Markets

WPP's Sorrell Eyes "LUV" Recovery; Does U-Turn on Paid Content

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: October 9, 2009 / 2:45 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

WPP chief Martin Sorrell has come up with a yet another metaphor for the economic recovery (which he believes is not happening yet). Per The Business Insider:

Going forward, Sir Martin says we'll see a "LUV" recovery: a Little recovery in Europe, a U-shaped one in the United States, and a V-shaped one in Asia.

BNET previously noted that Sorrell has a range of visual metaphors for recoveries. In May he said:

"It will be a recovery of shorts. It will be L shaped, maybe an italic L, that is flipping up."

And the Telegraph noted:

He often accurately deploys the image of a "saucer-shaped" or "u-shaped" recession to indicate that we're bumping along the bottom of the trough.
In 2003, he famously predicted that the world was finally "climbing out of the bathtub" after the global downturn.

Separately: Media Week's Arif Durrani noted that Sorrell has done an interesting U-turn on the issue of whether consumers should pay for news content. In January, Sorrell said it would be impossible to charge for news:

Some of the structural changes we're seeing taking place in the [newspaper] industry, particularly in America, the failure and bankruptcy and reorganisation of these [publishing] companies is going to continue. And there's no way of stopping it, because we've given it away for free.

The seeds of this problem were sown when the people who created the new media industry, probably in the early nineties, decided - rightly from the consumers point of view I have to say - to give it away for nothing.
It's impossible actually now to take it up. You can start up here [high] and take your pricing down, but you can't start there [free] and start moving it up.

But a few days ago he said:

[Rupert] Murdoch is absolutely correct to try and get people paying for content - it is critical for traditional media businesses as there is not enough advertising to support these models anymore.
Getting consumers to pay for content they value is key. We have to find those areas.

U-turns are a bit of a thing with Sorrell. He recently disavowed his Enfatico experiment, and then rowed back a statement about consolidating the back offices of JWT, Ogilvy & Mather and other WPP shops.