The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  By now he was married, with two children, not that he saw much of them—the next decade was outstanding for McCann and there’s no question that it was the result of Harper’s indefatigable effort. From fifth place in terms of agency size, with billings of $50 million, the company had a period of growth matched only by BBDO; by 1959 McCann Erickson was second only to JWT in size, billing $231 million.

  He was personally quiet, “actually shy, a lonesome man, the company was his life,” says Carl Spielvogel, an executive who worked closely with him from 1960. But Harper’s moves were bold and unconventional. In 1958, in an almost unprecedented act, he resigned the Chrysler account for the smaller Buick business, believing that being on the GM roster represented the better opportunity for his agency’s growth. It wasn’t a popular move, but Harper’s judgement proved to be right.

  He was careful, too, to nourish McCann’s already advanced global reach. Again, it was only JWT that could better McCann’s international client roster by 1960. One gain in particular was Coca-Cola, which became a flagship business for the agency. The agency won the account precisely because Coca Cola’s incumbent agency, D’Arcy, had shown no great enthusiasm to offer the overseas services that Coca-Cola needed and subsequently found at the vigorously global McCann.

  In the business of the industry, Harper always seems to have been several steps ahead of everyone else. “He was a brilliant conceptualist. He could formulate ideas that took the industry quite a while to catch up with” says Spielvogel. He had a fearsome intellect, a ferocious work ethic, frequently putting in twenty-four-hour stretches, and phenomenal concentration. He would regularly astonish colleagues in new business presentations by displaying a detailed knowledge of the minutiae of, say, the prospective client’s regional market share or pricing policy, even though he’d been handed the fat briefing documents only two hours before the meeting.

  TALL, BALD, AND HEAVY SET, this focus did not make Harper approachable, although it gained him respect; in a 1963 Time magazine article, an unnamed agency president said, “While I find Marion unattractively impersonal and ruthless, he does seem to be a marvelous organizer, and his mental capacity is immense.”

  His capacity for innovative thinking was unending. Most of it seemed to come from a mind obsessed with research, especially with finding out what made things work and then implementing improved versions of them. He also had the ability to rise way above the daily grind; whilst being super-diligent about detail he would also be first with what we now call a “helicopter view.”

  A lot of McCann’s appeal to clients was based around new and seductive research tools, encouraged by Harper. They were attracted to techniques with reassuringly technical names, such as the Relative Sales Conviction Test, which apparently guaranteed advertising success. How could you fail if your ads had been tested, for example, in The Perception Laboratory? This was a concept shown to him by a Dr. Eckhart Hess at the University of Chicago, which he adapted and modified to analyze responses to advertising by measuring the pupil dilation of interviewees while being shown various visual stimuli.

  He was a seer; he is credited with being the first person to coin the term “think tank.” He was the first to describe the wider function of an ad agency as “marketing communications.” thirty years before the phrase became common usage. He arrived at the term partly because he was one of the first people to urge his staff to think beyond advertising on behalf of their clients. As early as 1960 he was talking about “holistic” answers to marketing problems (another industry buzzword thirty years later). He was enthusing about the coming “information explosion” and he had a prescient interest in computers. Many of these ideas came from the Institute of Communications Research, a McCann think tank to shape all the other think tanks, a department to improve the agency’s primary functions.

  One notion, typical of the extraordinary breadth of his imagination and his fascination for the concept of the group thinking—together with his talent for packaging his ideas—was best described by Russ Johnston in his book, Marion Harper: An Unauthorized Biography, a riveting account of this intriguing man and his unusual story:

  “He called it ‘The Humanivac’ a combination obviously of ‘Human’ and ‘Univac,’ as the then most popular computer was known. His idea was to assemble people like parts of a giant brain, each specializing in a particular aspect of marketing. A problem would be presented, each part of the human machine would go into action, and in a short time the solution would roll out, neatly packaged and ready to go to market. Some people thought it was fortunate that the idea slowly disappeared. Today [1982] it seems feasible but in 1962 it seemed pretty far-fetched. But, then, so was putting a man on the moon.”

  His most obvious and publicly recognized goal was to overtake JWT in size. But a much later remark, talking about his aims at the time he was made president, reveals a much grander vision: “At thirty-eight… you can’t have as your ambition just to be the best of whatever there already is.” He was always going to do something different and new and the idea that changed not just McCann Erickson but the entire business out of all recognition was so devastatingly simple it seems incredible that advertising could have got so far without anyone having thought of it before. He invented the advertising conglomerate.

  Marion Harper; a brilliant mind—but flawed.

  THE IDEA WAS driven by clients’ deep abhorrence of sharing their advertising agent with any other client who could be conceived as a rival, no matter how remote. They claim it’s to preserve confidentiality, but the information passing through an advertising agency can rarely be more sensitive than that passing through auditors, corporate law firms, and banks—companies that rival clients are perfectly happy to share. Agencies comply because they have no choice but it means that none can ever handle more than one account in each category; one car, one toothpaste, one airline. (In Mad Men Sterling Cooper had to resign Mohawk Airlines to be free to pitch for American Airlines.)

  So when one advertising agency acquired another, any conflict would have to be resolved, and usually this meant that the smaller of the conflicting accounts would be resigned. This immediately reduced the value of the merger, with two plus two often making no more than three.

  Then Harper, in his words, “turned the management ladder sideways” and started a practice where the acquired agency would operate independently of the acquiring agency, but they would be financially bound by a holding company above them, the beneficiary of their joint profits. Ridiculously simple. But, amazingly, for advertising completely original.

  There was a second dimension to the idea, one that has possibly had the greater reverberations through the business ever since. Harper figured that though agencies supplied clients with ancillary services like research, promotions advice and publicity, they never properly charged for them. Because they were located within the agency and were delivered largely by the same team who delivered their advertising, the client perception was that they weren’t a separate service and there should not be a significant fee for them.

  So his idea was that specialist companies—Marplan, specializing in market research, Communications Counselors Inc. for publicity, and Sales Communications Inc. for sales promotions—should be set up to provide those services outside the agencies. Initially a number of their staff were actually the people who’d been doing those jobs within the agencies—no matter, their specific expertise and experience would be properly and separately charged for, and their profits would go to the holding company. Economies of scale would be achieved by having as much common backroom staff to service the agencies and specialist companies as possible—administration, purchasing, finance—located in the holding company.

  The holding company therefore sat on top of a variety of independently operating and competing advertising agencies, each of which could cross-refer business to a variety of equally independent specialist support service companies. Extend this overseas, float it on the stockmarket and you have the prototype of
the contemporary marketing services conglomerate like WPP or Omnicom.

  Though Harper himself described what he was creating as a “revolution,” it was far from the Creative Revolution over at DDB. Indeed, he had as great a suspicion of it as Bart Cummings, attacking in a major management meeting “the new cult of creativity… closely identified with the bizarre.” He was poles apart from Bernbach, whose comment, “I warn you against believing advertising is a science” was in flat contradiction of everything Harper believed. He wasn’t neglectful of the creative side but, typically, he viewed it as yet another area that would benefit from the analytical and think-tank-based approach—and he set up yet another Interpublic subsidiary company.

  Spielvogel describes it as “a sort of combination of think tank and creative center. It was thinking out how the projects should go creatively, and then turning over the grunt work, the media and development of the creative work, to the agency. Harper called it ‘co-creativity’—what happens when you blend different skills at a very high level. We’re conducting an experiment to learn whether through co-creativity you can produce better, neater, brighter, hotter, more creatively.”

  It was to be called Jack Tinker & Partners, the partners element indicating that each of the four members (Jack Tinker, an art director; Dr. Herta Herzog, an Austrian psychologist expert in motivational research; Don Calhoun, a copywriter; and Myron McDonald, the marketing director) had an equal voice.

  BORN IN PITTSBURGH, Tinker had made his way up through the ranks as an art director until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He tried to enlist, saying in a 1982 interview: “I sat there for two days in my underwear and eventually somebody examined me and I passed and the last question was ‘Where did you go to college?’, and I said, ‘Well, I didn’t go to college. I went to this art school.’ As soon as I said that the noncommissioned officer, whoever he was, said, ‘That’s all. Put your pants on and get out.’”

  Tinker went briefly to JWT but McCann got him back as creative director. In the latter years of the fifties he’d been somewhat sidelined—one curious feature of Harper’s casting for Jack Tinker & Partners was that all four of the partners had been left out of the mainstream of agency operations.

  The agency started off in the Waldorf Towers in 1964 but they didn’t last long there—the comings and goings of clients, messenger boys, deliveries and all the noisy circus of office life alerted their classy neighbors—General Douglas MacArthur on the floor below, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor above. The terms of the lease forbidding use of the premises for business were enforced and they were out on their collective ear. They moved to a suite in the Dorset Hotel, previously owned by Martin Revson, the owner of Revlon cosmetics. They weren’t exactly slumming it. Charlie Moss, a young writer who’d been hired by Tinker from DDB on more than double his previous salary, describes the scene:

  “It was really a Mad Men set—the main room was two stories high with a kind of a balcony round the top, everything was white, the furniture was white with a white baby grand piano in the middle of the room. Around this big central conference room and living room place were other offices, which were hotel suites/rooms. When we came in they said they didn’t have any more room on that floor, so they put us on a different floor. They gave us a suite of a living room and two bedrooms that were our office, no furniture, just a carpet. The first three weeks we did everything on the floor.”

  Who did what is not clear, but judged against Harper’s initial brief there was some success. “The first piece of business we had was [from] the Bulova Watch Company… although when we got it, it was a piece of machinery that had been a spin off from the Space Program,” recalls Jack Tinker. The agency helped Bulova decide how to use it, then designed and named it—The Accutron Watch—and helped them get it into shops like Abercrombie & Fitch, a very different sort of store from the A&F of today.

  Next they helped with the design, naming, and styling of the Buick Riviera, followed by projects for Coca-Cola, Exxon, product design for Westinghouse, and providing input for Interpublic new business presentations. Then they took on a project for their first direct client, Miles Laboratories, and their success with it changed the nature of the organization completely.

  The Alka Seltzer account had been won in comical circumstances; Miles didn’t want it known that their account was loose, and Harper and his team had flown to their headquarters at Elkhart, Indiana, in his eccentric corporate aeroplane, a converted bomber. While the meeting was underway the plane was backed into fresh concrete at a dispersal area at the airport. Their attempt at discretion was blown as the local newspaper the next day ran the story of the Interpublic plane conspicuously sunk in cement.

  The advertising idea could not have been simpler: as the male voice-over says, “No matter what shape your stomach’s in… when it gets out of shape… take Alka Seltzer,” and accompanying it we see a series of stomachs—flat, fat, and flabby—shown in close-up in everyday use: a road digger, a ballet dancer, a fat man having his stomach jabbed by another man with whom he is in urgent conversation, and a mechanic easing himself under a car. Under Howard Zieff’s sympathetic direction the campaign was warm, affectionate and infectious, and the jaunty tune written by Sascha Burland, which reached number thirteen in the Billboard chart, helped delight the United States and revitalize Alka Seltzer.

  The campaign was so unlike anything ever seen for a pharmaceutical product before. The follow-up was animated, a cartoon man berated by his stomach (played by Gene Wilder), complaining about the rich food he eats. The dialogue is fast and witty, like a Woody Allen exchange. And with the strap line “When you and your stomach don’t agree” the viewer was again charmed by a commercial in a category in which they were more used to being bullied by Rosser Reeves’ doctors in lab coats and crashing hammers in animated heads.

  The industry acclaim for the campaign changed the perception of Jack Tinker & Partners from an experimental creative think tank to that of a full-fledged creative hot shop. Indeed, history now portrays Harper’s motive as being much like those agencies that Della Femina lambasted in his article, setting it up as a satellite for more adventurous clients who may have thought of leaving the unadventurous McCann. But Harper came to regret letting Tinker take the business as their own client, rather than continuing to work on a project basis only: “I should have continued some immediate provision for experimental creative principles. Because what happened was that the client began to eat up the people.”

  In the same interview he credited Dr. Herzog (the model for Dr. Greta Guttman, the European research director at Sterling Cooper who enraged Draper with her recommendations for Lucky Strike advertising) with the simple suggestion that two rather than one Alka Seltzer tablets was required. The result? Double the sales!

  TINKER WAS PROVING to be yet another successful addition to Harper’s new and burgeoning group. The first acquisition had been Marschalk and Pratt in 1954, an agency with which McCann shared the Standard Oil—Exxon—business. Amongst others added to the mix over the coming years were the New York and London offices of Pritchard Wood, a British agency, and Erwin Wasey. Initially the agencies and ancillary companies were owned by McCann but operated entirely autonomously. The final move was to take the name of a public relations company McCann owned in Germany, Interpublic—easy to say, spell and understand in any country—and incorporate it as the holding company for Harper’s empire in 1961. Flotation wasn’t to happen for another ten years but meanwhile, all was going well for the “emperor”—except that increasingly his courtiers were beginning to wonder whether he was wearing any clothes.

  “Marion was always more interested in the top line than the bottom line,” says Spielvogel. Harper had employed him personally in 1960 from writing his daily advertising column for the New York Times as his executive assistant, specifically to work on the establishment of Interpublic. He did well, and by 1967 was vice president and on the main board of Interpublic, handling the Miller Beer account and respo
nsible for new business acquisition and press relations.

  Part of the famous Alka Seltzer campaign in the sixties, by Jack Tinker & Partners.

  Looking back, he says of Harper, “When he was building the company he was a brilliant business conceptualist and then he became enamored with growth at any price. And there was a big price to pay.”

  Harper’s operating style, both professional and personal, was becoming increasingly grand and expansive. His emphasis on internal training and education for his staff in the latest techniques and procedures cost huge sums in the enormous and elaborate global meetings that he would stage. The chase for new business was relentless and he had no interest in keeping down the costs for pitches.

  In less than four days in 1965, for a $10 million piece of GM business, he had fifty copies of a detailed presentation written and printed in full quality hard back book form. Says Russ Johnston, “The cost… must have been enormous. The craftsmen were union workers and the plate making, typesetting, printing and binding were done on a weekend overtime basis.” Johnston estimates the cost of an equally unsuccessful pitch for TWA in 1967 at more than $200,000.

  The balances that had kept him in check had fallen away; Harry McCann, the man who had employed and guided him in his early years, had long since retired and subsequently been killed in a car crash. And the long-term chief financial officer Burt Stilson, suffered a heart attack and retired to Florida to play golf.

  “A lot of people who reach a certain point start to smell the roses,” said one contemporary observer. Harper’s personal life, too, was becoming stratospherically high octane. Bizarrely, he invested heavily and unwisely in prize cattle, and for his second wife, Valerie Feit (“long legged, radiant, beautiful,” according to Russ Johnston), he set up a fashion consultancy in Paris under the Interpublic banner. It was a loss maker.