ABSTRACT
16 May 1994 marked the fifth anniversary of the acquisition by the UK-owned advertising and marketing-services group WPP of the US-owned Ogilvy Group, the world's fifth largest advertising agency and one of the jewels in the Madison Avenue crown of the US advertising industry. The acquisition of the Ogilvy Group enabled WPP to top the world rankings of advertising agencies by the end of 1989 and, as such, marked the culmination of a strategy of acquisition embarked on by WPP's Chief Executive (and former Financial Director of Saatchi and Saatchi) Martin Sorrell. This had begun in 1985 with Sorrell and his partner Preston Rabi purchasing a controlling stake in Wire and Plastic Products — a small shopping trolley manufacturer based in Kent — with the intention of using the company as a vehicle for acquisition. The transformation wrought by Sorrell's acquisition programme on WPP was by any standards phenomenal. Even prior to the acquisition of the Ogilvy Group and, a year earlier, the equally spectacular acquisition of another giant of the US advertising industry, J. Walter Thompson, Sorrell had acquired for WPP a plethora of companies specialising in below-the-line advertising, together with design companies and media-production facilities. This had transformed the portfolio of WPP and helped drive up its share price from a value of 35p at the time of Sorrell's first involvement to 700p by the beginning of 1987. 1 It was fitting that the rise of WPP to the top of the world rankings of advertising agencies should have catapulted it ahead of Sorrell's former employers, Saatchi and Saatchi; Saatchi and Saatchi had dominated the UK rankings of advertising agencies through the 1980s to become a leading global agency, breaking for the first time since the 1950s the preeminence of US-owned agencies and their UK subsidiaries over the business of UK advertising. By going to the top of the world rankings by acquiring two of the dominant US agencies of the postwar period, WPP reinforced this historic break.
