Martin Sorrell

Executive Chairman

Sir Martin Sorrell serves as the Founder and Executive Chairman of S4 Capital, a digital advertising and marketing services company listed on the London Stock Exchange. He founded the company in 2018 as a next-generation digital marketing platform serving global and regional clients and influential brands, with a personal investment of $53 million. He studied Economics at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, and earned an MBA from Harvard University in 1968. He founded WPP Group in 1985 from a small company valued at £1 million and transformed it over 33 years into the world's largest advertising and public relations group. He executed historic acquisitions including J. Walter Thompson for $566 million in 1987 and Ogilvy & Mather for $825 million in 1989. He built WPP to a market capitalization of over £16 billion with revenues exceeding £15 billion and more than 200,000 employees across 113 countries. He was the longest-serving CEO in the FTSE 100 index. Harvard Business Review ranked him the second-best performing CEO in the world in 2016 and 2017. He was knighted in 2000 for his contributions to the advertising and marketing industry. He is recognized as one of the most influential figures in the history of the global advertising industry and is currently focused on building a digital marketing model based on technology, data, and artificial intelligence. He will participate in LEAP 2026 to share his vision on the future of digital marketing and artificial intelligence in the advertising industry, topics of increasing importance to the Saudi market amid the rapid growth of the digital media and content sector.