Campus Conquistador

At Indiana's DePauw University, Mark Vittert majored in speech, took "gut" courses to ease through with a minimum of study--and dreamed big. "I wanted to be the youngest person in American history to have founded a company and sold it for a million dollars," he recalls. Since his graduation 19 months ago, Vittert has talked persuasively and moved fast. He started College Marketing & Research Corp. to help businessmen on the far side of the generation gulf match their goods and services to the desires of campus consumers. "All I knew about was students," he explains. That was enough. A few weeks ago, Vittert, 22, sold his firm to Hugh Hefner's Playboy Enterprises Inc. for $1.5 million in cash and stock, thus joining the growing ranks of America's young millionaires.

The son of a rich St. Louis real estate developer, Vittert showed considerable ingenuity at earning money as an undergraduate. His profitable enterprises included a direct-mail campaign selling a campus "survival kit": Vittert sent letters to students' parents promoting a package of fruit, peanut butter and candy, which for $5 would be sent to their sons and daughters when they crammed for final exams. Vittert's drive for individuality also made him campus handball and pingpong champion--and a sartorial iconoclast: though he has his hair cut short and dresses in pin-stripe gray suits, he almost never wears socks. "I like to feel my toes squirm around," he says.

Canny Corn. Vittert had a compulsion to start from scratch. Shunning both the family bankroll and the business his late father had built, he went straight from college to Indianapolis to raise cash on his own for starting a company. Within days he persuaded a group headed by Insurance Executive John Burkhart, a wealthy DePauw alumnus whom he had never met, to put up $150,000. Burkhart also agreed to serve as board chairman. Vittert set up shop in a windowless cubicle, recruited five staff members and began searching for clients, traveling around the country on cut-rate "youth-fare" plane tickets. At first his selling efforts met only rebuffs; middle managers noted Vittert's youth, then his sockless ankles, and instantly turned him down. Undaunted, he finessed the cadres of "no" men by telephoning top executives at home to ask for an interview. A major oil company hired his firm to recruit applicants for its credit cards among college students over 21.

Other clients followed quickly, and College Marketing's representatives on 700 campuses now push credit cards for Sun Oil, Gulf, Standard of Indiana and Trans World Airlines. The company has done marketing polls for Miles Laboratories, Schlitz and Levi Strauss. For Hamm's beer, Vittert displayed a flair for corny but attention-getting promotion. His firm designed a fraternity-house poster that shows a seminude girl balancing a can of beer on her bottom. The headline: THE MAN'S CAN YEAR ROUND. Last May, College Marketing closed the books on its first year with a profit of $105,000 after taxes on revenues of $896,000. Vittert's representatives also do well; 15 earned $10,000 or more last year, and one senior at the University of Illinois made $48,000 managing sales and research teams.

Vittert seems determined to avoid the transgressions that brought failure last year to Cortes Randell's National Student Marketing Corp., a firm that offered much the same services as College Marketing (TIME, April 13). A prime source of Randell's trouble was lax supervision of his representatives. College Marketing requires its representatives to submit the addresses and telephone numbers of all people they deal with; some of these are spot-checked by phone from Indianapolis.

Playboy plans to use the firm to sell subscriptions and products and run market surveys. Vittert remains president, sometimes working 60 hours at a stretch. He is a bachelor who does not drink, smoke or cuss and seldom dates. He drives a battered, four-year-old convertible, lives in a spartan one-room apartment and dislikes business entertaining to the point that he serves visitors sandwiches for lunch in his office. He professes little interest in making more money. "What can I do with it?" he asks, echoing the concern of the confused generation. "Eat four meals a day?" Instead, Vittert hopes to win a White House fellowship to work as a Cabinet aide and start a new career of helping people through politics. "As you can see," he says, "I'm really naive and idealistic."

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