The Tiny Company That Spawned a Global Media Empire Gets the Ax

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Who even knew that WPP Plc still made wire baskets?

It’s the basis for a good pub trivia question: former Chief Executive Officer Martin Sorrell built the world’s largest ads company by seeking out a publicly traded business where he could acquire control on the cheap, then use it as a deal-making vehicle to expand. The company he found was Wire and Plastic Products, a maker of wire baskets. In 1985, he bought a controlling stake, and over the subsequent 33 years expanded it into a 16-billion-pound global advertising player.

Mark Read, Sorrell’s successor, is on the cusp of selling that business, British newspaper The Times reported on Saturday. I, for one, was flabbergasted to discover that WPP still owned it.

It’s an infinitesimally small part of WPP’s business. The 973,641 pounds ($1.2 million) of 2017 sales it generated, the most recent fiscal year filed at Companies House, represented 0.006% of the parent company’s revenue. Or seven seconds of advertising at the Super Bowl halftime, where a 30-second slot costs $5 million.

But this divestment isn’t about the money, per se. The company’s continued presence in the WPP stable is emblematic of the bloat which became endemic under Sorrell, whose investments included a 9% stake in publisher Vice Media and 19% stake in Argentinian software firm Globant SA. Read is demonstrating a clean break from the previous era. The message is that there’s no room for sentimentality.

He’s earmarked 200 million pounds worth of divestments this year, adding to the 849 million pounds of businesses he sold last year. That excludes the sale of a majority stake in its Kantar market research business, which may close in the next few weeks and could be valued at more than 3 billion pounds. It’s a long overdue streamlining.

Divestments alone won’t fix WPP’s problems. Sales in North America, the firm’s biggest market, continue to fall. Read has pushed through the internal mergers of some of his most prominent agencies: J. Walter Thompson has been combined with digital agency Wunderman to form Wunderman Thompson, for instance.

Read signaled in an interview with Bloomberg News last week that he wasn’t done with acquisitions either. He tried to indicate that this wasn’t just taking a leaf from the Sorrell playbook, of buying customers and therefore growth.

His stated aim is to be more strategic and buy digital capabilities, even in the creative space. That would echo archrival Publicis Groupe SA’s $4.4 billion deal to acquire digital marketing specialist Epsilon in April. It seems the transformation has a long way to go.

For his part, Sorrell is building a new advertising holding company, having engineered a reverse takeover of Derriston Capital Plc and rebranding it S4 Capital Ltd. to fuel new deals. I fear it’s an unlikely eventuality, but I do wonder whether Sorrell’s impish side would be tempted to buy Wire and Plastic Products, just to close the loop.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jennifer Ryan at jryan13@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Alex Webb is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe's technology, media and communications industries. He previously covered Apple and other technology companies for Bloomberg News in San Francisco.

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