Advertising

Sir Martin Sorrell: advertising man who made the industry’s biggest pitch

(GUARDIAN) - When Sir Martin Sorrell got himself a puppy, a red setter, he named it Savage. As our car crawls through central London, from WPP’s Mayfair head office to Millbank, where Sorrell is to sit on a panel, the dog sits placidly in the back, lolling its head in the sun. The name couldn’t seem less apt. When Sorrell gets out, he offers a firm handshake and urges me to be nice to the mutt. “I called him Savage, because he isn’t,” he says.

The comment is left hanging in the air, asking to be grasped as a metaphor for Sorrell himself, who comes with a formidable reputation but in the space of the previous hour, squeezed between meetings, is charm itself.

He laughs at being called a “beancounter” and an outsider in the advertising world; he bemoans being stereotyped as a north London Jew; he makes repeated, slightly awkward jokes about his short stature and later sends an email apologising again for turning up late. It is easy to be drawn in. But for all the easy manner and self-deprecation, Sorrell has proven time and again that, unlike Savage, he has considerable bite.

It is 25 years since Sorrell took a loan out against his shares in Saatchi & Saatchi, where he had been finance director, and bought a small company called Wire and Plastic Products, which made wire baskets, and which he would build into the largest advertising and marketing services group in the world.

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