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WPP's Sorrell: Slow Growth in 2010 for Ad Industry

Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the advertising group WPP, predicted a slow growth in the upcoming year for the advertising industry during his presentation at the annual UBS Global Media & Communications Conference earlier this week. According to MediaPost, Sorrell acknowledged that the industry saw an improvement in November and that it is losing less ground than it has been. However, he remains uncertain as to how sustainable that growth will be.

Sorrell also said that there is a lot of potential in mobile advertising, thinking that it will grow largely due to smartphones, such as Apple's iPhone, and Google's Android operating system, as stated by a story from the economics Web site, www.paidcontent.org. He anticipates that social networking Web sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, will be short-lived fads. He stated that Google is "the push for this" because, at the moment, they are very strong, "focused and therefore, more effective."

According to a Wall Street Journal report, WPP's GroupM "expects global advertising revenue to return to annual growth in the range of 6% to 7% from 2011 to 2014." GroupM is projecting a 0.8% growth in 2010, higher than its earlier anticipated 1.4% decline. Sorrell also told attendees at the recent Reuters Global Media Summit that he does not believe that the industry is at the end of the recession, nor is it recovering quite yet.