Adland

by Mark Tungate

  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.

  In terms of working methods, P&G and Burnett were strictly opposed. P&G wouldn’t budge without research, while Leo Burnett had founded his agency on the principle of unhampered creativity. Client and agency disagreed over the very first campaign – P&G wanted to test the ads on smaller markets before running with big titles such as Time and Life, while Leo would have preferred to trust his own judgement. In the end, the campaign tested badly and was cancelled. A TV campaign based on the same idea was somewhat more successful – and P&G was impressed enough to hand the agency its Lava soap brand in 1953. Over the years, Procter & Gamble turned the Leo Burnett Company into a more mature marketing organization, encouraging it to back up its creativity with solid research. The relationship survives to this day.

  Also in 1949, Leo was called in for a meeting with WK Kellogg, the 89-year-old founder of a company supposedly dedicated to improving the diets of Americans through nutritious breakfast foods. In fact, Will Keith Kellogg had spotted the marketing potential of cornflakes when he first came across them at a health spa run by his brother, John, at the turn of the century. (The brothers were Seventh Day Adventists, which required a strict diet and a total ban on alcohol and tobacco.) After an abortive attempt to go into business with John – who was opposed to adding sugar to health food products – WK decided to go it alone. He founded The Kellogg Company in 1909, promoting breakfast cereal as a healthy alternative to bacon and eggs.

  After meeting Leo (who was impressed by the elderly Kellogg’s undimmed commitment to providing ‘better nutrition for the human race’), Kellogg handed the agency the Corn Pops and Corn Soya brands. Burnett proposed television-oriented campaigns; the agency’s advice on the matter was so convincing that Kellogg handed over the Rice Krispies account as well.

  It was while redesigning the packaging for Rice Krispies that the agency came up with the idea of using the box itself as an advertising device. Until then, cereal packets had been dominated by block letters identifying the product. The agency created a series of dummy designs that reduced the lettering and used the remaining space for colourful graphics. This was a packaging revolution – and it won Leo Burnett the Corn Flakes account. Soon afterwards, in 1952, Kellogg’s handed the agency all of its advertising across the United States and Canada.

  It was, of course, for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes that the Leo Burnett Company created one of its most enduring brand icons, Tony the Tiger. As we’ve established, the agency specialized in giving life to such characters, from the Jolly Green Giant (with his booming ‘ho, ho, ho’) to the Pillsbury Doughboy. ‘None of us can underestimate the glacier-like power of friendly familiarity,’ Burnett told executives in 1955.

  Yet the agency’s most successful invention was a tough, ornery, brooding figure.

  The Marlboro Man rode into view to confront a straightforward marketing problem. In 1954, a delegation from Philip Morris met with Leo Burnett to explain that the company wanted to change the image of its filter-tipped Marlboro cigarette, which was regarded as a women’s brand. The company was also excited about the new crush-proof flip-top box it had invented. In the end, Leo both changed the packaging and repositioned the brand.

  He was certainly the right man for the job. Years earlier, conscious of the fact that his family had always lived in rented accommodation, Leo had purchased a 71-acre farm. Although toiling on his land was one of the few things that could distract him from advertising, work life inevitably overflowed into home, and weekend brainstorming sessions at the farm had become an established tradition. It was here that a handful of colleagues found him one Saturday morning, brandishing a magazine with a cowboy on its cover. ‘Do you know anything more masculine than a cowboy?’ he asked rhetorically.

  Not content with providing a rugged new image for the brand, Leo also gave the Marlboro lettering on the packs a capital ‘M’ and switched the colour from red-and-white stripes to solid red. He wrote to Philip Morris executives: ‘The cowboy is an almost universal symbol of admired masculinity… This almost sounds as though Dr Freud were on our Plans Board. He isn’t. We’ve been guided by research and old-fashioned horse sense.’

  No fancy psychological motivation techniques for Leo. According to Joan Kufrin in Star Reacher: ‘The black and white cowboy ad titled “The Sheriff” broke in local newspapers in New York, Florida, California, Texas, Washington DC and Philadelphia in January of 1955, closely followed by the rollout of the new Marlboro cigarette in 25 major cities over several months.’ She goes on to quote Joseph F Cullman, who was executive vice-president, marketing for Philip Morris at the time: ‘Marlboro became the number one brand in greater New York 30 days after the introduction, based solely on this one print ad.’

  Subsequent executions featured other rugged, tattooed types who were not cowboys, but were not male models, either. But the agency later went back to the cowboy imagery and stuck with it. In this way, it turned Marlboro into the world’s best-selling cigarette.

  It would be ingenuous to avoid discussing the moral implications of cigarette advertising here. Over the years, the standard response from agencies has been that they are hired to persuade people to switch brands, not to start smoking. They are within their rights, they say, to market legal products. This has become something of a moot point since the mid-1990s, when public anger at the tobacco marketers reached such a height that tough advertising restrictions were introduced in the United States and Europe. Cigarette sales are still rising in Asia, but opposition to tobacco marketing is growing there, too.

  Leo’s own views are a matter of record. As far back as 1965, the New Yorker magazine wrote to him announcing that it would no longer carry cigarette advertising. Leo penned this response: ‘As a long-time New Yorker reader, I have always considered myself capable of making my own judgements of products exposed to me in the advertising pages of your magazine and never looked to it either for preachments, protection or coddling.’ After putting down his thesaurus, he added, ‘I guess it’s about time for another Marlboro.’

  Of course, sensitivity about cigarette m
arketing rose to a far higher level in subsequent decades. But Burnett staffers are not forced to work on Philip Morris business. And Philip Morris has changed its marketing tactics. As long ago as 2003, an article in Adweek commented: ‘The Marlboro Man, once a ubiquitous figure riding through the pages of US consumer publications, has disappeared from print altogether. Marlboro owner Philip Morris… began taking dollars out of magazines in 1999 and is virtually out of print now’ (‘The Party’s Over’, 5 May 2003). On its website, the company states: ‘We have placed no consumer advertising for our cigarette brands in any newspapers or magazines since 2005’ (www.philipmorrisusa.com). And yet a 2012 survey from research company Millward Brown still ranked Marlboro at number 7 in a list of the world’s most valuable brands, with an estimated value of over US $73.6 million.

  In the end, however you feel about tobacco marketing, there is no denying the Marlboro Man’s status as an advertising icon – and a superlative example of simple, effective brand imagery.

  The international era

  In 1956, the Leo Burnett Company moved into new headquarters in the Prudential Building, taking up 100,000 square feet of space. ‘As I look down our seemingly endless corridors, I sometimes have to rub my eyes,’ Leo wrote in his end-of-year summary to staff. Two years later, the agency passed the US $100 million billings mark. Burnett was 67 years old – and still reluctant to retire.

  The sixties were as rosy for the Leo Burnett Company as they were for other agencies. United Airlines, Parker Pen, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Vick Chemical and Nestlé were some of the accounts that arrived during that bustling decade. By 1969 the agency’s billings had soared again, to US $269 million.

  In the meantime, Leo had finally started to let go, accepting that day-to-day operations were safe in the hands of his second-in-command, Phil Schaff. In June 1967, Schaff had become chairman and CEO, with Leo adopting the new title of founder chairman. A tougher moment came when he was asked to stop attending the Creative Review Committee (CRC) – the body that had the final say on much of the creative work that emerged from the agency. Now in his seventies, Leo conceded that it was time for him to step aside. But Schaff summarized the reality of the situation in an interview with Joan Kufrin: ‘No matter what Leo’s title was, whether he was chairman of the CRC or not chairman of the CRC, chairman of the board or founder chairman, his name was Leo Burnett and he was a legend, and people were going to pay attention to him, and not to whoever was in charge of the creative meeting.’

  On 1 December 1967, at the agency’s annual breakfast gathering, Burnett made a speech that would be considered his curtain call. It’s known to insiders as the ‘When to take my name off the door’ speech, and it is something of a legend within the agency. It began: ‘Somewhere along the line, after I’m finally off the premises, you – or your successors – might want to take my name off the premises, too… But let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door.’

  The speech was a stirring evocation of the Burnett philosophy. Leo told staff he wanted his name removed ‘when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising – our type of advertising… When you lose your passion for thoroughness, your hatred of loose ends… When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big – rather than good, hard, wonderful work… When you start giving lip service to being a “creative agency” – and stop really being one…’ Leo added that if these and other such horrors should come to pass, his staff could ‘throw every goddamned apple down the elevator shafts’. By the time he had finished, several onlookers were tearful.

  But Leo hadn’t left the building yet – and he had a last chapter to oversee. In typically languid Burnett style, the agency had taken longer than many of its rivals to go global. Indeed, Leo rather disdained the expansionist policies of groups such as Interpublic, which he referred to as ‘Interplanetary’. By the late 1960s, however, many rival agencies were reaping a large percentage of their billings from outside the United States – as much as 46 per cent in the case of McCann Erickson. Acknowledging that its clients required global reach, in May 1969 the Leo Burnett Company merged with the London Press Exchange – an agency of 23 offices around the globe. Burnett had at first been hesitant, but in the end he gave the merger his blessing at a decisive board meeting. Almost overnight, Leo Burnett became the world’s fifth largest advertising agency, with billings of US $373 million. In a brochure sent out with his year-end letter, Leo remarked: ‘I see in efforts like ours a modest advance towards the “single-family world” we so direly need.’ Elderly he may have been, but Burnett could still envisage the future.

  In 1971, at the age of 79, Leo was still going into the office four days a week. On 7 June, he dictated a letter to Jack O’Kieffe, saying that he planned to cut this down to three days.

  He died of a heart attack that evening, at home on the farm.

  Life after Leo

  A character like Leo Burnett was always going to be a hard act to follow – and in some ways the agency hasn’t tried. Having spent his life creating brand icons for others, Leo has become a brand himself: a logo, a philosophy, an identity. To this day his picture is on the agency’s walls, his black pencils lie on desks; on the website there is a grainy film clip of him telling staff when to take his name off the door.

  And yet, life has undoubtedly changed at Leo Burnett. For a start, these days it is owned by the French. It’s hard to imagine what the bluff, forthright Leo – who liked to imagine that Chicago copywriters ‘spit on their hands’ before taking up their pencils – would have thought of this development. In spring 2002, the Chicago Daily Herald announced with barely disguised alarm: ‘The holding company for one of Chicago’s most famous home-grown enterprises, Leo Burnett Worldwide Inc, is being sold to Paris-based Publicis Groupe SA for US $3 billion’ (‘Merger reshapes ad world’, 8 March 2002).

  By the time the Publicis deal went ahead, the agency that Leo Burnett had planned on his ping-pong table had grown into a conglomerate with billings of US $1.8 billion. Allowing itself a moment of nostalgic pride, the Chicago Daily Herald pointed out that when the adman had set out a bowl of apples on his reception desk, ‘critics scoffed at his ambitions, predicting that he’d soon have to resort to selling apples in the street’.

  Burnett saw off the scoffers long ago. And his name is still on the door.

  06

  The Brit pack

  ‘Fags, booze and fashion’

  It was only a matter of time before the creative revolution made it across the Atlantic. ‘There’s no doubt that what happened in New York led to what is now regarded as the golden age of British advertising,’ confirms experienced adman Alfredo Marcantonio, who has served time at some of the best-known agencies in the UK. In a scenario that could easily have been drawn from the period we’re discussing, our meeting takes place in an Italian restaurant in London’s Soho. Outside, a dreary winter drizzle is falling – but in here, there’s a warm glow of nostalgia.

  ‘Agencies like Doyle Dane Bernbach showed us how to use our own language,’ Marcantonio says. ‘Of course, in those days American advertising was not diffused as widely or as rapidly as it is today. Keen young creatives would rush to the newsagents as soon as magazines like the New Yorker and Esquire came out, because that was where you could see the sharpest ads.’

  Marcantonio was actually working at the British arm of Volkswagen when DDB began producing its groundbreaking ads for the Beetle. The ads struck such a powerful chord that he quit his job in the VW marketing department to go and work at an agency. ‘What happened next was admirable: instead of slavishly copying the American creative revolution, the Brits started one of their own, which was entirely different but just as much of a break with the past.’

  It was also a product of its time. The early sixties struggled to emerge from the shadow of the previous decade, with its post-war burden of austerity and introspection. But when US agencies like Doyle Dane Bernbach and Papert Koenig Loi
s opened offices in London, their new take on advertising dovetailed with the experimentation that was occurring in the fields of music, fashion, photography and graphic design. Of course, they were not the first US agencies to arrive on British shores: J Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson had made their first forays into the market in the 1920s. Much later, Ted Bates, BBDO, Grey and Leo Burnett all acquired London outposts. Ogilvy & Mather eventually bought the venerable SH Benson, which had provided some of its seed money. But these were the shadowy reflections of the Madison Avenue monoliths, while DDB and PKL were trying to inject their trademark caustic wit into the somnolent British advertising scene.

  Many names and agencies were associated with the British creative revolution, but one agency in particular quickly comes to the fore in any conversation about that era: Collett Dickenson Pearce.

  The British hot shop

  The number of famous print ads, TV commercials and slogans created by CDP in the late sixties and throughout the 1970s is quite astonishing. Even now, for those of us who grew up in the period, a mention of them provokes a tingle of recognition. Stunning visual metaphors for Benson & Hedges cigarettes; ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’; ‘Heineken. Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’; Fiat cars ‘Hand built by robots’… Not content with creating print ads for Pretty Polly hosiery that were disturbing enough to a growing lad, CDP even managed to make Clark’s shoes look sexy. Agency co-founder John Pearce once summarized its main areas of expertise as ‘fags, booze and fashion’.

  With a knack for impact that augured well for its future clients, Collett Dickenson Pearce opened its doors on April Fool’s Day 1960. The agency was not started by a band of young hotheads: its founding fathers were well into middle age when they went into business together. John Pearce and Ronnie Dickenson had met at Hulton Publishing, where Pearce was general manager and Dickenson worked on Picture Post, one of the most influential news magazines of its day. Dickenson went on to become programme controller at pioneering television company ATV, while Pearce was made managing director of the advertising agency Colman Prentis & Varley – probably the closest England had seen to a hot shop before CDP came along.