Sir Martin Sorrell talks at Business Insider Ignition

Sir Martin Sorrell
Slaven
Vlasic/Getty Images

• The spirit of creative disruption that characterizes
  Burning Man is akin to the changes sweeping through the
  advertising industry today, according to Sir Martin
  Sorrell.
• The head of S4 Capital,
  which just announced its second acquisition in the form of ad
  tech company MightyHive Tuesday morning, said that the
  advertising industry has to go through radical change.
• Sorrell also addressed how S4 has been going around
  pitching itself to investors, saying that S4 was like “a motor
  torpedo boat” versus legacy advertising
  businesses. 

What does the advertising industry have in common with Burning
Man? More than you’d think, according to Sir Martin Sorrell.

The spirit of creative disruption that characterizes the
annual pop-up creativity festival is akin to the massive
changes currently sweeping through the advertising industry, the
former WPP chief said in a conversation with Business Insider UK
editor-in-chief Jim Edwards at Business Insider’s IGNITION
Conference in New York on Tuesday.

“There’s a strange sort of analogy between our industry and what
you see at Burning Man,” Sorrell, who said he had attended the
festival three times himself, told Edwards. “What it symbolizes
to me is creative disruption.”

The head of S4 Capital,
which just announced its second acquisition in the form of ad
tech company MightyHive Tuesday morning, said that “there has
to be a radical change” in the advertising industry.

“Some people refer to it evolutionary … I think it’s
revolutionary,” he said. “The pace at which it is happening is so
intense and so quick, that it’s revolutionary, and that’s one of
the things that I experienced at WPP.”

With MightyHive – which specialises in programmatic advertising –
and MediaMonks on its roster, S4 Capital can now seemingly offer
full-service digital marketing capabilities. But the “acid test”
for the firm would be whether it generates significant
differentiation for its clients, Sorrell, who departed from WPP
earlier this year, said.

“The acid test of S4 will not be acquiring MediaMonks, not
acquiring or MightyHive … it will be whether the combination
works effectively and whether it has correctly analyzed what
clients want.”

Sorrell also shared anecdotes of how S4 has been going around
pitching itself to investors, saying that the firm was at an
advantage as it doesn’t face any of the challenges that other
incumbent legacy advertising businesses inherently come with.

He recently told an investment institution, for instance, that
with a legacy business, “it’s like trying to weld aircraft
carriers together as opposed to a motor torpedo boat,” a
thinly-veiled swipe at his former company WPP,
which has been trying to simplify its various networks and revive
growth by merging entities together.

That investor then apparently responded with his own version of
the analogy, according to Sir Sorrell, saying that “when you put
the two dead birds together, you may have four wings, but it
doesn’t mean that you can fly.”