When Leo Burnett opened an advertising agency in a small office at 360 N. Michigan Ave. on Aug. 5, 1935, he put a bowl of apples on the receptionist’s desk.
He was thumbing his nose at a reporter who said it was goofy to go into advertising during the Great Depression and Burnett would soon be peddling apples on the street.
The International Apple Shippers Association, faced with a surplus, had been wholesaling them to jobless men in Chicago who sold them for 5 cents each. Burnett turned apples from a sign of despair to an offer of hospitality: Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.
The idea would become a trademark of the agency’s creative marketing. Ninety years later, Leo Burnett Worldwide and apples are virtually synonymous. His biographer, Joan Kufrin, wrote in “Leo Burnett: Star Reacher” that agency offices had given away 679,386 apples by 1994.
But early on, the pessimistic reporter was right. Getting an ad agency started was difficult because advertising was under fire from the New Dealers, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers.
One of them, Rexford Guy Tugwell, was a Columbia University economist who deplored “the waste and extravagance of advertising.” He and other members of FDR’s brain trust were trying to put a safety net under the hard-pressed working class. They faulted advertising agencies for increasing the demand for pricier products while seducing consumers with false or misleading claims.
Tugwell’s remedy was to have bureaucrats monitor advertising. Burnett hoped that reform could come from within. But he might not have had a shot at resuscitating the industry if he hadn’t received a tip from an old-timer while working at the Homer McKee agency in Indianapolis:
“Don’t try to sell manure spreaders with a Harvard accent.”
The problem of cultivated language stems from the advertising executive’s dilemma: He is a salesman who never meets the customer. He has to convince a client that he can induce consumers to buy the client’s product.
Using Harvard-ish tones would emphasize the deal’s value to the adman, not to the client. Middle Americans prefer to hear a down-to-earth explanation of how an ad would benefit them.
Burnett got a taste of advertising in St. Johns, Michigan. “I looked over my dad’s shoulder as he laid out ads for his (dry goods) store at home after supper, on big pieces of wrapping paper spread out on the dining room table, using a big black pencil and a yardstick,” he later recalled.
At 12, Burnett started working for a weekly newspaper, the Clinton Democrat, first in the print shop and later as a reporter. He covered his beat on a bicycle, boasting that “rarely a week passed that I did not scoop the rival paper with a hot obituary.”
After high school, he taught in a one-room school for a year. Then he got a journalism degree from the University of Michigan and a job offer from the Peoria Journal in Illinois.
The editor shook his hand, pointed to an available desk and told him to get over to city hall and see what was up. It got him a headline: “Lynam Confesses Murder of Wife.” Below was a story about an Indianapolis man who had killed his wife with an ice pick and was hiding in Peoria.
That crazy quilt of prior experience left Burnett unfazed by a novel or untested advertising proposal. His maxim was: “First we get into a client’s mind, then into his checkbook.”
For Marlboro cigarettes, he depicted a cowboy smoking one, aiming to counter the image of mentholated cigarettes as effeminate. The client took that projected campaign to a market research firm, which reported there weren’t enough cowboys in America to turn a profit.
“They were thinking with their heads, not their hearts,” Burnett said of Philip Morris’ bean counters. He stuck with the cowboy theme, and Marlboro was a hit.
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An advertisement for Philip Morris featuring a cowboy smoking a Marlboro cigarette ran in the Tribune in 1955. (Chicago Tribune)
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An advertisement for Philip Morris featuring a cowboy smoking a Marlboro cigarette ran in the Tribune in 1955. (Chicago Tribune)
But Burnett wasn’t infallible. A ventriloquist once brought his dummy to an audition for product spokesmen for a radio program. Burnett was sure that wouldn’t work on listeners who couldn’t see the act.
But Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy were syndicated for two decades by radio networks and attracted top-notch advertisers.
Notwithstanding, Burnett was a genius at matching a client’s product to an image — like the stylish photograph of the Marlboro man or a cartoonish one of a mythical character. Posing the mascot of the Minnesota Valley Canning Co. smiling broadly while holding a corncob like a barbell created the Jolly Green Giant and wound up rebranding the sponsor as the Green Giant Co.
Burnett himself wasn’t a Beau Brummell — a colleague described him as “arriving every morning in a freshly rumpled suit” — but he surrounded himself with a staff attuned to fashion.
Those employees judged his reactions to their ideas by what was known as the Lip Protrusion Index, or LPI. “When Leo was unhappy about something, his lower lip protruded,” Kufrin wrote. “The unhappier he was, the more it protruded.” An LPI of 5 meant an assignment of extra hours of night work. A 10 marked someone was about to be fired.
But Burnett also instituted a change in the agency’s work flow that gave employees a better shot at success while enabling him to better profit from them.
Traditionally every client had an account manager who asks the client about their needs, then tells the agency’s copywriters and artists what the client said. That robbed the content creators of the opportunity to take in the emotional subtleties in the client’s voice and facial expression.
Burnett removed the account manager from that middleman role. The client met the creatives face-to-face, and the account manager handled the logistics, billed the client and paid the staff.
During World War II, when there was a dearth of consumer goods, Burnett used his promotional skills to build public support for the long and arduous effort to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
The War Production Board asked Burnett to attend a conference about how the collection of scrap metal could be promoted. He brought a complete advertising campaign and, as a result, Kufrin reported: “The hungry blast furnaces of the steel plants were fed by washboilers, andirons, lawnmower parts, and all manner of iron gadgets from the homes of America.”
Afterward, Burnett resumed the leadership of the eponymous Leo Burnett agency. Its name, in huge letters, was attached to the London Guarantee Building, where it occupied 11 floors. But the aches and pains of aging underscored the reality that he was slowing down.
He worried about the Chicago-style advertising that he was credited with creating. He wrote his fears into a speech titled “When to take my name off the door.”
He delivered the speech at a breakfast meeting of all Leo Burnett employees at the Prudential Building in 1967, having moved his agency there a decade earlier. He exhorted them not to revert to the no-holds-barred style of New York agencies. Of course, the choice was up to them, but he gave his successors fair warning of his reaction, should the worst-case scenario materialize.
“But let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door,” he said. “That will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising — our kind of advertising. … When you lose that restless feeling that nothing you do is ever quite good enough. … When you are no longer what Thoreau called ‘a corporation with a conscience.’
“When that day comes,” Burnett said, “I will materialize and throw every apple down the elevator shafts!”
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