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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