Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of advertising network WPP, has proclaimed a bounce back in the advertising market in western Europe after a slight downturn in March.

April advertising revenue was "materially better than March" Sorrell said, but did not give numbers.

"March was a strange month," he said. "April came back, in other words, very similar to January and February," he told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York via a video link from London.

Shares of WPP, which owns ad agencies such as JWT and Ogilvy & Mather and media agencies such as MediaCom and MindShare, fell sharply in April after the first quarter trading update showed a slowdown in western Europe in March.
However, Sorrell said the US market had performed better than Europe for the first third of the year.

He added that the dynamics of advertising were changing.

"Sweden this year will be the first country where internet advertising outpaces television and we think next year Google will be a bigger advertiser in the UK than ITV and the internet will outpace television in the UK," he told the summit.

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