Edward H. Meyer, an empire-building chief government who, utilizing an iron-willed administration model and a laser deal with even the smallest particulars, reworked a midsize New York promoting company into the worldwide energy generally known as Grey Group, died on Tuesday at his condominium in Manhattan. He was 96.
His loss of life was confirmed by a Grey spokeswoman.
Mr. Meyer joined Grey Advertising, because it was then recognized, as an account-services government in 1956, when the company was billing about $34 million a 12 months.
He was named president in 1968 and assumed the reins as chairman and chief government in 1970. Over the subsequent 35 years he constructed Grey, one of many final main businesses to stay unbiased, right into a behemoth that an organization spokeswoman stated was billing $4.2 billion on the time of its sale to the British promoting and communications colossus WPP in 2005 for $1.5 billion.
As a supervisor, Mr. Meyer was something however passive. Demanding efficiency in any respect ranges, he had an uncompromising drive that impressed comparisons to company barons like Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone.
“Ed inspires awe in staffers of every rank,” a 2003 profile in Adweek famous. “He also inspires fear.” The article quoted a former Grey center supervisor who stated that workers would usually go silent the second Mr. Meyer stepped into an elevator, and that some would visibly tremble exterior his workplace earlier than conferences.
While gracious and sometimes incisively witty in interviews, Mr. Meyer didn’t duck such characterizations. “I just tend to think I’m not benevolent,” he informed Adweek. “But everybody says, ‘Boy, he admires brains, he loves people who get it done. If you can match those criteria, you’ve got it made at Grey.’”
Mr. Meyer believed that serving shoppers required much more than whisking their high executives to four-star eating places.
“I built my career and the agency on the belief clients come first, and the job of the guy at the head of the agency is to know their needs,” Mr. Meyer informed the New York Times promoting columnist Stuart Elliott in 2006. “Not what they like for dinner, but their advertising needs, better than anyone at the agency.”
Mr. Meyer made good on his phrases. In 1988, for instance, he took a flip cleansing shrimp and ready tables at a Red Lobster restaurant in Orlando, Fla., to get a really feel for the interior workings of the chain, a shopper that Grey equipped with the memorable tagline “For the seafood lover in you”
As a waiter, he had his shortcomings, spilling espresso on one patron. “She told me no apology was necessary,” he later recalled, “because it was nice to see someone my age doing that job.”
Over the years, shoppers took word. “Ed is Grey and Grey is Ed,” an government for Procter & Gamble, a cornerstone shopper for many years, informed Adweek.
Such hands-on dedication made much more sense for Mr. Meyer, provided that he had an uncommon quantity of pores and skin within the recreation.
“I was one of the few guys who owned a big hunk of the agency he ran,” he informed Mr. Elliott after the sale of Grey, which netted him an estimated sum near $500 million. “Every penny I had was in here, so I had more at stake than anyone else”
“I sweated it harder,” he added. “I overruled people because I couldn’t afford to be a nice guy.”
Edward Henry Meyer was born in New York City on Jan. 8, 1927, the second of three youngsters of Irving Meyer, a producer of kids’s clothes, and Mildred (Driesen) Meyer.
After graduating from the personal Horace Mann School within the Bronx, he enrolled in Cornell University. He took day without work in 1945 to serve within the United States Coast Guard Reserve for 2 years and, after returning to Cornell, acquired a bachelor’s diploma in economics in 1949. He then entered the chief coaching program within the Bloomingdale’s division of Federated Department Stores (now Macy’s Inc.).
Mr. Meyer started his half-century in promoting in 1951 when he took a job with the Biow Company, a small company. It was there that he started his lengthy and fruitful relationship with Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati-based packaged-goods large, by engaged on its Lava cleaning soap account.
His work with Procter & Gamble continued 5 years later when he jumped to Grey. It didn’t take him lengthy to provide outcomes.
In 1959, the company gained the account for Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Flakes laundry cleaning soap, a model that was in a prolonged droop as opponents touted their new and improved components.
As account supervisor, Mr. Meyer directed analysis into the model’s most loyal customers, who turned out to be new moms. In response, Grey centered on the model’s perceived purity, arguing that Ivory Flakes had been smooth and mild sufficient for laundry child garments and material diapers.
A ensuing tv spot featured a professorial man in a bow tie who calls himself “the world’s only baby language translator” deciphering an toddler woman’s fussy ramblings as a consequence of sporting scratchy diapers that had been washed in opponents’ soaps. After just some months, the model had reversed an 11-year decline in gross sales, in response to a former Grey government interviewed for an inner historical past of the company compiled in 1992.
An early proponent of globalization for the trade, Mr. Meyer considered a worldwide attain as key to his company’s progress. He additionally expanded into associated areas like public relations, media shopping for and direct advertising.
“When I took it over, it was a domestic, United States, advertising agency that had just begun to explore the world,” Mr. Meyer stated of Grey in a 2001 interview with Business Today journal. Under his steering, he continued, “Grey became a truly global agency, in the ’60s and ’70s, which was the right time to do it because you can’t do it anymore.”
Mr. Meyer is survived by his spouse, Sandy; his son, Tony; his daughter, Meg; and 5 grandchildren.
He retired in 2006, a 12 months after the company’s sale. In 2014, he and his spouse bestowed $75 million to Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan to broaden and consolidate its most cancers care and analysis packages underneath the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center.
To many within the trade who had come to see Mr. Meyer and Grey as one and the identical, his departure after so many a long time appeared nearly unimaginable. Mr. Meyer, apparently, agreed. In an interview with Chief Executive journal late in his profession, Mr. Meyer mentioned his seemingly limitless tenure as Grey’s chief.
“When will I retire?” he stated. “To paraphrase Warren Buffett, five years after I die.”
Source: www.nytimes.com