2025 Hindsight: Jon Steel kindly asked me to do the speech at the dinner to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the WPP Fellowship. The scheme is no longer operating but for many years it was a great way into the marketing services industry, especially for those who, like me, didn’t have the confidence, connections or chutzpah to get in the normal way, through one of the creative-agency grad schemes. It was supported by many of the great and good at WPP - Jon of course, but also Eric Salama - who is name-checked below - and of course the wonderful Jeremy Bullmore.

For those of you who don’t know me - I’m Sameer Modha. I joined the Fellowship in 1995 in its first year and, as I’ve spent most of the subsequent 20 years in the Group, Jon kindly asked me to say a few words on behalf of us all.

Now Jon once took me out for lunch at a point when I was about to leave the group for a while. In fact, despite his efforts (and despite a very nice lunch), I did leave for a while, but then, as now, he made it clear that the door was never closed, so thank you, Jon, for the invitation.

I wanted to do justice to what we all felt, so naturally enough, when I was preparing these words, I turned to the most obvious resource, and sat down to read all of the entries in the 20th Anniversary book.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading all 160 of them in one sitting. That’s 160 compressed lives. 160 beautifully written journeys.

It was like eating a near-fatal quantity of humble pie. I had to go and lie down for a while and sleep it off, and as I dreamed, the same phrases kept coming back to me over and over again.

‘How lucky I was’, ‘how undeserving’, ‘it was a gift’, ‘I couldn’t believe I’d been accepted’. A repeated sense of bafflement that anyone would want to choose us over the thousands of other candidates who applied. ‘Who? Me?’

Some of us tried to find excuses for why we had been selected - putting it down to alcohol, alliteration or anything else outside of ourselves. Others put it down to dumb luck - the image of the ‘Golden Ticket’ crops up many times as you’ll see if you read them all yourself. (But if you do, please, pace yourself.)

Not a single person wrote that they deserved it and were God’s gift to the Fellowship, but perhaps the only thing worse than believing that you ‘make your own luck’ is believing you had nothing to do with it.

Of course we have all been lucky. We were already lucky in thousands of ways before we got anywhere near the Fellowship, and we were lucky in being chosen for it as well, and we’re lucky to be here tonight. But for the purposes of the evening (and perhaps for longer than that), and before I get onto the substance of what I want to say, I’d like us all to take a moment to embrace our luck. To put our arms around it and hug it to ourselves without feelings of guilt or obligation.

(I think Martin [Sorrell]’s meeting the Pope today, so maybe it’s appropriate to encourage some sort of self-administered absolution.)

There. Doesn’t that feel better?

Now we’ve got that over with, I’d like to turn to the other thing that we all expressed, which was, of course, gratitude. I’m going to take a bit of time over this and express (although being true to my metaphor I suppose it should be regurgitate) gratitude for a number of different things. I hope you won’t mind if I use some flashbulb memories from my own journey over the past twenty years, but the things I’m being grateful for are, I believe common to all of us.

And this gratitude is directed not only to those at Farm Street and WPP corporately, but also to the people in the operating companies and holding entities that make up the Group. It was noticeable that some of the same companies and disciplines crop up repeatedly in the book - and not always the biggest ones. People right across WPP have given to the Fellowship over and above what could be expected of them, and if we pause to remember the example of Herta Ogilvy, this applies beyond the companies themselves to what we might call the Greater WPP - its diaspora and its hinterland.

It’s worth mentioning that it wasn’t always like that. In JWT, which has taken a good proportion of Fellows over the years, my second year was haunted by echoes of being described as a ‘super grad’. Even though we were a free resource, there was a degree of resentment, not only from those on the agency grad scheme, but also from management about these upstarts who had somehow bypassed the agency virility test.

In fact, when I went for my second-year ’interview’ with Merry Baskin who was head of Planning there at the time, I’m told that she was prepared to give me a ferocious grilling of the kind that she was famous for, and which I was, to be frank, ill-equipped to handle. When I walked in she asked me how I was and apparently I looked forlorn and said ‘quite nervous actually’, and she didn’t have the heart to go through with it.

Fortunately over the years, the companies, like Merry, came to realise that the Fellows were bringing something different from their own recruitment practises that was valuable in different ways, and to support them in turn.

So gratitude then.

1. Most obviously there’s gratitude for all the support you’ve given us. Whether that’s the utterly indispensable practical support on logistics, visas and transit, or professional support in making connections and introductions; putting a good word in the right ear or inbox.

And more generally, I think there’s been a fair bit of life support as well, which we should thank you for. As a species, humanity is unusual in the late maturing of its offspring, which means that you essentially start your twenties in a mess of bits which you’re trying to assemble into something coherent all while moving at speed, and in that process bits can fall off or get mangled, and many of you, have helped many of us with the running repairs.

I still cherish my copy of Behind The Scenes In Advertising, in which, at the beginning, Jeremy wrote ‘For Sameer, who is yet to discover who he is.’ Jeremy - you probably don’t even remember it, but those words have helped me much over the years - as an expression of belief in me, as permission to be a bit of a mess, and as a lesson in how details matter in writing. Someone else might have written ‘who has yet to discover’, but that ‘is’ made me feel on the brink of discovery.

2. And beyond all the support, I think another thing we would all like to thank you for, is for simply being available. Like good corporate parents, you’ve been there for us, even though we haven’t called or written for months at a time.

I remember in the early days, there was a rather tense meeting, where we all got together to express our dissatisfaction with the way the scheme was running; at the absence of structure and program. I can’t remember who it was with now, but whoever it was gave us pretty short shrift, and said that the point was that you were available and that we should ‘raid the group’ for whatever we could get out of it, like a fridge for hungry teens.

Speaking to Janet recently, I asked if this had changed and was delighted to hear that it hadn’t. That some Fellows pop up at Farm street every few weeks, while others are prodigal sons and daughters, seen only on high days and holidays. She said that people were still available to be ‘raided’ and that some of us have been very good at snaffling and blagging things one way or another. Long may it continue.

3. The final thing that I want to thank you all for is the most slippery, so let me illustrate it with another story.

Years ago, Eric you were very kindly giving me a lift home from somewhere. Again, you probably don’t remember, but there was a call that you wanted to make, and rather than do it privately, you were perfectly content for me to listen in on the handsfree in the car.

There was some sort of deal going on, and you were in the final stages of negotiation. It was becoming clear that the company being bought was trying to do something a bit naughty at the last minute. You were calmly, forensically brutal in your assessment of the situation and in what you were going to do next, and aside from feeling flattered that you didn’t mind me hearing you in full flight, you gave me, in that little moment, a glimpse of a completely different perspective on the industry.

And perspective is, I feel, the greatest thing we are, all of us, grateful for. As I read through the entries there were some lovely images of the Fellowship. Someone described it as ‘like living in a kaleidoscope’ - tumbling in a myriad of shapes. Another as Icarus Wings. Another as ‘A first class ticket to anywhere you want to go’ - letting us fly high and dangerously if we so wished. Alice - you said it was like vines to swing from, which I thought was lovely and there were many other images with a sense of soaring and tumbling, of ups and downs on life’s journey, but always kinetic - moving and seeing with perspective.

Sometimes those journeys ended up elsewhere - academia, law and consultancy, and also TV, teaching or journalism, and a good few running their own businesses - but always helped by a strong dose of perspective that they got from the Fellowship.

So I’d like to finish by proposing a toast to perspective.

A friend of mine who is now a defence attache use to run special forces training. For many years he was responsible for creating ranks of our most elite troops to go and do scary things in dark places. And he once let me into the secret of how you do it. ‘To create an elite fighting force, Sameer, you take a bunch of people, isolate them from others, and you tell them that they are an elite fighting force.’ By setting them apart and telling them they are the best, you help them to become it.

I wonder if the Fellowship works in a similar way.