S4 Capital executive chairman Sir Martin Sorrell and MediaMonks chief executive Victor Knaap will talk about their ambitious expansion strategy at a Campaign breakfast.
It will be the first time that Sorrell and Knaap have spoken on-stage together in public since S4 Capital agreed to merge with Dutch creative production business MediaMonks in a 300m euros (£266m) deal.
Campaign is staging the exclusive breakfast, called “Back to the future: When Sorrell met MediaMonks”, in association with M&A advisor Results International.
The event, which will take place at the Curzon Soho cinema in London on 1 November, is part of a series of Campaign events to mark the magazine’s 50th anniversary.
Campaign will quiz Sorrell, the former chief executive of WPP, about his long career in advertising and ask him and Knaap about their plans to build S4 Capital into “a new-age, new-era digital advertising and marketing services platform for clients”.
Marketers, agency leaders and M&A experts will also talk at the Campaign breakfast about the changing nature of the agency model and the implications for the wider industry as clients demand a more flexible and agile approach.
When Sorrell quit WPP in April in acrimonious circumstances, he hinted that he planned to launch a new business by saying he would go “back to the future”.
He stunned the ad industry by launching S4 Capital just six weeks later, since he had no “non-compete” clause in his WPP employment contract.
Sorrell went on to beat WPP in the race to acquire MediaMonks in July and listed S4 Capital on the London stock market in September in a reverse takeover – just as he did when he set up WPP in 1985.
S4 Capital has promised digital marketing services that “are agile, efficient and of premium creative quality; in other words, faster, better, and cheaper” and it will have one P&L, rather than “multiple” profit centres like WPP and other agency groups.
MediaMonks, which was founded in the Netherlands in 2001, has made its name with digital, creative work for brands such as Adidas, Amazon, Google, Johnson & Johnson and IBM, and has won 128 Cannes Lions.
It already operates in 11 markets, including the UK, the US and Asia.
Sorrell is expected to look at further M&A because he wants S4 Capital to move into new areas such as digital media buying, data and analytics, and is looking at new markets such as Germany, India and Japan.
S4 Capital believes it can take advantage of the disruption in marketing services and said in its stock market prospectus that bypassing traditional ad agencies and taking on management consultants are two key areas of focus.
Results International is a leading adviser on M&A and fundraising for the the global marketing, technology and healthcare sectors, and has been a partner on three previous Campaign breakfast briefings.
