We're delighted to be celebrating our 25th anniversary... and, by
happy coincidence, the HuffPost's 5th anniversary. Ours is a silver
anniversary, I guess, but it's difficult to digitize silver, certainly
by voice, so we turned to somebody who has followed the company
virtually since its inception, since it was a wire basket
manufacturer 25 years ago, when we started out as two people in one
room in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London.
We've asked Professor Joe Bower, professor at the Harvard Business
School, who has been writing about WPP, using video digital case
studies for 15 or so years. And Joe's done a little retrospective on
the company, and we thought that the readers of the Huffington Post
would be interested in reading his thoughts on WPP.
I think WPP's halfway there; our objective is to be the best marketing
services company in the world, and by best we mean the natural choice
of both clients and people; the natural choice of clients when they
select an adviser or a partner in the area of advertising and
marketing services and of people when they select brands or companies
to go to build their careers in advertising and marketing services.
We think we're there in some parts of the world and in some functions,
but we have a long way to go, and our strategic focus remains the new
markets, the fast-growing markets of the world (the BRICs and
Next-11), the new media, the new digital opportunities (in personal
computers, the internet, mobile, video content, social networks) and
last but not least, consumer insight. By consumer insight we mean
understanding how consumers are changing their purchasing habits for
products and services, how they're changing their media consumption
habits and how we can apply that data through technology to improving
the return on investment for our clients in their industries. So I
hope you enjoy Joe's thoughts, and we're delighted to celebrate our
anniversary on May 9, 2010.
And here's the video case study on WPP by Sonja Ellingson Hout: