Word: burnette
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Many of the nation's biggest advertisers have a new slogan for their advertising agencies: Get Lost! Consider United Airlines, which dumped Leo Burnett, the giant Chicago agency that created one of the most memorable ad campaigns in aviation history, "Fly the friendly skies." Now it's bye-bye, friendliness--hello, hostility. United hired Minneapolis, Minn., maverick Fallon McElligott to handle the carrier's $60 million U.S. account. Fallon's in-your-face ads trash air travel, playing up canceled flights, lousy food and surly personnel. The punch line, "Rising," implies that compared with the rest of the airline industry...
...million account--now held by Young & Rubicam--up for review. That couldn't be more fitting, because the ad wars are turning Madison Avenue into a shelled-out battleground where huge chunks of business are blasted loose and flying around, creating career casualties when they land. At Burnett, a boardroom coup in March toppled CEO Bill Lynch and his protege, Jim Jenness, and restored chairman Rick Fizdale...
...Burnett's troubles reflect the industry's turmoil. Certainly there's plenty of business available. Ad billings have been rising at an average rate of about 6% a year. But given the plethora of media outlets--print, radio, TV, cable, satellite and now the Internet--competing for consumers' attention, it's easier than ever for messages to get lost or ignored. So even though his airline was enjoying a record year financially, United chairman Gerald Greenwald sacked Burnett in October, noting that today's hate-to-fly passengers hardly regard the skies as friendly...
...While Burnett was still reeling, its $100 million Miller Lite account was also heading for Fallon (which does work for TIME as well) in a stealth campaign launched by Philip Morris CEO Geoffrey Bible, whose company owns Miller. Bible had earlier warned Burnett's Fizdale that he was "lighting a blowtorch" under the agency to get it to create sharper and more youth-oriented ads for the flagging Lite brand. In the meantime, he also asked Fallon to work on Lite, in secrecy. In late December, Miller Brewing CEO Jack MacDonough paid a surprise visit to Fizdale with a Merry...
With so much business up for grabs, hard-hit Burnett (billings: $5.82 billion) has won some battles too. The agency pulled a $250 million Procter & Gamble account away from Saatchi & Saatchi in January and brags about its quirky campaign for Altoids ("The curiously strong peppermints"), a 200-year-old brand of British breath mints. Burnett says the ads have brought Altoids from nowhere to a 10% share of the $235 million U.S. market for breath mints in just three years. Says Linda Wolf, Burnett's group president for North America: "When it comes to being edgy and offbeat and getting...