Kantar boss: we need more talent

28/October/2002

Among his other objectives, as expressed in an exclusive interview with MR News, are to strengthen high-level ties with client companies and to develop greater expertise in the use of consumer databases.

Salama knows something about fostering talent. During his eight years as WPP's Director of Strategy one of his major tasks has been to establish an elaborate system of management development courses, many of them interdisciplinary. Out of 30 such courses WPP runs each year Salama has usually taken personal charge of six or seven.

He prides himself on two other achievements, both of which have some relevance to the Kantar job. One is having used the resources of the WPP Group as a whole to identify profitable business niches and create new enterprises to fill them. Among them are Lightspeed Research, the Red Cell advertising network and Gepetto, a children's marketing company.

The other achievement is having put together a series of ad hoc teams to help clients, with team members coming from different WPP companies and sometimes even from non-WPP firms. A team formed to serve Boots, for example, brings together people from Research International, ad agency J. Walter Thompson, PR firm Hill & Knowlton and media buyer Mindshare.

This does not mean that Salama subscribes to the old one-stop shopping doctrine, according to which one unit of a marketing services conglomerate such as WPP should make a practice of encouraging its clients to hire other units. The doctrine, as Salama acknowledges, is not loved by the many clients fearful of putting all their eggs in one basket. He does, on the other hand, see the advantages of drawing, when appropriate, on the diverse resources of a group willing and able to solve clients' particular problems without any preconceived ideas about what to sell to them.

It follows that the restructuring now taking place under which Kantar is to expand to take in, as well as research agencies such as Millward Brown, consultancies such as the Henley Centre, is not intended to pressure clients of the one into buying the services of the other. However, Salama does believe that the move will introduce greater coherence into a sector where the most important thing - for traditional research agencies as well as consultancies - is not the mere collection of data but the application of knowledge to the process of making business decisions.

Is it possible that Kantar will merge certain consultancies with research agencies? Yes, replies Salama, "it is possible, but it's not a high priority. In any case we won't carry out any mergers for the sake of merging."

Salama, aged 41, was born in London of Egyptian Jewish parents. He studied philosophy, economics and politics at Oxford, worked for a time in the foreign affairs department of the Labour Party, took a higher degree in economics at Birkbeck College, London, then joined the Henley Centre in 1986 as an econometrician and rose to become Managing Director.

It was after WPP's acquisition of the Henley Centre that Salama grew close to the conglomerate's architect, Sir Martin Sorrell, who made him in 1994 Director of Strategy. In 1996 he joined the Board and is currently one of only four executive directors with Group Chief Executive Sorrell, Finance Director Paul Richardson and Chief Talent Officer Beth Axelrod. (WPP has 11 non-executive directors, including Chairman Philip Hamel.)

WPP has a rule that heads of its operating units do not sit on the group board. Kantar, even though it is itself an umbrella company, counts as an operating unit, since its CEO has profit and loss responsibility for the whole division. At the end of the year, therefore, Salama will quit the WPP board. Despite that it looks as if his importance within WPP can only grow as the enlarged Kantar develops to help fulfil Sorrell's expressed aim of increasing the non-advertising components of the group to 50% of the whole.

Unlike David Jenkins, the retiring Kantar head, who chose to relocate to the US, Salama will continue to live in London, if only because his two young sons are, like himself, devoted Arsenal supporters. However, he is accustomed to spending two weeks of every month in the US, and that too will continue. In fact he is already working closely with Jenkins in preparation for the handover.

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