Martin
Sorrell, chief executive of WPP and one of adland's best known soothsayers, has
dramatically revised his stance on the viability of publishers charging for
content online following comments from the quintessential newspaper man, Rupert
Murdoch.
Speaking at an industry event
in Greece last week, The Daily Telegraph reports an irrepressible Sorrell,
as saying: "[Rupert] Murdoch is absolutely correct to try and get people
paying for content - it is critical for traditional media businesses as there
is not enough advertising to support these models anymore.
"Getting consumers to pay for content they value is key. We have to find
those areas."
Such sentiments will be music to the ears of those operating in the embattled
newspaper sector, which according to Sorrell's own media investment arm GroupM
is expected to see advertising revenue plummet 26% in the UK
this year.
But such apparent support for online pay-walls flies in the face of Sorrell's
own vision of the future, announced less than 10 months earlier.
Addressing an international
advertising event in January, there could be no mistaking what the WPP
leader thought about the position traditional publishers now find themselves
in, or his reservations about charging for web content.
"Some of the structural changes we're seeing taking place in the
[newspaper] industry, particularly in America, the failure and bankruptcy and
reorganisation of these [publishing] companies is going to continue. And
there's no way of stopping it, because we've given it away for free," he
said.
"The seeds of this problem were sown when the people who created the new
media industry, probably in the early nineties, decided - rightly from the
consumers point of view I have to say - to give it away for nothing.
"It's impossible actually now to take it up. You can start up here [high]
and take your pricing down, but you can't start there [free] and start moving
it up."
It appears News Corp's
venerable leader's commitment to "charge for all our news websites",
buoyed by thriving online subs at the Wall Street Journal, has led Sorrell to
change his mind.
It marks the latest backtrack in what has been a tricky year for WPP's famous
crystal ball-gazer, who, lest we forget, is responsible for group billings of
more than $80 billion, or around a third of all the world's measured media
buying.
At the same event in January, Sorrell predicted "a flat year" for the
global ad market in 2009, adding reassuringly: "We're not looking at the
Armageddon or the Apocalypse Now that analysts and media followers are
forecasting.
"We don't see it as bad as Goldman and others who talk about -5, I see -10
from [some quarters] which seems somewhat strange."
Nine long months, a series of forecast revisions, and thousands of redundancies
later, and Sorrell now accepts a drop of 5.5% is the most likely outcome.
But then it's been one of those years; also at the IAA event in January, media
execs were expressing incredulity at the suggestion a former Russian spy was
being bandied around as a potential buyer for London's
Evening Standard.
