Speaking at the offices of WPP's new ally Infosys on Monday (23 April) to inaugurate the latter's new "customer experience centre", Sorrell expanded on the background to the tie-up with Infosys, which has produced a cloud-based marketing platform dubbed "Infosys BrandEdge in partnership with Fabric" (Fabric is a WPP company).
Sorrell explained his latest buzzword – "horizontality" – his label for pulling together all WPP's businesses to work together, "because clients don't hire agencies but people".
Asked what he thought would happen to WPP's peers if they didn’t follow it down the road of applying technology, Sorrell was measured, responding that "we all" managed to survive the rise of Google and then the recession.
He went on to claim WPP had "good relationships" with key digital players – companies he has previously described as "frenemies" – predicting it is on course to spend $2bn with Google and $400m with Facebook this year.
True to form, he turned critical, accusing them of being new media owners masquerading as technology companies and comparing their pitch to Rupert Murdoch going "straight to our clients".
He suggested it would be wise for marketing services companies to strike alliances with technology companies which have relationships with chief technology officers or chief information officers.
"We'd better prepare for the day when we engage just as much with CIOs as CMOs," he concluded.
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