Marketing is now being disrupted by technology at a rapid pace. Marketing guru Martin Sorrell said the future of marketing will be purely digital, faster, cheaper and better.

Martin Sorrell, founder of the world's largest advertising and PR group WPP and executive chairman of S4 Capital, adheres to his Holy Trinity model in the new era of marketing, which consists of a first-party data model, fueling the development of digital advertising content and programmatic media planning and buying.

Speaking of the future of digital marketing, Sorrell said "faster, cheaper and better" will be keywords.

"Faster means more agility because all legacy companies have to be agile," Sorrell further explained, adding that "better" means better use of technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR), while "cheaper" means more efficient.

He also shared his observation with CGTN, saying that a hot phenomenon at the moment is the short video platform TikTok.

"As we see platforms rise and fall, we will go with the flow and try to monitor them… We are seeing changes in that ecosystem. We have companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, Lenovo, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. But the phenomenon [at this moment] in the Chinese context and beyond China is TikTok," he said.

At this year's Web Summit, which is the largest tech gathering in Europe held in Lisbon, Portugal, from November 4 to 7, Sorrell said the issue of privacy and internet giant power contributed to the summit's Zeitgeist.

"Privacy is an issue. And the power of the internet giants, the big three or we throw in Alibaba and Tencent, the big five, is also an issue," he noted.

And for the marketing strategies of companies operating in China and Chinese companies that operate globally, Sorrell said "the unwillingness of America to accept China" will be the top one challenge.

"There are Republicans who believe that if the Americans can tough it out with the Chinese until 2030 – 2030 apparently the aging population of China becomes the dominant. And a Republican thinking that if they can tough it out to then, Chinese will be in terminal decline at that point," he said.

But he called for cooperation, "It's not the way that we will succeed as a world. We'll succeed by successfully co-existing with other sides."