Adland by Mark Tungate Page B

values.’
    Perhaps Leo Burnett owes some of its corporate culture to the city itself. Is there a Chicago school of advertising?
    â€˜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 CadillacMotor 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