S4 Cap. Regulatory News (SFOR)

23 April 2019

S4 Capital plc ("S4Capital" or "the Company")

Press correction

The London Sunday Times printed an article on Sunday, April 21, stating that S4Capital's MediaMonks is facing a legal battle in Holland.

This is not true. The matter is a dispute between former shareholders of MediaMonks. Any involvement of S4Capital will only be as a witness in any action. 

The complainant was not a founder of MediaMonks and was a 0.029% (or 29/1000ths of 1%) shareholder in MediaMonks up until November 2017, when he sold his shareholding. Discussions between S4Capital and MediaMonks did not commence until well into 2018.

MediaMonks is an Advertising Age A-listed digital content company, whose offer goes well beyond the description in the erroneous Sunday Times article

The Sunday Times journalist was made fully aware of all these facts before he wrote the article, but apparently, for unknown reasons, chose to ignore them.

Enquiries to:

About S4Capital

S4Capital plc (SFOR.L) is a new age/new era digital advertising and marketing services company established by Sir Martin Sorrell in May 2018.

Its strategy is to build a purely digital advertising and marketing services business for global, multi-national, regional, local clients and millennial-driven influencer brands. This will be achieved initially by integrating leading businesses in three areas: first party data, digital content, digital media planning and buying, along with an emphasis on "faster, better, cheaper" executions in an always-on consumer-led environment, with a unitary structure.

Digital is by far the fastest-growing segment of the advertising market. S4Capital estimates that in 2017 digital accounted for approximately 40 per cent. or $200 billion of total global advertising spend of $500 billion (excluding about $400 billion of trade support, the primary target of the Amazon advertising platform), and projects that by 2022 this share will grow to approximately 55 per cent.

S4Capital integrated with MediaMonks, the leading, Advertising Age A-listed creative digital content production company, led by Victor Knaap and Wesley ter Haar, in July 2018, and with MightyHive, the market-leading programmatic solutions provider for future thinking marketers and agencies, led by Peter Kim and Christopher S. Martin, in December 2018.

Victor, Wesley, Pete, Christopher and Peter Rademaker (formerly Chief Financial Officer of MediaMonks, now Chief Financial Officer of S4Capital), all joined the S4Capital Board as Directors. The S4Capital Board also includes Rupert Faure Walker, Daniel Pinto, Sue Prevezer and Paul Roy.

The company has a market capitalization of approximately £500 million ($650 million) and approximately 1,200 people in 16 countries, across the Americas, Europe, the Middle-East and Africa and Asia-Pacific.

Sir Martin was CEO of WPP for 33 years, building it from a £1 million "shell" company in 1985 into the world's largest advertising and marketing services company with a market capitalization of over £16 billion on the day he left. Prior to that he was Group Financial Director of Saatchi & Saatchi Company plc for 9 years.