Leo Burnett: When to take my name off the door.

I first read this speech well over two decades ago. I never thought I'd see a film record of it.

This is an incredible contemplation of the creative process. His Lonely Man sitting at the drawing board or the typewriter working all night, alone, reaching for the stars--is such a terrific image of what it means to be up against a deadline and still strive for excellence.

Some of the references he makes are explained in the post below.

Leo Burnett: The Logo & The Apples

When Leo Burnett started his advertising agency in Chicago, he set up shop under this distinctive shingle. It's an elegantly simple logo. Leo Burnett said that it represented his personal philosphy: "When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. "




There are a lot of stories about Leo Burnett's apples. This one is pretty much encapsulates the way I heard it from Hank Bergst.

"One of his most important uses of internal corporate symbols were the red apples placed on every receptionist's desk. Any visitor or employee was free to take one. This stemmed from a prediction from a Chicago newspaper columnist that Leo would fail miserably in his agency launch in 1935, made in the depths of the Great Depression, and would soon be on the street selling apples instead. Upon reading those words, Leo vowed to give away apples instead."

Knowing these things will help you appreciate the post above.

Rory Root RIP

Rory and I at WonderCon last February

Rory Root was a great human being. He was generous, funny, well informed, full of anecdotes.

And a visionary retailer. Way back when, he believed he understood the future of comic book retailing ,and he set out to make his ideas became reality. His Berkeley store, Comic Relief, was unlike any other.

He was a great friend to Beanworld and a good pal of mine.

His great silver coffee cup is now forever empty and will miss him as much as we will.

And speaking of ads....

I found this one today. The Quark Xpress slug (!) at the top is dated February 26, 1995. The red writing on the side says "Bone Ad Negative Film." So I have to assume that this was an ad intended for an Image Comics issue of Jeff Smith's Bone. Don't recall if it made the issue or not. Don't really remember if this ad ever actually ran anywhere at all.
But looking at it TODAY, I like its intent.

It seems that everyone who reads Beanworld finds something unique in it. Every reader creates his or her own story within the story I present on the page.

One of the things people have told me over and over is that Beanworld has aged very well along with them over the course of their lives. That it matures in the imagination like a fine wine.

It seems that no one really ever outgrows Beanworld.

"Big ideas come out of big pencils!"

There were a lot of superior advertising folks in the 20th century. I've already written about Theodore McManus and Rosser Reeves. Others, who I'd include on a list of folks who's work (or often far more properly put, their agency's work) has had direct influence on how I think would include David Ogilvy, Raymond Rubicam, and Bill Burnbach.

But the most important person to me was Leo Burnett, the founder of the so-called "Chicago School of Advertising." Leo's shop created or/or shaped four of Advertisng Age's Top 10 Advertising Icons of the 20th Century: #1 Marlboro Man (not that I condone cigarette smoking in any way, I don't, but the power of this icon was undeniable), #3 Jolly Green Giant, #6 Pillsbury Doughboy, #9 Tony the Tiger. Now THAT is an impressive track record!

So what exactly IS the "Chicago School of Advertising?"

It was a way of thinking that valued finding the so called "inherent drama in the product" and creating an advertisement out of the "drama," rather than using mere cleverness-for-cleverness' sake.

Burnett deeply believed in the people of the Midwest states. What he called the "the heart and soul of the nation." He believed in pictures and symbolism over long winded claims of every feature of a client's product'. He believed in keeping the text copy in his ads short folksy, and friendly using down-to-earth language.

On August 5, 1935, Burnett founded the Leo Burnett Company, Inc., in Chicago with $50,000 and several creative employees. In The Mirror Makers, author Stephen Fox quoted Burnett as saying "My associates and I saw the opportunity to offer a creative service badly needed in the Middle West. I sold my house, hocked all my insurance and took a dive off the end of a springboard."

The Leo Burnett Company, Inc. was formed, and the company started with small clients. He never wandered from his steadfast ideas and beliefs as to how advertising should be created and products sold. From the get-go, a Leo Burnett ad was recognizably different that those from any other shops. A Burnett ad always was able a strong visual attention-getter. One the consumer's interest was challenged, a Burnett ad immediately started making a case for the product. A Burnett ad convinced the consumer that THIS product was so incredibly interesting or compelling that one really had to give it a chance! As Fox wrote in "The Mirror Makers," "Instead of the fashionable devices of contests, premiums, sex, tricks and cleverness, he urged, use the product itself, enhanced by good artwork, real information, recipes, and humor."

Minnesota Valley Canning Co., the canning outfit company that produced Jolly Green Giant products even changed their company name to Green Giant after the Giant’s successful adverting campaigns. Burnett’s company’s billings grew from zero to nearly $100 million in a decade.

I didn't even know who Leo Burnett was when I hit the advertising word in Chicago in 1977. Oh, I knew his ads and characters his shop had created for his clients plenty well, but I didn't know the name of the agency or the man. He had already passed away in six years before in 1971.

But I had the incredible good fortune of landing a job at a small advertising agency called Sander Allen Advertising as the new kid in the three person art department. The number two guy was Henry "Hank" Bergst. Hank was an incredible old fellow. I believe he was well over 70. He started working in advertising as a very young apprentice either before or during World War One. By the 1930s he was considered one of the very best hand lettering artists in Chicago.

Hank designed the first Betty Crocker and Kotex logos, he designed Kleenex boxes for a decade or so. And he was one of those first creative employees in the brand new Leo Burnett shop when it first opened its doors. He worked directly with Leo Burnett for many years. He was the head of the lettering department there until 1960 or so when the new technologies made letting artists obsolete. He became a paste-up artist (or "keyliner") as they were called in Chicago. He was still working well beyond the retirement age. Not because he had to, he was rather well-off. He worked because he loved advertising. He, and Lou Frosh--the head of the department, were filled with a treasure trove of stories and tales about the early years in the business.

But the stories I loved the most were about Leo Burnett. I learned one hell of a lot about how to THINK about advertising in the Burnett way from Hank. I recognize now, that I probably had as good as an education in "Thinking-like-Leo" as any kid my age who was working at the Leo Burnett agency in 1977. I had a mentor who place me in just two-degrees-of-separation from the man himself.

There are a lot of wise quotes attributed to Leo Burnett and here are a few of my favorites:

"Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it."

"Anyone who thinks that people can be fooled or pushed around has an inaccurate and pretty low estimate of people - and he won't do very well in advertising."

"I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one. "

"Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business. "

And my absolute favorite:

"I like to imagine that Chicago copywriters spit on their hands before picking up the big black pencils."

I've never been comfortable working for any company on any product that didn't allow me to work in the Chicago style. I've done it, but I didn't like it.

My slogan for Beanworld: "A most peculiar comic book experience" in my mind is pure Chicago school.

I'm certain I will touch on Leo Burnett again in the future.

More From The Beanworld Archives

Wakinyan vs Unktehi

Early '80s

Aprox 16'' x 30"

Colored markers and ProWhite on Bienfang 360

I found this oddly shaped piece while looking for another one I have yet to find. I had almost forgotten about this drawing. It was all folded up and tucked into a file that had nothing to do with the subject matter at all. Oh well.

This drawing illustrates, in my own style, a favorite story of the Lakota people featuring two of my favorite spirit-beings found in published traditonal Lakota stories--Wakinyan (ThunderBeing or ThunderBird) and Unktehi (Water Monster).

Wakinyan is of the air and the source of thunderstorms, hail, tornados. Even though Wakinyan is a fierce entity, Wakinyan likes the Lakota because they are so respectful of its power.

Unktehi on the other hand is of the water. Lives in the rivers. Unktehi doesn't like the Lakota at all. Would just as soon see them all drown. At every river crossing there lurks the danger that Unktehi is lurking under the water like a giant crocodile and will drown you.

Wakinyan and Unktehi fight a lot. A variation of this myth (substituting an Eagle and Feathered Serpent) is found down south in MesoAmerica and in fact is smack dab in the middle of the national flag of Mexico.

But in my mind, when I look at my drawing below with the comfortable distance of probably 25 years, what I see more than anything else is the drawing below by the incredible Bill Everett that was in the Steranko History of Comics. To me perpetual conflict between the Golden Age Human Torch and Sub-Mariner inhabits the exact same mythological space as Wakinyan and Unktehi. I'm sure I had this drawing in my mind exactly whenever it was that I drew it.

Robert Rauschenberg Has Died At Age 82.

Erased de Kooning by Robert Raushenberg 1953
19" x 14 1/2"

Heidi did a wonderful retrospective/obituary of Rauschenberg over at The Beat and I don't think I can add much to her words beyond a few personal observations.

I became aware and influenced by the works of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg at more or less the same time.

My favorite Rauchenberg piece has to be "Erased de Kooning." It most captures the many influences that Rauchenberg was channeling as a young and ambitious artist on the verge of a major Break-Out as we say in the Beanworld--even though the art world at large was ingnoring everything he was painting.

Somewhere along the line he became intrigued with the notion of erasing as the flip side of drawing. "I had been working for some time at erasing," he told art historian, Calvin Tomkins in The Bride and the Bachelors, "I wanted to create a work of art by that method."

Raushenburg recognized that erasing one of his own drawings did not have the impact or effect that he was seeking. "I realized that it had to be something by someone everyone agreed was great, and the most logical person for that was de Kooning."

So the eager young Unknown Artist went to the studio of the Older Famous Artist and pitched him his radical idea. De Kooning didn't toss him out on his ear, instead he not only "got it" but he chose a drawing that de Kooning said he" would miss."

De Kooning chose a drawing that Raushenberg would really have to work HARD at erasing. Raushenberg explains the history of this artwork over at YouTube and the clip is well worth watching. "He gave me something that had charcoal, oil paint, pencil, crayon, I spent a month erasing that little drawing."

Rauchenberg later told Tomkins, "It wasn't easy, by any means. The drawing was done with a hard line, and it was greasy too, so I had to work very hard on it, using every sort of eraser. But in the end it really worked. I liked the result. I felt it was a legitimate work of art, created by the technique of erasing."

As I was writing the above, I went out the door of my studio and snapped the pic below. It's the bottom shelf where I keep the big books that I've referred to the most over the years, which explains how tattered some of them have gotten over the decades. Rauchenburg is right next to Duchamp!