Happy 89th Birthday Lester Wunderman.

9 years ago the Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp, Belgium.

Hometown of our agency These Days, part of the Wunderman/WPP Network.

Also 89 years ago Lester Wunderman, one of the living legends of the advertising agency world,

was born. Lester started the Wunderman multi-million-dollar business, coined the term “direct marketing” and our agency remains a thought leader in the industry but Lester’s early days  story is still relevant.

89 years ago the Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp (Belgium) and hometown of our agency These Days part of the Wunderman/WPP Network.

Also 89 years ago Lester Wunderman, one of the living legends of the advertising agency world,was born. Lester started the Wunderman multi-million-dollar business, coined the term “direct marketing” and anno 2009 our agency remains a thought leader in the industry. But read on since Lester’s early days  story is still relevant to all of us. To summarize:

• Lester and his brother, Irving, started an advertising agency in New York City during the height of  The Great Depression “because no one would hire us.”
• Lester had no clients and used to walk around from office to office selling himself.  At one point he saw a man about to jump out of a window and pulled him off the ledge.  The man thanked Lester and asked how he could repay the favor.  Lester asked for his advertising business, and thus won his first client.
• The pressure to win in this tough marketplace drove Lester Wunderman to “promise clients that their advertising would deliver results.”
• According to Wunderman: “We couldn’t sell on our experience or awards, and we didn’t have an education in advertising.  All we could really say was that we got results.”
• “No matter how much firepower other agencies had they couldn’t win if we had results.”

Obviously, in this case the pressure to survive as a business led Wunderman to innovate in a way that drove improvement for both his clients and his business.  The idea of results-based-marketing is seen today in marketers’ focus on Return on Investment and, eventually, the idea of relationship and data-driven marketing.  Here’s Lester addressing all Wunderman creative directors worldwide, talking about our agency’s mission of accountable creativity.

Today the idea is that to win in a world of consumer control, you should listen instead of shouting and create marketing that people actually choose to engage with.  Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship. Thus, the legacy of improvement doesn’t stop with one man or one business, but can echo through the generations.

Thanks for the legacy, Lester

and a Happy Birthday.