I spent three hours this weekend watching how the modern holding company was born.

Saatchi & Saatchi, started in Soho in 1970, making ads that got Britain arguing. There's a line within the documatry which I couldn’t stop thinking about; “You can't be the biggest and the best. You have to pick one."

They picked biggest. They'd promised the City 20% earnings growth a year, and buying agencies was the fastest way to hit it, so in 1986 they bought Ted Bates for $450m and became the largest agency in the world.

In 1986 they bought Ted Bates for $450m and became the largest agency in the world.

Their finance director, Martin Sorrell, left the same year and built WPP which I had no idea stood for Wire and Plastic Products, a company that started out making wire shopping baskets.

By 1990, Saatchi & Saatchi  was close to bankrupt and in 1994 shareholders forced Maurice out.

The bit that stuck with me isn’t the debt and the serious mismanagement  of operations. It was a detail from people at the agencies they'd bought, some of whom said they never once met Charles. The man whose instinct built the place had become a name on the letterhead.

That part still feels familiar. Once growth is promised to shareholders the incentive moves and most agencies are still paid for hours and judged on margin.

Neither of those is the client's growth, and neither is the best possible work.

I've written before that holding companies are killing agencies to protect margins and calling it efficiency.

The problem has never been the people, it's what the structure pays them to care about.

You can find the docs on YT for anyone interested, if you want to understand the history of our industry - I couldn’t recommend the three videos below enough:

The Real Saatchis Masters of Illusion | The Rise and Fall of Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency

Inside Saatchi & Saatchi - A Spirited Case Study

The Men From The Agency (CDP) - BBC