Reincarnation

Almost unnoticed beyond Madison Avenue was the brief announcement last month that the ad agency of Kastor Foote Hilton & Atherton Inc. had changed its name to just plain Emerson Foote, Inc. The switch was significant: it meant that Emerson Foote, 60, had once again set up shop in a serious way.

Foote is part of advertising folklore. Alabama-born, he was a bank teller and a clerk before he traveled to San Francisco for his first ad job in 1931 as a researcher with a small agency. By 1938, he was in the big time. As a creative man with Albert Lasker's Lord & Thomas agency, Foote handled the American Tobacco Co. account, led the group-think that produced such slogans as "Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War." He was one of the few who got along with irascible Cigarette Magnate George Washington Hill, as a result rose to vice president. In the 1947 movie, The Hucksters, in which Sydney Greenstreet represented Hill, suave Adolphe Menjou was supposed to be Foote, bleeding ulcerwise and beaming sycophantwise as Greenstreet spat on a conference table. "I don't think I could impersonate Mr. Menjou very well, and I don't think he could impersonate me very well," laughs Foote.

Peripatetic President. When Lasker retired and sold off Lord & Thomas to his employees, Foote led the reorganization of the company into today's Foote, Cone & Belding, Inc. He stayed on for eight years, then in 1951 shifted over to bigger McCann-Erickson, Inc. as a vice president. Even in a peripatetic business, Foote moved around more than most. He left McCann not once but twice, the first time over "policy differences," the second because of what he describes as a crisis of conscience. A reformed chain smoker who worried increasingly about cancer, Foote finally decided not to work for any agency that had a cigarette client. After 1964, he spent much of his time with the National Interagency Council on Smoking and Health. An ad that he wrote for the cancer society is one of his personal favorites. Its message: "Give to Conquer Cancer--Strike Back."

Foote pined so much for his old profession that in November 1965 he wrote one more piece of copy. It ran in Advertising Age, and in it Emerson Foote asked for "another opportunity to serve in the advertising business." Sorting out 100 responses, Foote took up an offer to buy in and become president of Kastor, Hilton, Chesley, Clifford & Atherton, Inc., which was then reeling from a scandal concerning Regimen tablets. Kastor Hilton had been fined $50,000 for falsely claiming that Regimen was an effective weight reducer--the first time an agency was also held liable for defrauding the public.

Regimen Hurt. Foote moved in seven months after the Regimen scandal climaxed. Now, owning 87% of the stock, in what he calls his "third incarnation in advertising," he is intent on making the shop illustrious again. Says Foote of the Regimen affair: "That hurt us. We lost accounts totaling $2,500,000 as a result of the conviction, and we found it a handicap both in attracting business and people." Today Emerson Foote, Inc.'s billings are $9,100,000 v. $14 million at Kastor Hilton's peak.

Foote's aim is to do more copywriting and creative work himself, attract new business by avoiding the humorously apologetic type of advertising now prevalent; he feels it is a passing industry fancy. "We're in a phase of self-consciousness," Foote says. "Too much attention is being focused on the agency rather than the product, as in the case of Doyle Dane Bernbach or Wells, Rich, Greene, or Carl Ally Inc. The best advertising is often inconspicuous--Campbell's Soup, Cutty Sark and especially Salem cigarettes." Foote also stresses honesty to the young staff he is assembling. A lot of people took Ogilvy & Mather's Rolls-Royce ad--the one claiming that at 60 m.p.h. the loudest noise is made by the clock--as an amusing put-on. Not Foote. "That claim simply isn't true," he says earnestly. "I've tested it myself." Foote also doubts that there is such a thing as "soft" whisky, and he adds, "There may be more Poles in New York City than Warsaw, but no one really knows whether or not they drink Rheingold beer."

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