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