Martin Sorrell Quotations

We're insulated a little bit from the recession because of our cost structure, but our business is to some extent cyclical, ... With pressure on network TV, rising (interest) rates against inflation and lower, declining audiences, clearly clients are looking at alternatives.

There are very few events that have significant reach anymore. That's the paradox of Super Bowl advertising -- why does a 30-second spot cost $2.5 million? There is a pool of money which has remained pretty much the same that is willing to bid for those programs.

I have never heard such optimism, and such positive noise about growth and development in India,

We're now in a situation where people are questioning consumer spending.

We'll continue to look at it over the next week or so and take a decision one way or another,

We're building our brand in Asia. With iPR, it clearly makes Ogilvy the strongest public relations company in the region.

The second quarter was stronger in France and Germany, ... The UK is not as stabilized or as strong.

The television ratings were, I think, a little bit disappointing, but NBC said they made a good return on it.

Primarily our strategy is organic growth, buttressed by acquisitions.

a terribly invidious position by people giving him an earache about this.

The volume and the demand is so great ... we're able to price our services a little bit more aggressively as a result,

I was carrying Jackie Stewart's bag! Formula One was pretty much the same back then.

F1 is exciting, its values are attractive and it could be an even better family sport.

One of the reasons why they are optimistic is that there is more competition. Red Bull has become more competitive, the races have become more attractive - and that is what fans want!

Monaco was my first race of the season and I spoke with a number of people and all seemed to be very optimistic.

Formula One does very well. It is a very interesting asset. Could it be run in a different way? Sure it could be. Could it be improved? I'm sure it could. But all I can say is, it seems to do pretty well.

Somebody who is unique - and this will get me into trouble - by definition cannot be replaced.

I recently interviewed Bernie Ecclestone in London. He had a go at women, said [Vladimir] Putin should be running Europe and so on. He enjoys it - he's been doing it for such a long time. He has an entrenched position. The truth be known, he is unique, right?

It is always easy to criticize, as Bernie Ecclestone is somebody with extreme opinions.

F1 is a fight for people's time. There are millions of options today for how to spend it. That is probably the biggest difference from 1968 to now.

If you pay 50 million for something, you probably pay another 50 to 100 million to activate it. And the more you spend, the better you do. There is no point in just buying rights.

You have to see it on a broader level. But you also have to activate it properly.

You must not only focus on the consumer, but also on what it does to you internally - getting people aligned to the strategic mission of the company - what it does to the suppliers, governments, all your stakeholders...

Formula One gives a platform to companies like Rolex - and that's just in media space, watching television or reading newspapers, digital or physical. You see the brand in the context of the competition and bring it to the attention of everybody on a regular basis.

The world is changing. And a lot of people in Formula One are starting to understand this.

That might be the old model: to get a fixed fee. You have to start to think about other models and how they can generate interest - what it can do for a brand in the future - and about the fact that revenue can also be generated in many other ways... Just look at the one and a half million people at the free Rolling Stones concert in Cuba. And Cuba is not Central Park! So just use your imagination as to what kind of revenue can be made...

The last person in the UK who described his product as being crap in public was one Gerald Ratner - and he was gone immediately.

And there are some - Bernie [Ecclestone] and others - who are embracing new technologies. When Sky UK started to broadcast there was an argument that audience would come down because it is pay TV. But the actual quality of the production and the use of technology and the engagement of the viewer is much better than it ever was. The product is simply better.

The fast growing markets - the BRICS and Next Eleven - are the key. The next billion consumers are not going to come from the US or Western Europe - they are coming from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Formula One follows our strategy: fast growing markets, data, and digital. All those three things Formula One has. And it involves a stunning array of companies. Now that doesn't mean there can't be more...

[Formula One racing] will be very different - as the technology will be very different and that will make fans consume it in a completely different way. I said before that I believe that Virtual Reality will hit it big time.

I believe that Virtual Reality will hit it big time. I know that some of my colleagues disagree, but I believe in it.

If I were to be super critical, I would say Formula One is too tactical and not strategic enough. And that brings us back to the digital issue: you may have to invest in order to gain - sacrifice some short-term effects in order to make high returns in the future.

When you have two people challenge for the same job and you keep them both and call them co-CEOs, or the whole fiasco of a 'merger of equals'... there is no such a thing. So if there should be dreams of dual leadership, the chances of success are limited. But Bernie [Ecclestone] is still at the top of his game I have noticed.

Donald Trumps' senior advisor said on CNN that the US Presidential election was the ultimate reality TV show! Appeal to those you want to reach!

Think through whom you are trying to reach. Tailor what you do and how you do it to appeal to those communities.

If you are a driver of a team and have a certain set of sponsors, who is the target market for those sponsors? But, of course, it is also a question of nationality.

I interviewed Kim Kardashian recently and had a conversation with her mother. A lot of people have various thoughts about Kim Kardashian, her mother and her sisters, but it is an incredibly well thought through concept and branding. Each of the daughters appeals to a different segment of the market.

When you go back to the above names it was a very much narrower situation - the alternatives were far fewer. Today there is much more competition for the 'hero stakes'! And if you think about all the alternatives you have today to spend your time on, the pool of heroes is much broader. It was very much less back then.

That is again a romantic notion: the hero. I think people enjoy a much more levelled playing field where you have the ability for many people to become heroes.

When I think back to 2005, the fast growth markets - what we call the fast growth markets - were probably ten percent of our business. They are now 31 percent.

The challenges some European economies have are such that it makes it very difficult for them. You have to go where the growth is.

Vodafone is building a digital stadium in Istanbul. It is really worth going to see that. The whole experience will change with the possibilities viewers will have.

Technology will have moved on to an unimaginable level in ten years.

What still amuses me a bit is that in F1 people see the race basically on TV screens. But I am sure new tracks will be built.

If you run a country and want to put it on the global map you don't have so many choices. You can get the Olympics, the World Cup or a Formula One race. And the first two are only every four years - and you have them only once.

The arguments of waste are heavily overdone, because what you do is to accelerate the infrastructure that you have to build anyway, like airports and roads, and in this case it happens much faster. So speaking of a roadmap, without being specific, I would still go for Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East - that's what our clients are really interested in.

Why not look at Indonesia? It will be the third biggest country in the world in population in 25 years' time - after India and China.

You could think about Vietnam and at some point in time about Nigeria. And then you head to South America: Argentina, Columbia, Peru. Probably not all of them will have an F1 race, but they are definitely considering events.

In that - and that is my personal view - Singapore delivers the most value, as they think about Formula One as a complete entertainment event, on and off track.

[Formula One] is entertainment and it competes with other entertainments - and not with other racing formats. It competes with people's time on a weekend. So you have to deliver.

What you want to see [in Formula One] is a highly competitive sport - and the more equal it is the more exciting it is... the more volatile in the sense of results. If you have just one winner continuously it dulls the enthusiasm.

There is much romanticism about Formula One of the past. Today it has to be more of a family sport, not less. It is a fixture in the Sunday afternoon TV programmes, and probably flamboyance - those white silk suits and devil-may-care attitudes - would be outworn attributes today.

I remember that Jackie [Stewart] was the first driver wearing flameproof underwear! What it definitely was: it was much more flamboyant. But that doesn't really make it better in my point of view.

[Formula One racing looking after Jackie Stewart in 1968] was not so intense and, yes, it was much more dangerous - what was definitely different back then was the level of safety.

Just take the lack of presence of F1 in the United States. In theory - and logically - you would have an East Coast Grand Prix, a West Coast Grand Prix, and I think you should have a street race in Detroit - it is still the motor capital of the US. You stay in the US for four weeks and could have two to three races, certainly two.

Formula One is not just multinationals. It's also about national players wanting to get global coverage.

In fact, if you were interested in a global platform there are only three sporting events: probably the most powerful - or equally powerful [to F1] - are the World Cup and the Olympics, and then Formula One. And there it gets interesting.

If you look at the sponsorship yields, Formula One - because it happens every year - generates more sponsorship money for a four-year cycle than anybody else. So it is very powerful.

If you look at the rights situation - what media companies pay - then you see that the rights prices continue to rise for powerful sports. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that the demand amongst global and local sponsors for these kinds of sports is immense, even if there is controversy attached to them like FIFA - who would definitely be number one on that list, though F1 has also been somewhat controversial.

Despite streaming, despite the rise of tablets and smartphones - all the implications which in theory would make linear TV less important - live sporting events are extremely powerful. But it's not the event alone - it's also what's surrounding it.

Virtual Reality for Formula One could be fantastic - driving the car!

In the 19th century China dominated the manufacture of porcelain. Then European factories discovered a cheaper method of making pottery of equal quality, demolishing the Chinese industry the exact reverse of what is happening now. World economics have turned full circle.

In the Ridley Scott film 'The Martian' you can do that [virtually driving car]. I have lifted off in the space craft from the surface of Mars, walked in space and looked down into deep space and got terrified, with the headphones and the goggles.

The web attacks traditional ways of doing things and elites, and this is very uncomfortable for traditional businesses to deal with.

In our business, except in media buying, there are few economies of scale. Client perception of creative agencies is that the bigger they are, the worse they are.

It doesn't make much sense and it's nil premium. They're going to have co-CEOs...which is a very uncomfortable structure.

The technology is already incredible and will improve massively in the next few years. Think about what you could do.

Marketing is an investment, not a cost.

In the old days, you could segment happily. You could put out one message to one segment of the audience, and one to another. That has now gone. You say something to one community and instantly, literally at a click, it's available to everybody. What it means is that if you're trying to craft a message, it's very difficult.

I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.

Bernie [Ecclestone] has not been shy to say one or two controversial things. The last person in the UK who described his product as being crap in public was one Gerald Ratner - and he was gone immediately. But not Bernie! What it tells you is that the demand for live sporting rights, the demand for global or regional events, is so powerful that you brush aside some things because there aren't so many of these events.

If you ask what keeps me up at night, it's the pressure in the system forcing us to do all sorts of things. Content, data and technology are forcing us to think about business in a very different way.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

In an era of transparency, you can have innovation without branding, but you cannot have branding without innovation.