Buy less print, more TV, more radio and a dollop of digital/social says WPP CEO. Some interesting quotes on where Sir Martin Sorrell sees the future of media. Even more interesting that he was talking at a Financial Times conference, a newspaper with a strong online presence conference and I was reading it on the Guardian’s website.
On WWP spending vs. consumer trends:
“TV viewing is about 43% of consumers’ time, [ad] investment is 43%, outdoor [advertising] and radio are about right…The two big [anomalies] are newspapers and magazines. We are still investing 20% [of client ad budgets] but consumers are only spending 7-10% of time. That has to change”.
On where digital plays into this:
The second anomaly is [the] internet and mobile where in the US it counts for about a third of time spent by consumers, but that the ad spend level is about 20%.
On technology companies really being media companies:
“I do regard Google as a media owner, yes. These are media owners masquerading as technology companies. Google sells Google, Facebook sells Facebook. Twitter sells Twitter.”
On who he sees as the winners in this seismic change:
“If I was going to invest money in all these stocks where would invest my money? I would in Google and Amazon. If buying for my grandkids that is where I would put it.”
I was also interested in seeing where budgets from WPP were spent. Google gets $2bn, AOL/Yahoo got $500m, Facebook got $200m and the amount Twitter got was “very much smaller”. In context, he said that WPP spends $72bn.
Disclosure: Martin Sorrell is CEO of WPP, the primary competitor to Omnicom, the company that I ultimately work for.
