After completing several acquisitions in the interactive ad space all over the globe this year, WPP Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell expects to concentrate the company’s investments in the Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese markets. I spoke to him following his presentation at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference in New York this week, and he offered his rationale for shifting the company’s focus away fromthe U.S. and Europe. “Our clients are obsessed in top-line growth. And where do you get that? You get that in the faster growing geographies and the faster growing technologies. That’s what our clients are trying to do and so, by extension, are we.” Some excerpts from his presentation and our discussion follow below, with the full story available on our sister site, Paidcontent.org.
— Digital and geography: At one point, Sorrell displayed all WPP’s recent acquisitions, with a large Venn diagram showing companies that fit into “emerging geographies” and “emerging media” and which ones intersected. That’s where he’ll focusing most of his acquisition targets moving forward. In particular, Sorrell expects that the next wave of investments and acquisitions will resemble the recent 75 percent stake it took in Indian ad agency Quasar. He outlined some of the other tasks ahead of the company in the digital space: one is to activate what he called the company’s “legacy businesses”
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