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Introduction
Sir Martin Sorrell
Chief Executive Officer
WPP
Chief Executive Officer
WPP
I once tried to explain to the Design and Art Directors' Association (D&AD) what had first attracted me to their world.
I was, after all, neither a creative person nor even an inspired planner or account director. I was widely regarded as a bean counter.
And I freely admitted that I liked counting beans very much indeed and found counting a great many beans a lot more satisfactory than counting very few beans.
But what had always interested me - and which continues to interest me - is how those beans are made in the first place.
Unlike any other business sector, I said, what we in the world of marketing communications invent and sell are not products but 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.
I was, after all, neither a creative person nor even an inspired planner or account director. I was widely regarded as a bean counter.
And I freely admitted that I liked counting beans very much indeed and found counting a great many beans a lot more satisfactory than counting very few beans.
But what had always interested me - and which continues to interest me - is how those beans are made in the first place.
Unlike any other business sector, I said, what we in the world of marketing communications invent and sell are not products but 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. Ours is a business of infuriating unpredictability; which is one of the reasons that it attracts so many unconventional and talented people; and is also one of the reasons that I was first drawn to it.
Assembled here you will find 260 pearls. They represent but a fraction of the number of pearls produced by WPP companies on behalf of their clients in the course of last year. I hope you find them as inspiring as I do. I admire their creators very much.
Seeing them showcased like this, it can surely come as little surprise that WPP, for the second year running, was declared the Holding Company of the Year by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
I'm not sure what the collective noun for pearls might be; but I continue to find them at least as satisfying to count as beans; and sometimes even more so.
Assembled here you will find 260 pearls. They represent but a fraction of the number of pearls produced by WPP companies on behalf of their clients in the course of last year. I hope you find them as inspiring as I do. I admire their creators very much.
Seeing them showcased like this, it can surely come as little surprise that WPP, for the second year running, was declared the Holding Company of the Year by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
I'm not sure what the collective noun for pearls might be; but I continue to find them at least as satisfying to count as beans; and sometimes even more so.