Beans and Pearls: Seminal lecture delivered by Martin Sorrell to D&AD in 1996 placing creativity – in its widest sense – at the core of WPP’s offer to clients.

By Martin Sorrell

Publisher: WPP

This lecture was given in London in November 1996 as part of the Design and Art Direction President's Lecture series.



"In a business world that is going to put a higher and higher value on integrated creativity, we are in danger of losing what should be our overwhelming advantage ­ by allowing something called creativity to be confined to the creative compound.

What we sell are pearls. Whether we are designers or planners or writers or art directors or corporate strategists, our raw material is knowledge. We turn that knowledge into ideas, insights, and objects that have a material, quantifiable value to our clients.

They are all pearls: of wisdom, of beauty, of desire, of wonder. Only the human mind can perform this extraordinary alchemy. And only certain kinds of mind, at that. But here we must be very careful. We have come to believe that only very few are alchemists ­ and I think that¹s wrong and dangerous.

I believe we will survive and thrive in the new creative age only if we enlarge both our understanding and our delivery of creativity."

- Martin Sorrell