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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