S4 Capital is using the distruption of the pandemic to seek out and poach top talent from across the advertising industry.
Globally job losses in the industry are expected to be around 100,000, half of those in the US, according to estimates by Forrester.
"That gives us an opportunity to hire some really good talent," S4 founder Sir Martin Sorrell told AdNews in an interview.
The S4 executive team met in London recently to discuss the opportunity of acquiring good talent, mostly on the creative side, who are dissatisfied with their current conditions.
Sir Martin says these people are at "places that hitherto, you would never think you would be able to winkle" out.
These people are not at traditional agencies but companies with strong digital reputations.
"I think, as a result of COVID, we are going to see a lot of shifts of people," Sir Martin says.
"They are very worried about their jobs but the really good people are on the move and I think we can pick off some good talent."
Sir Martin, the founder of holding company WPP, has high praise for his S4 staff, growing to 2,600 from a start in 2018.
"I've been in the industry for a long time and I've never seen better people. Superb. It's a great team," he says.
The average age is about 33. On the media side, about 600 at business unit MightyHive, the average age is about 25.
"The reason that they're so young is that programmatic people are difficult to find and we tend to train them ourselves," he says.
"We hire them from good schools and then we train them and put them into data analytics or programmatic.
"That also has the impact of reducing our direct costs, our indirects are very low, because we've just started. We've not had time to get into bad habits, but our directs are quite low."
And ownership is high at S4 with out 40% of employees with shares.
"You're talking about a billion dollars of value, that is spread amongst our key people and employees," he says.
"And obviously the company has done well. It can't carry on forever doing that well, it's the law of big numbers, but it means that for the foreseeable future, as long as we build the business in the right way, we'll continue to do very well.
"We're basically a bunch of entrepreneurial people. And entrepreneurial people means putting your money where your mouth is."
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