Harvard Business School

Transcript

Well, that's quite simple, from my point of view. Success would be the epitaph which said, "He was involved, or responsible, partially responsible for building the best business in our industry."

Now, our industry is what we call communication services, so it's advertising and marketing services. So not just advertising and media planning and buying, but public relations, public affairs, branding and identity, information insight and consultancy, and market research, health care communications, direct digital interactive. So that broadly defines it. It's a trillion dollar industry, as we calculated. And what I would like people to say is WPP, and its constituent operating companies, because we're a multibranded model, which has grown principally by acquisition, organically as well, but principally. So it's a difficult model, in my view, to run, probably the most difficult model.

For people to say that that is the best in the industry, now what does that mean? It means two things. Firstly, that if any client is thinking about building their relationship, or starting their relationship with an advertising and marketing service company they automatically—it's a Pavlovian reaction to think about our companies, our operating brands, and WPP. Because increasingly WPP is becoming a factor in pitches and presentations. So that's one thing on the client side.

On the people side, anybody who's thinking about a career in our industry, whether they're graduating from the Harvard Business School, from an art school or design school, from the Royal College of Art in London, or wherever it happens to be, or thinking of changing jobs within our industry automatically thinks of our operating brands and WPP as being the best in the industry. That's what I mean. It's not necessarily about being the largest, although the press always like to focus on that.

And I think the other thing is having started it from scratch, I mean, I know we built it. We celebrated its 60th anniversary this week in New York. JWT is 150 years old, or almost 150. I mean, these are businesses which are multi-generational businesses. But, I mean, they look at WPP, and they say we're the best, because we're the best at doing what we do. And if anybody wants to engage an agency, or if anybody wants to join an agency, they automatically think of us.

And, you know, people say, "Is it about market value?" Well, if you do what I just said, you'll have the best market value marketing, total shareholder return, everything else will fall into place.