Sir Martin Sorrell has cited the BBC, the New York Times and the Guardian as examples of traditional media with a “stuffy” attitude to content that is not resonating with younger digital news fans gravitating to sites such as Vice News.
Sorrell made the “stuffy” reference at several different sessions at the Cannes Lions festival – each time claiming he then perhaps used the wrong word – to encapsulate why he believed Vice was more attractive to a youth audience.
“What I was getting at, maybe ‘stuffy’ is the wrong word, is that younger people trust different sources,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “Or, they look at different sources, or look at sources differently to the way we trust them. We naturally trust the BBC, the New York Times or the Guardian. But younger people, centennials or millennials, don’t naturally feel that way. If they see something on Buzzfeed or Vice, or watching Periscope, they way they react to it is very different.”
Sorrell first raised the notion of “stuffiness” at a private WPP event, Stream, at Cannes early last week.
He posed it at a panel discussion that included Vice Media founder Shane Smith, Mark Thompson, the chief executive of the publisher of the New York Times, and Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian.
While the event operated under “Chatham House rules”, Sorrell freely related the tale at subsequent panel discussions and interviews, including with the Guardian, at Cannes.
At an event hosted and moderated by Johnny Hornby, the chairman and chief executive of agency group The&Partnership, Sorrell elaborated on the topic again.
“There is another issue and that’s style,” said Sorrell, whose WPP owns a stake in Vice Media. “It came up at the Stream conference. We had Shane with Mark Thompson and the new editor of the Guardian.
“Content on Vice I think is very strong. It’s just that stylistically it’s very different. So you have the NYT and the Guardian and I shouldn’t use the word ‘stuffy’. Just observing it, the style is very important. They talk about trust and the implication is that we don’t trust a Vice. Well young people do trust a Vice. That is the real point. It’s just the way they deliver news is markedly different.”
Hornby asked about the risks being taken to get footage, such as Shane Smith embedding with Isis, asking “he didn’t get his head chopped off, but how did he know he wasn’t going to?”.
Sorrell, who had Smith appear in a question and answer session at WPP’s annual general meeting earlier this month, didn’t give a direct answer.
Sorrell did go on to admit that newspapers have been overly targeted by advertisers moving budgets with the rise of digital media, and that the “pendulum” has now started to shift.
“Engagement on traditional news we know is very strong but it is not measured properly,” he said.
“I think there’s a legitimate argument as whether time spent by consumers is the right metric or whether it should be engagement, and there’s some really strong evidence that engagement with traditional print is greater than that engagement with so-called ‘new media’.
“I think actually we are starting to see with traditional media, particular newspapers, a little bit of the pendulum swining back because people will realise they are more powerful than people give them credit for.”