Leo Burnett

On August 5, 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, Leo Burnett opened his own agency in Chicago. He had mortgaged his home and borrowed against his life insurance to raise twenty-five thousand dollars - a considerable gamble for a man with a wife, Naomi, and three children to feed. The new office was modest: eight employees and three accounts. On the reception desk, Burnett placed a bowl of red apples, a gesture of midwestern hospitality that would become the agency's trademark. Skeptics predicted he would soon be selling apples on the street corner instead.

Burnett's advertising philosophy set him apart from the dominant New York agencies. While David Ogilvy championed research-driven sophistication and Claude Hopkins emphasized reason-why copy and scientific advertising, Burnett believed in finding the 'inherent drama' of the product - the quality that made people buy it in the first place - and presenting it with warmth, sincerity, and emotional power. He distrusted cleverness for its own sake. 'The secret of all effective originality in advertising,' he wrote, 'is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.'

This approach, which became known as the Chicago School of advertising, drew on deep cultural archetypes rather than urban sophistication. Burnett understood that most Americans did not live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan but in small towns and suburbs where values like honesty, warmth, and dependability still resonated. His advertising spoke to this audience not by talking down to it but by finding common emotional ground.

Burnett's greatest legacy is the gallery of brand characters he created - figures so deeply embedded in American culture that they transcend their commercial origins. The Marlboro Man, introduced in 1954, is perhaps the most dramatic example. Marlboro had been a minor cigarette brand with a feminine image. Burnett transformed it by placing a weathered cowboy in a sweeping Western landscape, creating a campaign that turned Marlboro into the best-selling cigarette in the world. The Marlboro Man became an enduring symbol of rugged American masculinity, though the campaign's ultimate legacy is complicated by the devastating health consequences of the product it promoted.

Tony the Tiger, the enthusiastic mascot of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, has been declaring cereal 'Gr-r-reat!' since 1952. The Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Maytag Repairman, Toucan Sam, and Morris the Cat all emerged from Burnett's agency, each embodying a simple, memorable personality that could carry a brand for decades. These were not merely mascots but what Burnett called 'cultural archetypes' - mythic figures that represented American values and aspirations in condensed, immediately recognizable form.

The agency also produced iconic slogans and campaigns: United Airlines' 'Fly the Friendly Skies,' Allstate's 'You're in Good Hands,' and McDonald's early advertising that helped establish the brand as a symbol of American family life. By the end of the 1950s, the Leo Burnett Company was billing over one hundred million dollars annually and had become one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.

Burnett was a physical paradox - a short, stocky, rumpled man with ink-stained fingers who chain-smoked and kept irregular hours, yet who inspired fierce loyalty in his employees and commanded respect across the industry. He believed that the creative atmosphere of an agency was as important as any individual campaign. 'Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun,' he wrote. 'Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business.'

He insisted on high standards with a persistence that bordered on obsession. One of his most quoted principles was the conviction that complacency was the enemy: 'When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.' He expected his teams to keep pushing, keep revising, keep looking for the idea that would transform a good advertisement into an unforgettable one.

Burnett's concern extended beyond creativity to ethics. He was deeply troubled by advertising's potential for deception and mediocrity. 'I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death,' he declared. This was not mere idealism - Burnett understood that boring advertising was also bad business, that audiences rewarded honesty and emotional truth with their attention and their purchasing decisions.

In December 1967, nearing the end of his career, Burnett delivered what became known as the 'When to Take My Name Off the Door' speech at the agency's holiday gathering. It was a valedictory address of extraordinary power, laying out the conditions under which he would demand his name be removed from the company: when the agency put money before craft, when it lost its restless dissatisfaction with good-enough work, when it forgot the lonely creator at the typewriter or drawing board. He concluded with a characteristic blend of passion and humor, threatening to materialize from the afterlife to 'throw every goddamned apple down the elevator shafts' if his standards were betrayed.

Burnett died on June 7, 1971, at the age of seventy-nine, of a heart attack at his family farm in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois. He had visited the agency earlier that day, pledging to reduce his schedule to three days a week. The company he built survived him and continued to grow, eventually being acquired by Publicis Groupe in 2002. Today, the Leo Burnett name appears on offices in over eighty-five countries, and bowls of red apples still sit on reception desks around the world.

His photograph graced the cover of Time magazine on October 12, 1962, alongside other advertising legends, and in 1999, Time named him one of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. These honors acknowledged what the advertising industry had long known: that Leo Burnett, the rumpled Midwesterner with ink on his fingers, had changed not just how America sold things but how it told stories about itself.