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"Information is no longer power, it's the interpretation of information that is important," Martin Sorrell (MBA '68), chief executive of London-based WPP Group, told The Times of London (November 20, 1999). "Our clients are in an overcapacity situation in virtually every industry in which they operate. As a result, branding becomes more and more important - differentiating what they do and what they sell. That's good for us, because we're in the differentiation business."
WPP is one of the world's largest advertising and marketing-services companies and includes firms such as Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, J. Walter Thompson, and Hill & Knowlton. Through his clients, Sorrell has his finger on the pulse of a wide range of industries. Speaking of the Internet, he observed that "the great analogy for the Web is the nineteenth century flotation of the railroads, where every issue opened at three times the placing price. You had this financial bubble but it doesn't alter the fact that the underlying commercial activity - the way we live, the way we travel, the way we communicate - fundamentally changed as a result of the railroads. The same thing is happening as a result of the Web."
Sorrell also noted the irony of investment professionals with "all their portfolios in traditional businesses, who are now running hotfoot to invest in all these new models that threaten to destabilize and disintermediate all these traditional investments. Maybe this is the ultimate form of socialism."
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