When we moved back to New York, dog and all, JWT put my family up in a hotel in White Plains, NY. They had a lot of patience, since it took me a month and a half to find a place to live. I was looking for an apartment that would allow dogs, and I finally gave up. He was adopted by a nice family that gave him a good home.
During this time, while the company was covering our living expenses, I remember we went into New York. Not knowing much about New York restaurants, we wandered into the Four Seasons for dinner. When I put in the expense account for that, along with other expenses, the company suggested that I might want to tone down the places I chose to dine. The bill was only $50 for the two of us, but that was a lot of money back then.
Most advertising people lived in the Westchester suburbs, and almost nobody drove to work since the highways were packed tight and Grand Central Station was around the corner from the office. In fact, the railroad terminal was like a private reserve, with one entrance leading directly into the Graybar Building. You could go almost anywhere in New York from the underground Grand Central tunnels without ever seeing the light of day, and return home through its secret portholes, as Martin Mayer said, “uncontaminated from the herd in the Station Concourse.”
We finally located a two-bedroom, first-floor corner apartment in Westchester County on the fringes of Rye, NY, and my routine commuting into the City began.
I was assigned to administrative duties at our New York headquarters, and shortly after my return, named secretary of the Review Boards for the New York office. I served for the next five years with the senior corporate executives on the boards that reviewed and approved the marketing and creative proposals for all U.S. accounts. I was there when a Lark Cigarette was filtered over a mountain of charcoal and Walter Mitty drove his first Ford Mustang. I sat in with well-known advertising legends like Dan Seymour, Henry Schachte, Ted Wilson, Don Armstrong, Paul Gerhold, Larry D’Aloise, Ed Robinson, Rud McKee, Allan Sacks, Nancy Stephenson, Bob Colwell, Harry Treleaven, Chip Meads, Ruth Downing, O’Neill Ryan, Jack Devine, Philip Mygatt, John Monsarrat, Stever Aubrey, and of course, Chairman of the Board Norman Strouse.
During this time, management determined that the company also needed to revise its corporate marketing and Creative Review Board procedures, and I was named Advertising Planning Director and assigned this task, along with other responsibilities. As the ad planning director, I teamed up with Director of Research Paul Gerhold, who later became president of the Advertising Research Foundation. Among our accomplishments was a white paper on corporate name changing, which resulted in National Dairy Products changing its name to Kraftco, product planning for Oscar Meyer, and a significant revision of JWT New York office management systems. I also served as an advisor to the New York new-business team.
In 1965, I was also asked to help JWT win more creative awards and was named chairman of the New York Awards Committee. The assignment overlapped with the others. I kicked it off as a screening judge for the Advertising Club of New York’s Andy Awards. By the end of 1968, the program I started led to JWT’s winning more awards than any other U.S. agency. One hundred and seventy to be exact, of which one hundred and nineteen, an increase of 400 percent, were for the New York office alone. Among the coups, we took the top Golden Eagle award for Kodak at the Atlanta Film Festival. The two-foot-high statuette of an eagle with open wings wasn’t about to fit into my suitcase, and when I carried it back from Atlanta on the plane, the flight attendants thought I was a movie star who won something large enough to eat the Oscars.
It was JWT’s long-standing point of view that no attempt was ever made to create a specific look for a Thompson ad. Never creative for creative’s sake. David Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather, said, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” JWT’s advertising was created to solve specific client problems and to increase a company’s sales. But as Awards Chairman, I was quoted in our company’s JWT newsletter saying, “If in the process, we are honored by our industry, we are pleased.”
In 1965 I was asked to introduce an internal luncheon speakers program. REP Information Exchange allowed account representatives to share information between their management of the JWT client accounts. With all of this going on, to the best of my knowledge, I was the only employee at JWT, aside from the chairman, to have two full-time secretaries.
Then, in 1966, still on the Review Board, I was assigned as an account executive on the Office of Information of the U.S.
Department of Defense special task force on drug information, which helped change the approach on drug communications to the Armed Forces. I was also named account executive on the Institute of Life Insurance, I suspect because I had worked so closely with Chairman Strouse, since this agency client had his full attention because he had founded the Institute, and kept a close eye on its advertising programs.
We had a hit with our print campaign, for which I signed a release on one ad because the headline (using my daughter’s name) read: soMetiMe soon Liz pArk’s dAd wiLL Ask hiMseLF iF he hAs enough LiFe insurAnCe. (And how MuCh is enough, AnywAy?) Our television commercials were soon to win awards, as well.