CHARLES H. BROWER
ALONG Man hattan's Madison Avenue, admen have long divided life into two philosophical systems: the hard sell and the soft sell. To Charles Hendrickson Brower, 58, the tall (6 ft. 4 in.), shambling president of Batten, Barton' Durstine & Osborn, "there is no such thing as the hard sell or the soft sell. There is only the smart sell and the stupid sell." Charlie Brewer's smart sell, last week, was the hottest sell in the ad world.
Only a few weeks ago, Brower and BBDO hooked Dodge's $21 million car and truck account, biggest new account in the agency's history. Last week Brower scored again; Pepsi-Cola gave BBDO its $9,000,000 account, a plum that eventually could mean $25 million in billings if Pepsi's distributors follow the company's lead. Instead of showing what he was going to do for Pepsi, Brower put 60 members of his staff to work turning out a 65-page book that told about the people who would be on the account, stressed BBDO's philosophy of tailoring ads to the customer instead of creating a distinctive "agency look."
CHARLIE BROWER does not fit the popular image of the Madison Avenue huckster. He is low key instead of high pressure, prefers brown worsteds to grey flannels, Rob Roys to Gibsons, New Jersey to Connecticut's Fairfield County, still lives in the Westfield, NJ. home that he has owned for 20 years, keeps a Manhattan apartment for himself and his wife.
Brower rose through the copywriting end of the ad business, is still a phrasemaker at heart. He likes to work on his beat-up typewriter, sometimes stays up all night to touch up an ad presentation, e.g., he picked the name Valiant for Chrysler's compact car. His speeches are so nicely turned ("It is change, not love, that makes the world go around; love only keeps it populated") and hard-punching ("This is the great era of the goof-off, the age of the half-done job") that requests for reprints come in at the rate of 20 a day. An old-shoe type, he has a kick like a hobnailed boot when he wants something done better—which is pretty often. When a copywriter ventured that an idea had come to him "like a bolt out of the blue," Brower remarked: "Looks to me like you were struck with a broomstraw."
New Jersey-born Charles Brower comes from a long line of Dutch New Jersey farmers, entered Rutgers on a science scholarship. He later switched to majoring in English, tried teaching after college but decided to get into advertising "because I developed a prejudice toward eating." He was hired at $50 a week by the George Batten Co. in 1928, just before its merger with Barton, Durstine & Osborn. His hard-slogging work habits and a slogan-making command of the language propelled him through BBDO's ranks as he worked on ad campaigns for Armstrong Cork, Servel, B. F. Goodrich and Cellophane. He became the agency's chief idea man in 1946, a member of the executive committee in 1951.