OPEN

Sir Martin Sorrell, chief exec of WPP, sounds a bit rattled in reports of his speech yesterday to the Newspaper Society yesterday.

He is deeply concerned about media companies ability to respond to the "socialistic" forces of social media and disapproves of newspapers giving their content away for free (from the FT):

   

“They have decided – ‘if I don’t eat my children, somebody else will’,” he told executives from UK regional newspapers attending an industry conference, adding that he disapproved of giving away content for free. “You should charge for it if the consumer values the content,” he said.

He also warns that companies will have a hard time retaining talent, as many younger staff will prefer work in "smaller, less bureaucratic companies".

I think he’s right and I think he’s wrong. Right about talent wanting to work at the pace of change in online media not at the pace of a bureaucracy. Wrong that media companies shouldn’t be giving away content – just list to Carolyn McCall on the In Business programme this week singing the praises of aggregators and pointing out the profitability of the Guardian’s strategy of free online content.

As an ad man, or more accurately an accountant, it smarts to think of a company like Craigslist – for that was who he was talking about – giving away all that potential revenue. But they, because they could, because it worked, and not necessarily because they were socialists.

I wonder if WPP has a skunkworks, working away at creating the marketing and media services and business models that will disrupt its own business in the next decade. If not, we may hear more invectives against the "socialistic" web before long, I fear.

Tags: WPP, Craigslist, newspapers, advertising