Editco.net

WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell always tries to save up something for the hacks when he announces his results and this week he went for them being 'less worse' than they otherwise could have been.

This, alas, did not play as well on the Today programme as the 'bath-shaped recession' he essayed a few years ago.

Not only is 'less worse' ungrammatical and ugly but it's also completely meaningless.

As it happened WPP's profit only fell by 11 per cent to around $1bn because it got rid of 14,000 people.

WPP now finds itself in the slightly peculiar position of being the stock you buy if the ad market is going up and the one you dump if it ain't. Even though it's not biggest adland company, Omnicom is.

Sorrell also said that WPP found itself 'staring into the abyss' when the recession struck last year.

I don't think this was a particularly clever thing to say either.