Adland (9 page)

In 1964, Wells was lured away from DDB by Marion Harper, then busy building the Interpublic marketing empire (see
Chapter 11
, Consolidation incorporated). Harper had set up an ‘advertising think tank' called Jack Tinker & Partners, which he hoped to turn into a genuinely creative agency. Wells would help him do it.

She struck gold early on with a series of TV vignettes for Alka-Seltzer, the indigestion relief tablet. Wells reckoned that anybody with a truly sixties lifestyle couldn't avoid an upset stomach: it was an inevitable
consequence of all that hard work, all that partying, all those new, exotic and spicy foods. In other words, everyone needed Alka-Seltzer. The first ad showed a cheeky montage of different-sized stomachs over a jingle that became a chart hit. ‘No matter what shape your stomach's in,' was the tagline. A short while later, the agency added the iconic shot of two tablets being dropped into a glass of water: ‘plop, plop, fizz, fizz'.

The Alka-Seltzer story also reveals another of Wells' contributions to the creative revolution: as well as injecting razzmatazz into TV commercials, she was a natural branding consultant, able to persuade clients to change their entire marketing strategy so that it chimed in with her advertising. When she repositioned Alka-Seltzer as a lifestyle product, brand owner Miles Laboratories created ‘portable foil packs that held two Alka-Seltzers each and sold them in new places, magazine stands, bars, restaurants… and, naturally, Miles began selling twice as much Alka-Seltzer'.

This feel for integrated marketing was further highlighted by the agency's next hit campaign, for Braniff Airlines. At that stage, Wells recalls, all aeroplanes were either ‘metallic or white with a stripe painted down the middle of them'. Terminals were grey and soulless. Flying, which should have been a thrilling experience, was actually miserable.

Standing in a grim terminal building one day, Wells pictured Braniff ‘in a wash of beautiful colour'. So she had Braniff's fleet of aircraft painted bright pastel colours. Red-hot Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci was hired to redesign the hostess's uniforms. (Parts of the uniform could be removed as the plane flew into warmer climes; Wells later ran a provocative commercial dramatizing this as ‘The Air Strip', which proved a huge hit when shown during the Super Bowl.) Interior designer Alexander Girard, who had styled one of Wells' favourite restaurants – ‘in a high-octane colour montage of Mexican and modern' – gave the inside of the planes a new look. ‘The end of the plain plane,' said the print advertising. Wells and her team had created the coolest, the sexiest – the most
sixties
– airline around.

There was plenty of steel beneath her romantic nature. When Marion Harper refused to make her president of Jack Tinker & Partners, she resigned. She took with her the art directors Stewart Greene and Dick Rich – the first calm and reassuring, the second edgy and contemporary – and the Braniff account. Wells Rich Greene opened its doors on 4 April 1967.

After moving out of its temporary base in the Gotham Hotel, the agency found cramped office space on Madison Avenue. ‘We didn't have time for decorating,' writes Wells, ‘although we did plaster the walls with Love posters and tossed psychedelic pillows around and we allowed Mick Jagger to sing “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?” in the waiting room.' More importantly, Wells Rich Greene set out to hire young men and women ‘who had a gift for cinematic use of television'.

And this was the simple, complex secret of Wells Rich Greene. The Technicolor imaginations of Wells and her loyal creative director Charlie Moss spawned highly engaging advertising for the likes of Benson & Hedges, American Motors, Procter & Gamble and Ford. Wells' early success for Braniff attracted a string of airline accounts: TWA, Continental and Pan Am. By the mid-1970s, she was the highest-paid woman in advertising, earning more than US $300,000 a year. During that same decade, she was able to help out the city that had witnessed her climb to the top. Her agency popularized a slogan that no visitor to New York can escape, even today.

‘I lost count of the amount of people who claimed to have invented the line “I love New York”,' writes Wells, of her 1970s campaign to bring tourists back to the city. ‘Nobody created the expression; it is what people have been saying since I can remember…'

At the time, though, New York was distinctly unlovable: bankrupt, crime-ridden, and still reeking after a strike by garbage workers. Perhaps only Mary Wells could have envisioned an advertising campaign that played like a Broadway musical, with everyone from Gregory Peck (impressively) to Henry Kissinger (surprisingly) and Frank Sinatra (inevitably) appearing on screen to glow about how much they adored the city.

The finishing touch came courtesy of the designer Milton Glaser, who showed up at Wells Rich Greene with a selection of posters. While the team was examining them, ‘he pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and said, “I like this, what do you think?” It was the “I Love New York” logo with a heart in the place of the word “Love”.'

Next time you see a coffee mug or a T-shirt bearing the words ‘I ♥ New York', spare a thought for Milton Glaser.

The agency went on to other triumphs, and it was not until the very end of the acquisitive 1980s that Wells began to consider selling up and moving on. The industry had become consolidated, global reach was
the key to success, and – for Wells, at least – some of the romance had leached from the industry. She'd had earlier conversations with DDB and Saatchi & Saatchi, but now she became attracted by BDDP, a French agency with ‘a cool, young, sophisticated style', that had approached her with tentative talk of a partnership deal. The discussions grew more serious, and after much soul-searching and hesitation, she sold Wells Rich Greene to BDDP in 1990, for US $160 million (‘Queen of advertising tells all',
USA Today
, 2 May 2002).

The newly baptized Wells BDDP was about to get off to a rocky start. By then, adland was a very different place.

05

The Chicago way

‘The advertiser wants ideas, needs ideas and is paying for ideas'

M
aybe it was just good advertising, but Chicago immediately struck me as a friendly city. On a breezy autumn morning, as I stood in the middle of the street with an unfolded map trying to wrap itself around my face, three different people came up to ask me if I needed directions. After twice insisting that I would be OK, I finally gave up and admitted to the third person that I was hopelessly lost. ‘Leo Burnett?', the man repeated. ‘It's on West Wacker Drive. You're on East Wacker. Just go back in the direction you came and keep walking: you can't miss it.'

As I walked on, I realized that I hadn't asked the man if he worked in advertising – I'd just accepted the fact that he knew all about Leo Burnett. While Ogilvy and Bernbach are not part of the mythology of New York City, Burnett has entered Chicago folklore. He remains as larger-than-life as the characters his agency created, from the Jolly Green Giant to Tony the Tiger – not to mention the Marlboro cowboy.

The Leo Burnett Building at 35 West Wacker drive is a 50-storey skyscraper with a lobby big enough to provoke agoraphobia. An elevator whisks visitors up to a crescent-shaped reception area featuring banks of television screens, a battery of black-clad receptionists, a bowl of rosy red apples and – suspended from the ceiling – a giant black pencil. The significance of these last two items will be discussed shortly. Beyond the reception area is the usual maze of offices, including the lair of Tom Bernardin, the agency's chairman and CEO.

Leo Burnett Worldwide has always been considered a solid, reliable, unpretentious agency. Under Bernardin's leadership, its brand positioning is a curious blend of the homely and the cutting edge: a multinational with a family atmosphere. Bernardin says, ‘My intent since I arrived [in
2004] has been to emphasize our unique heritage and the core values of our company, while demonstrating that these very qualities, properly applied, can be utterly modern, relevant values.'

Perhaps Leo Burnett owes some of its corporate culture to the city itself. Is there a Chicago school of advertising?

‘I think there is – which can be both a good and bad thing. Being headquartered here arguably takes us out of the mainstream New York advertising community. On the other hand, we leverage that as a point of difference from the mainstream. But Chicago and New York aside, one of the things I've been working on is reinforcing the fact that we're a global company, rather than a company based in Chicago with offices around the world.'

And perhaps it's slightly unfair to link Leo Burnett inextricably with Chicago. After all, the man himself wasn't born in the city. ‘I snuck up on her slowly by way of outlying cities,' he once said. ‘When I finally got there, I was 40 years old and stuck in my colloquial ways.'

An unhurried start

Leo Noble Burnett, the first of four children, was born in St Johns, Michigan, on 21 October 1891, to Noble and Rose Clark Burnett. Noble Burnett owned a dry goods store, and Leo grew up watching his father lay out ads for the store on the dining room table. The shopkeeper would use ‘big pieces of wrapping paper… a big black pencil and a yardstick,' Burnett recalled. In her 1995 book
Leo Burnett, Star Reacher
, the agency's former corporate communications director Joan Kufrin explains that this was how Leo discovered the big black Alpha 245 pencils he used throughout his career – and which the agency has adopted as part of its brand identity.

Leo eventually laid out some of the ads for his dad's store, although working there didn't appeal to him, so he got a job as a ‘printer's devil' on the local newspaper – at first cleaning the presses and later setting type and running the machines. After that he became a reporter. ‘Rarely a week passed that I did not scoop the rival paper with a hot obituary,' he said dryly.

In 1914 he was offered a job on the
Peoria Journal
– but after a year, like so many budding journalists, he was lured away by the prospect of a better-paid job writing advertising copy, in this case for the Cadillac
Motor Car Company. Burnett had the good fortune to arrive at the moment that the celebrated copywriter Theodore F MacManus was turning out groundbreaking ads for the company. ‘MacManus… taught me the power of the truth, simply told,' Leo said. Inspired, he realized that advertising was the business for him.

Burnett rose to become advertising manager of Cadillac, which kept his job open for him even while he served for six months as a seaman second class during the Great War (he spent it building a breakwater in Lake Michigan, which ‘undoubtedly caused a great deal of agitation among the German High Command', as he observed).

In 1919, Burnett moved to Indianapolis to work for a new auto company called LaFayette Motors, founded by a former Cadillac executive. Although LaFayette went out of business in 1924, Burnett stayed in Indianapolis, landing his first agency job at an outfit called Homer McKee. While it's fair to say that McKee has not had the same impact on advertising history as Theodore MacManus, he was an important Burnett mentor. Leo was undoubtedly influenced by some of McKee's basic rules of advertising, which included ‘Don't try and sell manure spreaders with a Harvard accent', and ‘If a kid can't understand it, it's no good.'

Burnett could have coasted through his career in Indianapolis, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 seems to have jolted him out of complacency. One of Homer McKee's biggest clients, Marmon automobiles, was in trouble and Leo guessed that his time at the agency was coming to an end. ‘At my age… I thought I'd better get the hell out of Indianapolis if I was ever going to amount to anything in the ad business.'

Burnett had kept in touch with Art Kudner, a copywriter who had worked on the LaFayette account at the Chicago arm of the advertising agency Erwin, Wasey & Company. Now, following up an earlier offer, Leo put a call in to Art and asked if there were any jobs going at the agency. And so, in late 1930, his wife Naomi pregnant with their third child, Leo Burnett found himself moving to Chicago in the middle of the Depression.

A seething morass of jazz, mobsters, prohibition and poverty, Chicago must have presented a dramatic contrast to Indianapolis. In
Star Reacher
, Joan Kufrin says that there were 750,000 unemployed in the city. ‘During the fall of 1930, the International Apple Shippers Association, faced with an oversupply of apples, hit on the bright idea of wholesaling them to out-of-work men who could resell them for a nickel apiece. There
was an apple seller on every corner.' As Naomi Burnett told Kufrin, ‘Everybody we knew had suffered financially and many men had no jobs at all. I thought [Leo] was a miracle worker.'

Burnett moved his family to the comfortable suburb of Glencoe and set to work as chief copy editor at Erwin, Wasey & Company, based in the splendid Union Carbide Building. Busying himself with accounts such as Minnesota Valley Canning Co. (which later became Green Giant), Real Silk lingerie and Hoover, Burnett couldn't have known that one of the world's biggest agencies was about to begin a slow decline. One executive even referred to it as ‘advertising's fall of the Roman empire'. In late 1931, the agency lost radio manufacturer Philco as a client. This was followed in the spring of the next year by General Foods and Camel cigarettes.

At around this time, Burnett's clients quietly began suggesting that he set up his own agency. A colleague, Jack O'Kieffe (whom Burnett had originally hired as a 21-year-old copywriter back at Homer McKee), also urged him to go it alone. But given the state of the world, Burnett reckoned he had too much to lose. ‘Although I thought I knew something about advertising, I knew practically nothing about business administration and all of the other things that go into running an agency, small or large.'

In 1935, however, he changed his mind. Later he wrote to a friend: ‘What really pushed me into a decision was the fact that I just plain couldn't stand the ads coming out of Chicago agencies… I knew damned well I could make them better and had a couple of close associates… who felt the same way about it.'

In unconscious imitation of his father, Burnett drafted the plan for his new agency on the ping-pong table of his home. Prefiguring the revolution that was to sweep through Madison Avenue some 10 years later, this document emphasized the importance of risk-taking creativity. ‘The advertiser wants ideas, needs ideas and is paying for ideas,' Burnett wrote. ‘We are going on the principle that every possible cent of income from an account should go into creative and productive efforts on that account.'

Burnett started his agency with US $50,000. He took with him a handful of Erwin, Wasey people, including copywriter and ‘ideas man' Jack O'Kieffe. The agency officially opened for business at 360 North Michigan Avenue on Monday, 5 August 1935, with a bowl of red apples
on the reception desk. Today, a bowl of apples sits on the reception desk of every Leo Burnett agency around the world.

Quite a character

To say that Leo Burnett did not look like a thrusting agency chief is something of an understatement. While Ogilvy looked donnish and Bernbach simply resembled the guy next door, Leo was beyond plain. Rumpled, pillow-shaped, balding and jowly, his heavy horn-rimmed glasses perched on his spud-like nose, he was the very opposite of dapper. His suits were invariably navy or grey, with the jacket often buttoned askew. A famous picture of Burnett shows him setting off for a meeting clutching his trusty black leather portfolio, clad in a raincoat that even Columbo might have raised an eyebrow at. Neither was he a great orator – although he could make the written word soar from the page, a colleague once described his speaking voice as ‘a medium-low rumble with a slight gurgling overtone'.

Stubborn and indefatigable, he built an agency based on family values while working so hard that he was rarely at home. To the exasperation of colleagues, he did not flinch at impossible deadlines or overnight turnarounds. The only time he ever entirely forgot about advertising was when he was at the racetrack, one of his few diversions. Asked to sum himself up for a journalist, he wrote that he was ‘naively respectful of the simple verities and virtues, but venturesome in the pursuit of fresh ideas… Direct and outspoken, but mumbles his words'. Indeed, he preferred to fire off telegrams and memos. In person, he mostly limited his praise to ‘damn good'. He disliked confrontation and hated firing people. During meetings, staff measured his opinion of the ads they showed him by the LPI – or the ‘Lip Protrusion Index'. The more Leo's jutting lower lip stuck out, the bigger trouble they were in.

Yet there is no doubt that Leo was capable of inspiring immense affection: his wife Naomi, recalling when they first met at her mother's restaurant, summed up his appeal. ‘He wasn't tall, handsome or that type… but there was something about his personality and bearing that intrigued me… He was a charmer: the
darlingest
sense of humour.'

He believed in loyalty and repaid it – even as far as clients were concerned. When he collapsed due to low blood sugar before a meeting,
a colleague rushed off to get a chocolate bar. Leo croaked from the floor: ‘Make sure it's a Nestlé's.'

In a sense, the contrast between Burnett's apparent disadvantages – humble origins, unlovely appearance – and his achievements is summed up by the agency's original logo, which depicts a hand reaching for the stars. Jack O'Kieffe came up with the idea just after the founding of the agency. It was inspired by a line in Virgil's
Aeneid
: ‘So man scales the stars.'

Some years later, Leo asked the agency's copy director, John Crawford, what he thought the logo meant. Crawford blurted, ‘Why, Leo, when you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.' Burnett wrote down the explanation and used it from then on – but he never forgot who said it first.

Even today, Leo Burnett staffers occasionally refer to themselves as ‘star reachers'. ‘And we don't consider it corny,' one of them says.

Always a distance man rather than a sprinter, Burnett saw the agency carefully through the lean years of the 1930s. ‘Even the person who ducked out at midnight to get coffee for the crew knew he was helping to hold the place together,' he later recalled, unwittingly confirming the agency's reputation for hard slog. It's difficult to believe there was enough work to merit such agonizingly long hours: new clients came and went, but the place was hardly a roaring success. Net income for the agency in 1937 was only US $5,889, according to agency records sourced by Kufrin. By the end of 1938 the agency had gained a handful of new accounts – including the Pure Oil Company, the Brown Shoe Company and the Standard Milling Company – and billings stood at US $1.3 million.

Although the war years were hardly less difficult for the agency – particularly as some of its younger men went off to fight – there were some highlights in the gloom. In 1942 Leo Burnett won the Santa Fe railroad account. But it was not until 1949 that the agency received the two phone calls that would change its fortunes, propelling it into the big league at last. They were from Procter & Gamble and Kellogg.

Cornflakes and cowboys

The call from P&G concerned only a project, but any contact from the Cincinnati, Ohio, company had to be taken seriously. P&G was the largest advertiser in the United States, with sales of US $696 million
from some 18 household products. Indeed, at that very moment a congressional committee was looking into the impact of big corporations on business competition, a development that understandably made P&G nervous. It hired Leo Burnett to examine the ways it might defend itself against potential criticism. Burnett recommended a series of full-page ads, to be placed in influential magazines such as
Time
and
Life
, explaining how P&G's wide range of innovative, affordable products benefited consumers.