PERSPECTIVE: Squeeze Sir Martin and you're likely to get squeezed back.(Sir Martin Sorrell)(Column)

Well, hello again. Back in the editor's seat after six months off, I knew that the 2002 WPP annual report, published last week, would offer up a juicy theme for this column. Enter Sir Martin Sorrell who has elevated a corporate finger to those margin-eating grey-suited piranhas of honest agencies everywhere - procurement people. I know, I know, deeply easy to criticise and all that, but read on.

'The question remains,' Sorrell writes, 'whether the procurement process can successfully buy creative services, in the same way that door handles or widgets are purchased ... it seems to be based on the idea that what we provide is low value-added, and that, as we are dependent on significant revenues from large clients, we can be squeezed.'

In these few words, Sorrell touches on the single most important issue facing the advertising industry today. No-one has yet succeeded in inventing a way to extract value from the value agencies create for clients. And the dire state of things can be covered in the single word: DuPont.

DuPont recently asked seven agencies to submit online the proposed charges for handling their account and explain how they arrived at them.

Apparently, when they undertook this auction the names of the rival bidding agencies were not revealed - just the price at which they were willing to handle the business.

Before this, the agencies spent three days presenting a global plan for the company's numerous brands before an audience of marketing and procurement executives at DuPont's corporate country club in Wilmington, Delaware.

Now maybe, ...