Look. I respect Martin Sorrell. I genuinely do.

The man bought a literal wire and plastic products company in 1985 and Frankensteined it into the largest advertising holding company on the planet. That's not luck. That's not some MBA stumbling into a corner office. That's a guy who understood something about the business of persuasion at a scale nobody else could even squint at. He built WPP into a machine that ate agencies the way my kids eat pizza. Relentlessly. Without remorse. And always room for one more slice.

I'm getting up there in age myself, so I'm not knocking experience. Experience is the thing that tells you not to touch the stove twice. It's valuable. It's earned. And Sorrell has four decades of it.

But here's what nobody at the Cannes rosé bar wants to say out loud: sometimes experience curdles. Sometimes the guy who built the cathedral starts screaming at the architects who want to install electricity because he liked the candles just fine, thank you very much.

And right now? Watching Sorrell give interviews about WPP's strategy from the deck of S4 Capital, a ship that is, and I say this with all the love in my heart, on fire and also somehow sinking at the same time?

It's like watching your grandpa critique SpaceX because he once built a really nice go-kart.

The thinking isn't just dated. It's about 50 years too late. Sorrell is still talking about org matrices and "discipline vs. geography" while Brian Lesser and Lauren Wetzel are over at WPP building what is essentially a Large Marketing Model trained on human behavior across five billion people. One of these conversations matters. The other one belongs at a reunion dinner.

I'm not knocking the man's legacy. I'm knocking the fact that at some point, you have to swap the martini for forward thinking. And Martin Sorrell keeps ordering another round, sending it back because the glass isn't cold enough, and then complaining about the restaurant.

Sorrell sat down with BestMediaInfo last week and just... let it fly. The whole thing reads like a man who's been holding in a sneeze for six years and finally let it rip in a crowded elevator.

On WPP's new "WPP Creative" umbrella combining Ogilvy, VML, and AKQA:

"WPP under Read has been rabbiting on about 'simplification' for years and all they have done so far is issue press releases to slam brands together willy-nilly and destroy client and people brand value."

Slam brands together willy-nilly. Willy-nilly! When's the last time you heard a holding company CEO use the phrase "willy-nilly" in a trade publication? It's giving Downton Abbey energy at a programmatic conference.

On McKinsey being called in to lead the strategic review under CEO Cindy Rose, Sorrell dropped: "I guess this is their solution, i.e. one-WPP" and then added the Latin phrase "mirabile dictu" which translates roughly to "wonder of wonders" but in Sorrell-speak means something closer to "are you kidding me with this."

On the organizational structure, he declared that WPP is following "the Omnicom playbook" with discipline-first, client-second, geography-last, and that this creates "too much infighting and revenue attribution conflict." His preference? Publicis's model. Geography first. Client second. Capability last. Just like Monks, he said.

And then the kill shot. He called the whole thing "carnage" and predicted "very significant redundancies" and massive below-the-line charges when WPP reports results on February 26.

Coming from anyone else, this would be spicy trade press fodder. Coming from Martin Sorrell, it's... well, let's look at the man's own scorecard, shall we?

I don't enjoy this part. Okay, maybe a little. But it needs saying because you cannot call someone else's house a mess when yours is literally condemned.

The stock price. S4 Capital peaked at roughly 800p in August 2021 with a market cap around $6.5 billion. Today? It's trading at approximately 24.70p. For those of you who don't want to do the math, that's a 97% decline. Ninety-seven percent. If S4 Capital were a patient, the doctor would have stopped checking for a pulse somewhere around 2023.

It hit an all-time low of 19.48p in September 2025 after Sorrell's team cut their revenue forecast for the second time. The shares had already lost 30% that year before that particular nosedive.

The PwC disaster. In March 2022, PricewaterhouseCoopers told S4 Capital, essentially hours before results were supposed to go live, that they couldn't sign off on the 2021 audit. The stock cratered 35% in a single day. $1.25 billion in market value. Gone. Poof. One analyst compared it to Wirecard. Wirecard! That's like comparing your restaurant to the one that gave everyone food poisoning and also turned out to be a front for money laundering.

Revenue. Down 11.4% like-for-like in Q1 2025. Down 12.7% in H1 2025. The company that was supposed to be the nimble, digital-native disruptor is now shrinking faster than the legacy players it was supposed to replace.

So when Sorrell calls WPP's moves "carnage," I have a genuine question: what word are we using for S4?

This is the part that really gets me. Because Sorrell spent half that BestMediaInfo interview talking about how WPP's restructure means "very significant redundancies." He pointed to Omnicom and IPG cutting their combined headcount from 127,500 to 104,000 as evidence of industry "carnage."

Cool. Now let's count the Monks.

Peak headcount: approximately 9,000+ people. This was the army. The digital-first, unitary model, "faster better cheaper more" battalion that was going to eat everyone's lunch.

End of 2024: roughly 7,150. Down 7%.

Mid-2025: 6,879. Down another 8.9%.

Q3 2025: approximately 6,500. Down 13% year-over-year.

Entering 2026: roughly 5,500.

That's approximately half the workforce. Gone. In about two years.

And it wasn't pretty. Glassdoor reviews from Monks employees paint a picture that makes "carnage" look like a spa day. Rolling layoffs with no communication. No heads-up on timing. No clarity on whether the cuts were finished. People describing an "exodus" of talent. Work getting outsourced to cheaper satellite offices. The holding company's "visions of grandeur," one reviewer wrote, have "derailed the agency culture and the business overall."

Sorrell called WPP's strategy carnage. At S4 Capital, they just called it Tuesday.

Here's where it gets personal. Or geographical, which in this business is the same thing.

Monks was born in Hilversum, the Netherlands. Founded in 2001 as MediaMonks by a crew of Dutch creatives working out of, I am not making this up, an illegal basement dug under a hotel and later a space that had previously been used as a cannabis grow operation. The steel bars from the grow-op were still on the windows. It gave the office "an industrial look." That's the most Dutch origin story in the history of advertising.

Hilversum is the spiritual and creative home of everything Monks became. It's where Wesley ter Haar and the original crew built the production magic that put MediaMonks on the map.

But here's the math that doesn't lie: 80% of Monks' revenue comes from the Americas. 15% from EMEA. A sad 5% from APAC. When you're hemorrhaging people and the money overwhelmingly lives in New York and São Paulo, the expensive Dutch operation starts looking less like a headquarters and more like a very nice museum.

If Monks entering 2026 with roughly 1,000 fewer people than Q3 2025, the cuts are falling somewhere. And a high-cost European hub generating a fraction of revenue in a company desperately trying to right-size its cost structure? That's a target, not a headquarters.

The birthplace of Monks might be turning into its burial ground. And Sorrell, who bought MediaMonks for $350 million in 2018 as the cornerstone of his whole vision? He's not talking about that part.

My favorite part of the BestMediaInfo interview is where Sorrell explains, with the confidence of a man who has never Googled his own stock price, that Publicis has the right organizational model. Geography first, client second, capability last. And that Monks follows the same approach.

I need you to sit with this for a second.

His geography-first company just shrank in every single geography. Revenue down in the Americas. Down in EMEA. Down in APAC. Headcount cratered. Stock obliterated. In every geography, simultaneously, without prejudice.

He told BestMediaInfo that "discipline first creates too much infighting and revenue attribution conflict." Fair point! But his geography-first alternative created... a 97% stock decline, half the workforce out the door, and an all-time low share price. What exactly is that model attributing?

Here's what kills me. Sorrell's critique of WPP's matrix boils down to "you're organizing wrong." He's arguing about where to put the deck chairs. Meanwhile, Brian Lesser looked at the same ocean and said "we should probably build a submarine." Those aren't the same conversation. They're not even the same century.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because underneath all the noise about "WPP Creative" and "slamming brands together," there is something genuinely transformative happening at WPP that Sorrell either can't see or won't acknowledge.

Brian Lesser and Lauren Wetzel aren't reorganizing agencies. They're building a data and AI infrastructure that fundamentally changes what WPP sells. The InfoSum acquisition. Open Intelligence. The "Intelligence Beyond Identity" strategy. A Large Marketing Model trained on trillions of behavioral signals across 350+ partners in 75 markets.

This isn't a restructuring story. It's a technology story wearing a restructuring costume. And Sorrell is reviewing the costume.

But I'm going to stop right here.

Because the roast is free. The substance is for ADOTAT+ subscribers.

In Part 2: "The Machine Whisperers" (ADOTAT+ only), I go deep on what Lesser and Wetzel are actually building. Not the press release version. The real architecture. How InfoSum's "no data movement" framework works. Why Lesser's entire career was a chess game leading to this moment. Why Wetzel might be the most important person in advertising that most people haven't heard of. And why WPP just made the biggest philosophical bet in holding company history by rejecting identity-based marketing entirely while Publicis and Omnicom are going all in on it.

In Part 3: "The Data Wars" (ADOTAT+ only), I referee the fight. WPP's federated intelligence model vs. Publicis's Epsilon identity graph vs. Omnicom's Acxiom play. Three philosophies. Three futures. One of them is right and the other two are spending billions on the wrong answer. I'll tell you which is which and what it means for every CMO reading this.

The free version tells you who's losing. The paid version tells you who's winning, and why.

Subscribe to ADOTAT+ to read Parts 2 and 3 →

Because here's the truth nobody in this industry wants to hear: the agency brand doesn't matter anymore. The algorithm does. The data infrastructure does. The intelligence layer does. And the man who built the greatest collection of agency brands in history is standing outside the building yelling about the floor plan while the people inside are rewiring the electrical grid.

I love you, Martin. But the martini's warm, the ice melted sometime around 2019, and the bar is closing.

The future is federated. And it doesn't care about your org chart.