the summit, adding that the potential of measurability was a key attraction of mobile advertising – and it would become mainstream “quickly.
- Image of Martin Sorrell taken from WPP website