The Smart Sell

CHARLES H. BROWER

ALONG Man hattan's Madison Avenue, admen have long divided life into two philosophical systems: the hard sell and the soft sell. To Charles Hendrickson Brower, 58, the tall (6 ft. 4 in.), shambling president of Batten, Barton' Durstine & Osborn, "there is no such thing as the hard sell or the soft sell. There is only the smart sell and the stupid sell." Charlie Brewer's smart sell, last week, was the hottest sell in the ad world.

Only a few weeks ago, Brower and BBDO hooked Dodge's $21 million car and truck account, biggest new account in the agency's history. Last week Brower scored again; Pepsi-Cola gave BBDO its $9,000,000 account, a plum that eventually could mean $25 million in billings if Pepsi's distributors follow the company's lead. Instead of showing what he was going to do for Pepsi, Brower put 60 members of his staff to work turning out a 65-page book that told about the people who would be on the account, stressed BBDO's philosophy of tailoring ads to the customer instead of creating a distinctive "agency look."

CHARLIE BROWER does not fit the popular image of the Madison Avenue huckster. He is low key instead of high pressure, prefers brown worsteds to grey flannels, Rob Roys to Gibsons, New Jersey to Connecticut's Fairfield County, still lives in the Westfield, NJ. home that he has owned for 20 years, keeps a Manhattan apartment for himself and his wife.

Brower rose through the copywriting end of the ad business, is still a phrasemaker at heart. He likes to work on his beat-up typewriter, sometimes stays up all night to touch up an ad presentation, e.g., he picked the name Valiant for Chrysler's compact car. His speeches are so nicely turned ("It is change, not love, that makes the world go around; love only keeps it populated") and hard-punching ("This is the great era of the goof-off, the age of the half-done job") that requests for reprints come in at the rate of 20 a day. An old-shoe type, he has a kick like a hobnailed boot when he wants something done better--which is pretty often. When a copywriter ventured that an idea had come to him "like a bolt out of the blue," Brower remarked: "Looks to me like you were struck with a broomstraw."

New Jersey-born Charles Brower comes from a long line of Dutch New Jersey farmers, entered Rutgers on a science scholarship. He later switched to majoring in English, tried teaching after college but decided to get into advertising "because I developed a prejudice toward eating." He was hired at $50 a week by the George Batten Co. in 1928, just before its merger with Barton, Durstine & Osborn. His hard-slogging work habits and a slogan-making command of the language propelled him through BBDO's ranks as he worked on ad campaigns for Armstrong Cork, Servel, B. F. Goodrich and Cellophane. He became the agency's chief idea man in 1946, a member of the executive committee in 1951.

WHEN Brower took over BBDO in 1957 from BBDO President Bernard Cornelius Duffy, it was like a batter following a home run by Babe Ruth. Ben Duffy, one of the shrewdest and best-liked admen ever to stroll Madison Avenue, had built BBDO from a smalltime outfit postwar into fourth place in the industry before he was forced to retire from active leadership after a stroke. No sooner had Brower taken over than he faced a passel of trouble. Revlon, Inc. pulled out its $7,000,000 account. Then, to avoid trouble with its $17 million American Tobacco account, BBDO resigned its $1,500,000 account with Reader's Digest, after an unfavorable cigarette article appeared. "Being an intellectual uninterested in money," quips Brower, "I resigned the one that billed the least."

Brower reorganized and streamlined the agency in what he himself describes as a "blood bath" that swept out many employees. Then he set out to get new clients, won such new accounts as CBS, Air France, Book-of-the-Month Album Club, Coty, Gallo wines, and the $7,000,000 Valiant account, which proved so successful, says Brower, that "we lost the account--Dodge said that they just had to have us."

BBDO's rebound has netted Charlie Brower far more than he lost. This year BBDO will soar past its 1959 billings to reach an alltime record estimated at $235 million. Charlie Brower intends to make billings even bigger by exporting his smart sell. Last week he was off to London to give aid and comfort to BBDO's first overseas branch. He spent a night on the town, wrote a presentation before dawn, and sewed up a new campaign for Britain's Double Diamond beer before lunch.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.