CHAPTER 10: MADISON AVENUE HERE I COME
If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go
into the advertising business in preference to any other. The general
standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the
past half-century would have been impossible without spreading the
knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt “Madison Avenue, here I come!” Well,
actually not Madison, Lexington Avenue, but I was going to the largest
advertising agency in the world at the time.
In 1958 I had come across Martin Mayer’s Madison Avenue, USA. It
was a reporter’s book about advertising and the people who work from
their “rising in the morning to their falling down at night.” Of the nineteen
chapters in the book, two were solely on the J. Walter Thompson Co.
The book pointed out that its elaborate offices occupied almost three
floors of the enormous Graybar Building beside Grand Central Station on
Lexington Avenue, with each floor representing more than an acre of
space. It had no organization table, no flowcharts, no fixed system of
work, yet only four agencies had billing figures of more than $200 million.
With billing of $300 million, J. Walter Thompson (also known as JWT),
led the pack: with three-fourths of it in North America, and the rest in
thirty-four offices in nineteen countries on the other four inhabited
continents. Ownership of the agency stock was held by people who
worked at the company and was spread throughout every executive level.
Suffice it to say that I fell in love with the agency through the book,
and there was no other place that I could imagine going to work.
In 1963 J. Walter Thompson’s New York Graybar Building
headquarters, alone, housed 3,000 people. In addition to Ford, Pan Am,
RCA and Lever Brothers, JWT accounts ran the gamut from Kodak to
Kraft, Mennen to Oscar Meyer, Reader’s Digest to Rolex, and Scott to
Squibb. Products advertised went through the alphabet from Beechnut to
Brillo, Fleischmann’s to French’s, Planters to Ponds, Quaker Oats to Viva.
To be hired by JWT required passing a series of stringent tests. After I
applied, I was mailed three case histories of products for which the agency
wanted me to create marketing and advertising campaigns, and in one case
it was a mythical new product that had not been named.
While writing was my training and my trade, my avocation was art, so I
put my best foot forward. The marketing plan for each product was a snap,
and my creative side came up with some clever approaches for ads. But
