Martin Sorrell Quotes

#1. I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.

Martin Sorrell

#2. The web attacks traditional ways of doing things and elites, and this is very uncomfortable for traditional businesses to deal with.

Martin Sorrell

#3. Marketing is an investment, not a cost.

Martin Sorrell

#4. If you ask what keeps me up at night, it's the pressure in the system forcing us to do all sorts of things. Content, data and technology are forcing us to think about business in a very different way.

Martin Sorrell

#5. It doesn't make much sense and it's nil premium. They're going to have co-CEOs ... which is a very uncomfortable structure.

Martin Sorrell

#6. In the rain-swept afternoon
my heart discovers
the tragedy of autumn
raining from the trees.

Martin Sorrell

#7. We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

Martin Sorrell

#8. In an era of transparency, you can have innovation without branding, but you cannot have branding without innovation.

Martin Sorrell

#9. In our business, except in media buying, there are few economies of scale. Client perception of creative agencies is that the bigger they are, the worse they are.

Martin Sorrell

#10. In the 19th century China dominated the manufacture of porcelain. Then European factories discovered a cheaper method of making pottery of equal quality, demolishing the Chinese industry the exact reverse of what is happening now. World economics have turned full circle.

Martin Sorrell