We thought WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell had been a bit quiet at Cannes but it turns out he did say some quite newsworthy things – to Ad Age in this video.
For some reason they decided to sit on it for a week.
So: agencies aren’t banks so clients wanting to extend payment terms can bog off (until the day that all the others capitulate) and Publicis Groupe is mad to sign a deal guaranteeing revenue to Twitter as, he hints, IPG did with Facebook before it cashed in its shareholding. And he reminds the world of Aegis’s little spot of bother in Spain when extended payment terms to one client lost it £25m or so when said client went bust.
It’s also evident that all the stick he took for saying that media comes before creative still rankles. Here he seems to be saying that it comes first but “unlike the Don Drapers of this world” (or something similar) we should recognise that there’s creativity in media agencies too.
As indeed there is. But it’s not quite the same kind is it Martin? Look at the ads they sometimes produce.
