Ad Legends

TikTok challenges, retargeting ads, GDPR, crypto, and cookies? Is this the advertising business that we inhabit today? It feels foreign and disorienting. It's not that the pace of change is too great. It's that we refuse to pause and assess the value of the shiny new digital objects. At the same time, the fundamentals of the business are absent in way too many instances today, and to be successful as a marketer, they …

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Tom Burrell was born in 1939 and he grew up on Chicago's South Side. When he entered the advertising agency business in 1961, he was one of the first black people in the entire city of Chicago to work in the field. Vince Cullers may have been the first. To say that Burrell is a maverick is too tame. He's a trailblazer who climbed the highest mountains in American business and then learned to thrive in that thin white …

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"Data is an expense – knowledge is a bargain. Collect only data that can become information, which, in turn, can become knowledge. Only knowledge can build on success and minimize failure. A company is no better than what it knows." —Lester Wunderman, from his book Being Direct Lester Wunderman was born in Bronx, New York in 1920. His father, a fur manufacturer, died on the cusp of the Great Depression. A gifted …

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Raymond Rubicam was born on June 16, 1892, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the youngest of eight children. His father—a trade journalist—died of tuberculosis in 1895 and young Raymond was sent to live with his older brothers and sisters. By the age of 15, he was working full-time as a shipping clerk's helper for $5 per week. Rubicam liked to read short stories written by O. Henry. The author inspired him to get to …

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Phyllis Kenner Robinson was born in New York City on Oct. 22, 1921. At age seven she declared her desire to become a poet. A few years later, she updated her ambitions. Unlike her peers, she knew she wanted to write advertisements from an early age. "I can remember that as a kid I was influenced just by the vitality of some of the retail store advertising that was going on," she said. When other little girls in …

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Bill Bernbach is the most quoted, most respected, and most beloved advertising man in history. The Jewish kid from Brooklyn changed the score on Madison Avenue, and we continue to thank him for that. Bernbach graduated from NYU in 1933. After working in the creative department at Grey—where he met Ned Doyle—he formed Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1949. Bernbach is credited with inventing and promoting the …

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David Ogilvy literally wrote the books on the advertising industry. He wrote the bestselling Confessions of an Advertising Man, and then followed it up with Ogilvy on Advertising. Both books continue to be widely read by students and practitioners today and are considered classics. He was a proper Brit, and a restless student who left Oxford University after two years. Ogilvy lived an interesting and full life …

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Rosser Reeves was a rule-breaker, a gifted writer, a visionary business person, licensed pilot, sailboat racer, chess player, and art collector. He was born in Virginia in 1910 and he wanted to become rich. Reeves got what he wanted. In 1934, he moved to New York and went to work as a copywriter for a handful of agencies before landing a job at the Ted Bates and Co. in 1940, where he was able to help formulate the …

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