Sir Martin Sorrell is back with a vengeance.
Within months of being booted from his advertising giant WPP over cringeworthy allegations not fit for a family newspaper, he has snapped up one forward-looking agency and is now poised to buy another.
The first was MediaMonks, a company making online ads for the likes of Adidas, Netflix and Shell. That deal set up Sorrell’s new company, S4 Capital, as a rival to WPP’s creative agencies.
Now he’s hunting for what’s known as programmatic ad companies. These replace with algorithms the human beings who buy advertising space. How? When content — a news story, say — is loaded up onto a website, reams of data about the kind of people likely to view it are sent to an online marketplace. Potential advertisers can assess how likely those folks are to be potential customers, then bid to place an ad.
The evaluations and bidding are done in milliseconds by computer programs using vast amounts of data. In theory, Joe Public only gets shown ads relevant to their interests, while the advertiser saves money by no longer spraying ads around at the wrong people.
Programmatic advertising is one of the reasons old-fashioned media buying agencies are struggling.
Sorrell’s move into the market not only pitches him against traditional media buyers but arguably seeks to put them out of business altogether. Why? Because companies like MightyHive, which Sorrell wants to buy, help multinationals bring their programmatic ad work in-house, bypassing traditional agencies. WPP is trying to do this kind of work too, but is hampered by its old agency baggage. For Sorrell, it seems, revenge is a dish best served cold.
