1989: WPP acquires Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide
To celebrate the Ad Club of New York's 120th anniversary, The Drum is inviting readers to share their favorite marketing moments from the past 120 years.
Ogilvy
Today we feature WPP’s acquisition of Ogilvy & Mather as our marketing moment.
In 1989, WPP acquired The Ogilvy Group for $864m, bringing Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Ogilvy Direct and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide into its fold. Two years beforehand, WPP had acquired J. Walter Thompson Group for $566m.
According to the New York Times, the Ogilvy acquisition marked “the largest amount ever paid for an advertising agency.”
At the time, Randall Rothenberg wrote in the New York Times that “the Ogilvy acquisition caps the stunning rise of Martin Sorrell, a 44-year-old graduate of Cambridge University and the Harvard Business School who in four years has turned a $518,000 investment in a company that manufactured supermarket baskets into the world's second-largest marketing-communications company.”
After the acquisition, WPP was only second to Saatchi & Saatchi, where Sorrell had previously spent 10 years as chief financial officer, according to the New York Times.
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