IPG's Former CEO Offers Lessons for a Recessionary Time
Now devoting his time to philanthropic efforts, Phil Geier talks about the ad biz, the history of McCann and what went into his new book, "Survive to Thrive."
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IPG's Former CEO Offers Lessons for a Recessionary Time Now devoting his time to philanthropic efforts, Phil Geier talks about the ad biz, the history of McCann and what went into his new book, “Survive to Thrive.” By Anthony Vagnoni Seems there really were ‘mad men’ on Madison Avenue back in the days when the hit AMC TV series is set. Quite a few of them are still around, watching the industry morph before their eyes into something very different than the personality-driven industry they remember. One of them is Philip Geier, Jr., who started in the ad business as an account man at McCann-Erickson in 1958 and retired in 2000 as C.E.O. of parent company IPG. During this time Geier not only saw just about every possible trend in advertising and business come and go, he also foresaw the turmoil to come from a rapidly changing media environment. During his tenure as CEO, IPG went from a $500 million company to $5.6 billion, grew from 8,000 employees to 50,000 and expanded to include a wide range of marketing communications firms around the world.
Currently chairman of The Geier Group, a New York-based marketing communications and venture capital firm, Geier devotes a large amount of time to a variety of charitable efforts. The profits from his book are going to several of his favorite causes, including Save the Children and Autism Speaks. SourceEcreative spoke with him recently about his take on the ad business today and what went into the creation of “Survive to Thrive.” For more info on the book, click here. The book is a great read, filled with lots of inside knowledge not just about the industry in general and IPG and McCann-Erickson in particular, but about your personal history as well. You wrote that, after your first post-college business ventures failed, you decided to go into the advertising industry since you thought it looked like it was fun. Do you think it still is? No, it’s not. It’s a different world today. Part of that has to do with the changes in the media area, and the marketing communications aspects of the media area. They’ve gone into what I call pipes—these are different approaches where you go to hit your target. There’s been major change which has brought us into the digital area. Cable TV was the beginning of it, where you could specify pretty much what kind of programming you’d have on a channel. And it’s carried on to the beginnings of the internet and now to social networking. All these things that relate to media and distribution and reaching audiences have changed. But there’s one thing that people at some agencies seem to have lost. It doesn’t matter where the strategic or creative idea comes from, it still has to go through these pipes. And someone has to sort those out. Knowing the best way to do this is a big factor in why the business has become more technical and more research-oriented than in the past. Is there still room for creative expression here? You talk a lot about the power of ideas in the book, citing a speech given by IPG founder Marion Harper many years ago about how advertising was primarily the business of ideas. Is the idea still the central focus of what you should be trying to do in advertising? It is, but it can come out of different areas—digital or direct response, for example. But making sure you capture the idea and figure out how to place it into the various pipes to make it work is the toughest part. The idea is still the major factor that takes place. Let’s talk about emotion for a minute. Reading this book, I get the feeling you’re a little bit of a sentimental guy when it comes to advertising. Is that true? It’s true. I was brought up on the Coca-Cola business, and emotion was a major factor. So was music. Like the Coke spot went, if you could teach the world to sing, that message would be universally accepted. Anything in the beverage or indulgent area is always going to be much more effective via emotion. Even though a lot of work isn’t being done by the agency anymore, do you think McCann set a benchmark for Coke’s emotional advertising that the brand is still trying to meet? Yes, I think some of the greatest advertising was done in those days, and I don’t think anyone’s reached it yet. What prompted you to write the book? I wrote the book basically because I felt that no one has written a business book about advertising—it’s all been creative people writing about creative. I thought, if I can get across something that’s part business bible, part advertising history and part personal memoir, it would be beneficial. A lot of the memoir part is to convey some lessons learned, and not just the ones that worked but the ones that didn’t work, too—even the lessons that I learned myself, where I either did or didn’t do the right thing. If you can learn something from that as you go forward in the future, particularly in this recessionary period, I thought it would help. And remember, I went through three or four of them. I know what they were like, and how we got through them. We pushed our clients to put advertising on when they were on the bottom, and many of them came out with a higher share of market when things recovered. And some companies are doing that now, which is good. Tell me about your philanthropic activities. I understand all the proceeds from the book are to some of your all favorite charities. Yes, Save the Children and Autism Speaks. What happened was, when I got involved with a publisher and saw the amount of money they give you plus the promotion they do—well, you’re getting 15 percent of what the book generates. I said to myself, this is crazy. Why not to someplace like Amazon, which will provide you with the inventory and you keep 55 percent of the sales. After all, 70 percent of all books are sold there anyway. And this way, I can give all the proceeds to charity and I can have my company help develop the promotion. I do some marketing communications consulting and work with Lazard Investment Banking on M&A work, and I spend some time with venture capital development. Those are the areas where I generate income. And then there’s the philanthropic part. As you know, I had a heart transplant. I didn’t know that. About four years ago, I was on a tennis court in New York. And luckily for me there was a famous heart surgeon there who was in perfect shape. He kept me going. I was dead for four minutes. You’ve gotta be in good shape to do CPR for 25 minutes. Then, later on, things went downhill, and I ended up with a heart transplant. The only reason I was able to get it at my age was because I have B-negative type blood, which is very rare. I was at the bottom of the list, and then I went to the top, getting a woman’s heart. She was from West Virginia. A very liberal Democrat. So what happened was, I made my mind up—I’m on all these boards, for Save the Children, for Autism Speaks, which I helped start with (former NBC Chairman) Bob Wright, for Memorial Sloan Kettering, the Whitney Museum, all these business schools—and I said to myself, I’m not going to sit on these boards. Rather, I’m going to take on a project for each of these organizations. So, in the case of Save the Children, I’m working with Survive To 5, which is a major initiative they’re doing. Twenty-six thousand children under the age of five in underdeveloped countries die every day—twenty percent of them in the first month of their life—from preventable diseases. But if you give them just ten dollars worth of medicines, we can save them. I got former U.S. Senator Bill Frist to come on board as committee Chairman and Board Director, and now this is a major program which will go around the world. The Ad Council has helped us with a major program which we’ll be announcing this month where they’ll help us raise about $30 million a year over the next three years. To me, that was worth the effort. And with Autism Speaks, we’re taking on the vaccine problem, which is very controversial. We’re doing special research, and I’ve got people helping me on that. If I would give you any advice about vaccines, if you’ve got a young family, is to spread them out. If you had gotten nine vaccines back in the 1980s, nowadays you’re getting 29. What do you think might happen? It’s a possibly there could be some problems. A lot of kids get several at a time and at very young ages, so I say you should spread them out. What we’ve also found is that there’s not enough being spent researching the safety of vaccines. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control only spends $16 million. That’s all. It’s a real problem. Let’s talk about visionaries for a second. Do you think the ad agency business still attracts visionary leaders? Things are changing. The financial situation that’s taking place has shaken up a lot of people, a lot of young people. I’d say 70 percent have wanted to go into the financial business in some form. I think now, for the first time in a long while, you’ll see a lot of young people wanting to look at marketing and advertising. As a result, I think we’ll start to see the beginning of rebirth of talent coming back into this industry. Where do you see McCann going these days? They seem to just keep on ticking. I think the changes they’ve made are good ones, and think they’ll do well. How important is it for an agency to have a sense of history and legacy? I think it’s a big part of it. If you look back at McCann’s history, they had great accounts. In my day we had Coca Cola, and we had all of it—there wasn’t any part of the business we didn’t have. Today I think McCann is lucky to have some international business. Same thing with some other major accounts from back then, like Unilever. They used to be able to grow off the Microsoft’s and the Intel’s, but they’ve had trouble with them. But with the new management in place, a rebirth will take place I’m sure. I think a lot of people have always been fond of their MasterCard work. What’s nice is they’ve been able to go international with that campaign. As I write in the book, they’ve always done a very good job of executing internationally, on a localized basis, but with the same concept. Do you miss the ad business? Yeah, I do. It’s hard not to. If you had to do it over again would you get back in? Well, one of problems that’s happening—and I talk about this in the book—is that with everything going electronic, in terms of how you connect with people only via email and so forth—the top people in the agencies don’t call on the client anymore, or have reason to get in there and sit down and talk to them. It’s one thing to be talking with the CMO or people below them, but what we had back in the day was the ability to find ways to spend time with the people at the very top on the client side, whether it was joining the business council—which was hard to get on from an advertising standpoint—or going in and discussing problems on their businesses that had nothing to do with advertising. That’s how I used to get in. So this is missing in the industry now, because I think is of a lot of the contact you have with people is electronic. One of the best examples of this I can remember from those days has to do with (former McCann Chairman) Gene Kummel. L’Oreal was one of our big accounts. Gene would always load up on L’Oreal perfume at Christmas time, and made sure that the secretaries of the chairman and the president of our client companies got a little gift. And that’s how he’d get on their calendars and get in to see them, often without them even knowing about it. They’d say, “What’s he doing here today?” But Gene always found a way to get in. It was little touches like that which are missing today. |
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Phil Geier's book, "Survive to Thrive," offers great insights into modern-day marketing.Geier recently came out with a book titled “
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