It’s a dry, spare document. But beneath the dense, printed undergrowth of Centaur Media’s Interim Management Statement 7464E – out on City desks first thing this morning – lies a rich speculative mulch. Take this, for example: Geoff Wilmot is stepping down as CEO but has agreed to remain with the business until the end [...]
What’s the biggest, most successful, company you’ve never heard of? Impossible to say, of course. But a good candidate would be Aberdeen Asset Management. It’s in the FTSE100; it’s genuinely global. And it’s very profitable indeed, judging from its latest interim figures. Just to make the point: profit before tax increased 37per cent to £223m; [...]
The most interesting thing about WPP Group’s first quarter financial results were not the numbers, but its chief executive’s obiter dicta. The numbers themselves were a curate’s egg. They beat the revenue forecast, bizarrely enough they delighted in Britain, but they disappointed in the United States. Which is just about the only part of the [...]
Having, a while back, complimented Chris Macdonald on the improved quality of his tailoring, it would be churlish not to congratulate London’s sharpest suit on landing the hot seat at McCann New York, where he will soon become president. Macdonald (left), who combines the position of McCann London group chairman with agency chief executive, is [...]
Whoever said advertising was a young person’s business? The conventional wisdom is that at 40, most ad executives would be advised to investigate a second career. And at 50, they’ll be positively clapped out and have “post-economic” freedom foisted upon them whether they like it or not. Superficially, membership statistics for the Institute of Practitioners [...]
For years, you’ve run your own brand consultancy. After successfully selling it, you step into the limelight as chairman of the Central Office of Information, only to find that mad axeman and part-time cabinet minister Francis Maude is cutting off at the knees the very organisation you’ve just been invited to head. What next? I [...]
After years of being a jet-setting senior suit in someone else’s service, Richard Pinder has decided to go global on his own account with the ambitious launch of his own international network, The House Worldwide. Pinder (left), it will be recalled, was head of Publicis Worldwide for five years until group succession politics (the imposition [...]
What could be more timely than demonstrating the little car’s exceptional cargo-carrying capacity than three nubile women, one scantily clad, all three bound and gagged, occupying the boot space? Closer inspection of the ad reveals that the caricatures are supposed to represent actual celebrities. In the front seat is Paris Hilton, looking over her shoulder [...]
Oh Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! they chortled in their joy! The political class seems intoxicated with having finally, excruciatingly, achieved cross-party consensus on regulating the press. Everyone, it seems, is a winner. Dave has gambled – with losing a vote in the House of Commons, and implicit in it a momentous amount of face – [...]
There’s a rather thrilling viral doing the rounds that features top NASCAR (US stock car) racer Jeff Gordon giving a car salesman the ride of his life in a used Chevrolet Camaro. A heavily disguised Jeff (left) is posing as a mousy middle-aged punter, and the stunt is, allegedly, in the service of Pepsi Max, [...]
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