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U.S. Business: THE MEN ON THE COVER: Advertising

13 minute read
TIME

The twelve executives on TIME’S cover this week do not exhaust the list of movers and shakers in advertising. But each represents an advertising philosophy or technique that has helped to make the industry what it is and seems likely to shape its future.

STROUSE: The Professional Manager

THE General Motors of U.S. advertising is New York’s J. Walter Thompson Co. with 17 U.S. branches. 38 abroad, and worldwide billings last year of $380 million. In the driver’s seat at Thompson is President Norman Hulbert Strouse, 55, a determinedly unemotional man whose prime strength lies not in the creative side of advertising but in meticulously efficient administration of his sprawling organization. Like Strouse, who wears a toothbrush mustache and half-rimmed glasses, Thompson exudes an air of solid dependability. It shuns the hard sell to turn out orthodox, convincing ads for such blue-chip clients as Ford, Kodak and Kraft Foods. Strouse became the third chief executive in Thompson’s 84-year history in 1960, when he was hurdled over 84 other vice presidents to succeed Stanley Resor, then 81, who had run the agency for 44 years. The self-educated son of a railway clerk, Strouse joined Thompson as a space buyer in San Francisco 33 years ago and, after a World War II stint as a major on MacArthur’s staff, rode the Ford account to the top of the agency. In his spare time, Strouse turns out handsomely designed pamphlets on a hand printing press in his elegant triplex apartment on Manhattan’s Beekman Place.

HARPER: Cussed & Discussed

MAN is captured by what he chases,” says Marion Harper, Jr., 46, chairman of Interpublic, the top block in the complex corporate structure that has grown out of Manhattan’s McCann-Erickson agency. What hulking Marion Harper openly chases is Norman Strouse’s crown as head of the biggest U.S. agency. Gifted with uncommon ability at convincing argument and a metabolism that enables him to step into a conference with a client daisy-fresh after 24 solid hours of work, Harper became president of McCann at 32. Since then he has personally won for his agency such accounts as Coca-Cola and Buick and has increased its worldwide billings 600% to $371 million last year—second only to Thompson. An Oklahoman who went to Andover and Yale, Harper is an inveterate theorist who has become the most cussed and discussed man in advertising by expanding McCann into a maze of separate companies, each designed to offer advertisers a different kind of communications or advertising service. So far, Harper’s costly expansion program has left McCann with small profit, but his competitors still keep a nervous eye on the thrusting man who begins each day at his $150,000 Irvington, N.Y. home by simultaneously reading a book and pedaling a few miles on his stationary bicycle.

GRIBBIN: The Copywriter’s Friend

WORKING in a plain-shoe office that does not even boast air conditioning, George Homer Gribbin, 55. presides over Young & Rubicam (1961 billings: $260 million), the nation’s third biggest agency. “We’re always described as the second-best agency, right after the agency that’s making the pitch for itself,” says Gribbin, grinning behind his Mephistophelian eyebrows. Prime reason is that, unlike some of his competitors, Gribbin encourages his copywriters to exercise their individual style, on the theory that there are no hard-and-fast rules for producing effective advertising. Some of the results: those ads in which the Life Savers look good enough to nibble right off the page, and the discreet “Modess . . . because.” Michigan-born and Stanford-educated (’29), Gribbin broke into advertising as a copywriter for Detroit’s J. L. Hudson department store, worked his way eastward to Manhattan’s Macy’s before joining Y. & R. in 1935. A dry, reflective man who claims to play “the worst golf in the ad business,” he won his spurs at Y. & R. with his whimsical ads for Arrow shirts and Borden’s “Elsie the Cow” campaign.

BROWER: The Frank Critic

MADISON Avenue’s favorite phrasemaker is Charles Hendrickson Brower, 60, the shambling, 6-ft. 4-in. president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne, which had 1961 billings of $248 million and is the U.S.’s fourth largest agency. A onetime English teacher who describes his forebears as “New Jersey peasants for generations,” Brower made his name at B.B.D. & O. as a copywriter with an infinite capacity for hard work. Propelled unexpectedly into the presidency in 1957, he was promptly hit with the loss of the $7,000,000 Revlon account. His reaction: “I’ll just go out and get seven new $1,000,000 accounts.” He did even better, personally hooking the $12.5 million Pepsi account and the $21 million Dodge account. Feared by his colleagues for his “terrifying frankness,” Brower is nonetheless much sought after as a public speaker, won wide attention a few years ago by asserting that the U.S. was verging on decadence with “the two-hour lunch, the three-day weekend and the all-day coffee break. What we have to do is teach that work can be fun—that the only reward life offers is the thrill of achievement.” No decadent himself, Brower lives in an unpretentious New Jersey home that he bought 20 years ago, and until recently mowed his own lawn.

BURNETT: The Midwestern Marvel

LEGEND has it that 70-year-old Leo Burnett works from before dawn till after dark 364 days a year—and takes Christmas morning off. Through his ability to confect folksy attention-getting ads, Chairman Burnett has lifted the billings of Chicago’s Leo Burnett Co. to $136 million, largest for any agency west of the Hudson. Out of Burnett’s oven came the Pillsbury cake-mix campaign, which set a much imitated standard for food ads by running a mouth-watering photo of a cake under copy that appealed to Mrs. America’s subliminal desires and fears (“You triumph, you please, you make everybody very, very happy”). Burnett’s earthy roots go back to St. Johns, Mich., where he helped write ads for his father’s dry goods store. But his career really started at General Motors, where he rose to head Cadillac’s advertising department before switching to ad agency work. In 1935 Burnett mortgaged his house, borrowed on his insurance, and thereby raised $50,000 to start his own agency “because there was nobody else here in Chicago.” Today, his personal trademark is the bowl of red apples that sits in each of his agency’s reception rooms—a permanent rejoinder to a scoffing gossip columnist who warned years ago that Burnett, by going into business for himself, would “wind up selling apples.”

CONE: Toughness & Taste

SHOW me this young genius of yours,” sneered tyrannical George Washington Hill, the late president of the American Tobacco Co. Up stood Fairfax Mastick Cone bearing an ad with the slogan that was to be his lucky strike: “With men who know tobacco best . . . it’s Luckies two to one.” That was in 1941, when “Fax” Cone was 38, but his boss, famed Adman Albert Lasker, never forgot it. In 1942, when Lasker decided to retire, he sold his prospering agency, Lord & Thomas, to three top staffers including Cone for a bargain-basement $167,000. Today, as Chicago’s Foote, Cone & Belding, the agency is the nation’s seventh biggest, and Cone, as chairman of the executive committee, is its boss. Its worldwide billings last year: $127 million. Cone, who ran away from his San Francisco home at 16 to spend two years as a merchant seaman, still has the knack of pleasing tough tycoons (among his clients: Howard Hughes), but he is equally respected by his peers for the eye-appealing campaigns that he has staged for packaged goods ranging from Clairol to Kool-Aid. A trustee of the University of Chicago, he spends a high percentage of his time on community affairs, and his public consciousness extends to advertising. He refers to the “tasteless people” in advertising as “a miserable, crawly, noxious two or three percent who represent the advertising horn of our dilemma.”

LUSK: The Search for Diversity

IN a handsomely furnished Fifth Avenue eyrie, Robert Emmett Lusk, 60, chairman of Benton & Bowles, is fighting to reverse a trend. Alone among the nation’s top ten agencies, B. & B. last year suffered a loss in billings (from $120 million to $116 million). Lusk’s answer has been a campaign to expand his agency from a specialist in advertising low-priced packaged goods to a general-purpose agency by lining up such accounts as Western Union and Mutual of New York. Lusk, a Connecticut machinist’s son who worked his way through Yale (’23), rose to the top of B. & B. on the crest of a vastly successful 1946 advertising campaign for Procter & Gamble’s Tide—for which he coined the slogan “Tide’s In, Dirt’s Out.” (Early this year, with competing detergents cutting deeply into Tide’s share of the market, P. & G. switched the $9,000,000 account away from B. & B. to Manhattan’s Compton Advertising.) Tall, handsome and well-tailored, Lusk rarely departs from an inborn affability. But last year, when B. & B.’s Co-Founder Chester Bowles publicly lamented the years he had spent in advertising because “there’s a lot of phoniness that runs through it,” Lusk angrily shot back: “If an advertising man were asked to advise young people about going into politics as a career, he could say . . . that countless politicians have been grafters and crooks.”

BATTEN: The Quiet Philadelphian

A3 remote from Madison Avenue in spirit as they are in miles are Philadelphia’s N.W. Ayer & Son and its chairman, candid Harry Albert Batten, 65. Born four blocks from Ayer’s 13-story headquarters on West Washington Square, Batten (no kin to B.B.D. & O.’s Co-Founder George Batten) still lives only eleven blocks from the office and walks to work each morning. His agency, an envied enigma in the industry, shuns the spectacular for quiet craftsmanship, e.g., its 23-year-old “A diamond is forever” campaign for De Beers, and selects its clients with as much care as a Main Liner making a suitable marriage. “When we sign up a client,” says Batten, “we expect to have him for life.” Ayer has had International Correspondence Schools since 1896, A.T. & T. since 1908. Ayer’s employees last almost as long as its accounts. Batten joined at 14 as an office boy, learned to write ads by covering up for writers who had had one too many at lunch, became president, at 39. Under him, the value of Ayer’s employee-owned stock has multipled 52 times, and billings have risen to 1961’s $113.5 million. The very thought of a move to Manhattan horrifies Batten, who says: “The pirating of personnel and accounts that goes on there is unbelievable.”

GANGER: The Businessman’s Adman

BREEZY Robert Mondell Ganger, 59, chairman of D’Arcy Advertising of Manhattan and St. Louis, was hardened in the competitive fires of manufacturing in the early 1950s when, as president of P. Lorillard Co., he was instrumental in launching Kent cigarettes. As a result, he has scant patience with the pseudo-academic theorizing of some admen, instead talks to businessmen in their own lingo: “The objective of advertising has always been to sell goods at a profit.” A handy man with a trombone, Ganger (rhymes with hanger) paid his way through Ohio State (’26) by playing in campus dance bands, joined the Geyer ad agency fresh out of college. His work on a campaign for Embassy cigarettes brought him to the attention of Lorillard—where he spent three years before resigning “for reasons of health.” When he was invited to take charge at D’Arcy in 1953, Ganger walked into a disaster: loss of the $10 million-a-year Coca-Cola account. But in a vigorous drive for new business, Ganger signed up Royal Crown Cola, has recently won Wildroot, Knox Gelatine and Plaid Stamps. With billings up to $87 million last year, Ganger beams: “We’ve nearly doubled our business in the past five years—and you don’t do that by luck.”

LITTLE: The Big Account

CURLED like a benign bear behind his desk in Detroit’s General Motors Bldg., Henry Guy Little, 60, the 212-lb. chairman of Campbell-Ewald Co., masterminds the biggest single advertising account in the world: $60 million a year from Chevrolet. It is hard to tell where Chevrolet leaves off and Campbell-Ewald begins. Only a floor separates their offices, and “Ted” Little is in on much of Chevrolet’s market planning; it was he who named the Chevy II. Bent on an advertising career ever since his teen-age days in Los Angeles, Little bypassed college to go to work as a copy boy for Lord & Thomas, and learned the advertising craft from Albert Lasker. Signed up by Campbell-Ewald during World War II, he has headed the agency for the past decade, increased its billings 350% to last year’s $87 million. He leans to simple ads with somewhat corny slogans (“Swissair Swisscare”), and his personal tastes are plain. He likes to chase fire engines and listen to his vast collection of recorded noises of railroad locomotives.

CUNNINGHAM: The Voice of Conscience

JOHN PHILIP CUNNINGHAM, 65, is the debonair Don Quixote of advertising. As executive committee chairman of Cunningham & Walsh (1961 billings: $48.5 million), he publicly lambastes the vulgar sell (“When we load the television screen with arrows running around people’s stomachs, we are boring the public”) and the oversell (“When we plaster five different commercial messages right after one another at station-break time, we are boring the public”). Harvardman (’19) Cunningham gets away with such blunt talk because admen admire him as one of the great copywriters of all time. Among his notable creations: Chesterfield’s “Blow some my way,” which came along as women took up smoking in earnest, and the campaign that stressed the cleanliness of the bathrooms at Texaco stations instead of the spunk of Texaco gas. Cunningham, who launched Cunningham & Walsh in 1950, once said, “Creative men build agencies. Businessmen eventually run them.” Last year, stepping upstairs, Jack Cunningham turned over the chief executive’s duties at C. &. W. to President Carl Nichols, now 39.

OGILVY: The Literate Wizard

ADVERTISING is salesmanship—it is not fine art, literature or entertainment,” insists David Mackenzie Ogilvy, 51, chairman of Manhattan’s Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. Yet it is Ogilvy’s flair for creating ads that are literate and entertaining while tugging at the purse strings that has made him the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry. It was Ogilvy who immortalized Hathaway shirts with Baron Wrangel’s eyepatch and bearded Commander Whitehead for Schweppes. Cultivated, charming and handsome enough to model occasionally in his own ads, British-born David Ogilvy studied history at Oxford, served a Depression stint as a chef in a Paris hotel, and sold stoves door to door in Scotland before coming to the U.S. to work for Pollster George Gallup. When he set up his agency in 1948, Ogilvy made a private list of the five clients he wanted most: General Foods, Bristol-Myers, Campbell Soup, Lever Bros, and Shell. Today he has some business from all five, and his agency’s billings ($47.5 million last year) are almost eight times greater than a decade ago. Recently he was selected by Washington to sing the charms of the U.S. to prospective tourists from Britain, France and West Germany. “Every advertisement I write for the U.S. Travel Service,” he muses, “is a bread-and-butter letter from a grateful immigrant.”

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