Leo Burnett: Marlboro's successful advertising guru

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, a brilliant star appeared in the American advertising circle -- Leo Bena. He was the representative figure of the advertising innovation revolution in the 1960s and won the world's honor and respect for the American advertising circle.

Leo Burnett is bulky and unimpressive, hardly an "AD man", but his ideas are so eye-catching that they leave a lasting impression. He created many influential brand images, such as Jolly the Green Giant, Pillsbury the Fried Bread Man, Charlie the Tuna, and Tony the Tiger, but the most successful, classic, and best known and celebrated is the Marlboro AD. It can be said that Marlboro became famous because of the creative publicity of Leo Burnett, and Leo Burnett became famous because of the Marlboro AD and became the master that every advertiser admired.

Advertising genius

Leo Boehner was born on October 21, 1891, in St. John's, Michigan. His father owned a textile shop, and he worked as a boy in his father's shop.

It was Leo Burnett's father who introduced him to the world of advertising. "After dinner, I was on my father's back, looking over his shoulder. A large sheet of white paper was spread out on the table, and with a yardstick and a large black pencil, he was writing posters for the store. It was the first time Leo Berner saw the large black pencil Alpha 245, which he loved throughout his life and which the company still uses today.

Little Leo helped write posters for his father's store. He tried to stand at his father's locker after school on weekends. But he didn't like being a clerk, so his father allowed him to go to work in town. He was 12 years old and working at a small newspaper called the Clinton Democrat, cleaning printing rollers. He soon mastered the operation of machines, typesetting, and most of the trifles of a printing house. One of his tasks was to go to the train station and wait for incoming trains and chat with townspeople who were leaving or returning home for information, for $3 a week.

Leo's high school life was not very happy. He described himself as "a young kid with a zit on his face who tried to hide it. Although my school work was good, I was not physically strong and avoided most social and extracurricular activities." But a guest speaker in October, Wooginson Ferris, changed him completely. "The essence of Ferris's speech was this: There are going to be tough times in life, and you have to wake up, pick yourself up, and start again. You may be better than you think." Leo Burnett wrote, "I felt as if the words were being spoken to me. I had the Epiphany of a dream. I felt alive and interested in the world around me again."

Leo began charcoal sketching, watercolor painting, and colored posters for campus events. He even took part in the inter-school competition and won a lot of honors for the school. He was elected president of the student union.

Leo Boehner had planned to attend the University of Michigan in 1909, but his father's business difficulties forced him to change his plans. To save money for college, he started teaching at a middle school in a neighboring town.

In the fall of 1910, Leo Berner entered the University of Michigan. In addition to earning credits in Latin, German, rhetoric, history, and architectural drawing, Leo worked in a restaurant and helped professors with yard work. Later, he got a job writing window posters for Meck's, the largest department store in town. At the same time, Leo devoted himself to the campus arts, becoming the editor of the Michigan Celebrity Almanac, The Monthly Oddity, and The Daily Journal, and the author of Painted Windows. He also took time out of his busy schedule to help design large color posters for the university theater's opera.

Forced to entrepreneurship

In the spring of 1914, Leo Berner graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts degree. The summer after graduation, Leo Berner helped edit the school's college newspaper and hoped to get a job as a reporter at the New York World. The next year, however, he took a job as a reporter for the Peoria News in Illinois, earning $18 a week.

With his meager salary, Leo lived frugally, spending 15 cents on breakfast, 25 cents on lunch, and 35 cents on dinner. To earn more money, he began publishing "Railroad Development" columns twice a week in other newspapers under the byline "Leo N. Burnett." At the same time, he began to take note of the auto coverage he started a year ago, expanding from a weekly column to a full-page special.

At that time, the American automobile industry was booming, and large and small car factories were set up and expanded rapidly. Leo couldn't resist the craze and decided to join the auto industry. His determination to join the auto industry was reinforced in the spring of 1915 when he learned that Winters, an old school friend, was working at Packard Motors in Detroit. At Winters's suggestion, he resigned and moved to Detroit, where he landed a job with the Cadillac Motor Company. His job as editor of the Cadillac Journal of Information was initially $25 a week, which was soon increased to $40.

The Cadillac Car Company became Leo Burnett's advertising school, a time he would never forget. At the time, advertising guru Mark Manas, who advocated that advertising should resonate with consumers, was in charge of all the copywriting for Cadillac, and his "The Price of Leadership" design for Cadillac was a sensation. To LEARN MORE ABOUT ADVERTISING, Leo READ ALL THE PROFESSIONAL ADVERTISING PUBLICATIONS, CUT OUT NEWSPAPER ADS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS, AND JOINED MANY ADVERTISING CLUBS. This period was the turning point in his later career in advertising.

In the early 1920s, Leo Berner moved to Indianapolis to become an advertising manager for the Lafayette Motor Company. From 1923 to 1930, he was the senior creative director of the leading Homa Mack advertising agency in Indianapolis. He ended up in Chicago as an associate creative director at the advertising agency Russian Wasey. Russo Wacey was one of the largest advertising agencies in the world at the time, but for a variety of reasons, not least the owner's indifference to the business, from the end of 1931, the company's major clients began to terminate their contracts. In no time at all, Russian Wacey disappeared from the world of advertising.

After leaving Owen Wacey, some of his former clients suggested that Leo Burnett should start his own company. Although he was reluctant, he was able to borrow $50,000 by mortgaging his house, and on August 5, 1935, he founded Leo Burnett, Inc.

Rapidly rising in the advertising industry

When the news of Leo Burnett's founding broke, he immediately attracted five associates and three clients who admired his talents, including the maker of Hulk corn sauce.

One of the first things Leo Berner did when the company was founded was to buy a large farm near Lake Zurich, because of his natural love of nature. In the same year, the company created the "Reach for the stars" trademark, the green "Reach for the stars" diagram has a total of six stars, large and small. The idea for the whole figure came from Leo Burnett's famous entrepreneurial belief of "reaching for the stars" - a determination to work hard and a burning desire to outperform other advertising agencies.

The first year was hard, though Leo Burnett was sure he would make it through hard work. They took the Hershey chocolate AD. It was a good product, but they didn't advertise it much. Leo and his partner Jack are confident that they can sell Hershey with high-quality advertising cases. However, the advertisement failed. Leo learned his lesson and redesigned the AD for Wrigley Gum, but still didn't make any money. Then, another of the company's big clients, the Minnesota Watershed Can Company, had a poor harvest of peas due to a prolonged drought, and its advertising budget was cut. The outlook for Leo Burnett & Company is bleak.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Leo decided to focus his efforts on the wartime Propaganda Committee, and one of his first acts was to volunteer to collect scrap metal. Because of his outstanding contributions, Leo was invited by the War Production Board in Washington to become a secretary. In 1945, Leo received a commendation for his service during the war.

Soon after, Leo Berner suffered a heart attack, and although this was bad news for the company, he held what became known as the "farm meeting." Every weekend, he gathers account managers, art directors, and writers to get an update on the company's business decisions. The tradition continued for many years.

In this way, we stumbled to 1945. Leo Berner designed a print AD for the American Meat Institute showing two tender pieces of red meat against a red background. Such a design was inconceivable at the time, even tasteless. Leo Berner thought that the image of meat should be intensely stimulating, so he used full-page ads depicting thick strips of raw red meat against a bright red background. Break down the scruples, "red on red" is the highlight. "It's a very natural thing," he explained. "It's a very good interpretation of the idea of red, of what else we want to say, which is inner drama in its purest form." As a result, the red background makes the meat more tender, and the Yanks can't resist the temptation to eat more.