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I looked out the window. From where we sat, I couldn’t see the hotel, which left just enough to the imagination to make the incident seem more tragic. For some reason, whenever I am in Chicago, at least once I get the distinct feeling that I am living in the 1920s, in a Theodore Dreiser novel.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s a big thing beyond Chicago because a lot of people are blaming the advertising blogs. One was especially harsh, tearing him up over an internal memo he’d written.”*1

I shook my head. There I was, a supposed expert writing a book about advertising, and I needed the moderator of the Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Idiot thread from the Fiction Files to tell me the latest ad industry news. I wondered what type of person would kill himself over advertising, let alone a badly reviewed memo? Also, I was curious as to why a subject like this was on my friend’s finely tuned cultural radar. “So, do you read advertising blogs?”

“Sometimes,” he said. That’s interesting. I’d deduced from our e-mails that he was some kind of consultant, or a professor. Way too cultured to wallow in the muck of advertising. Before I could reply, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a nicely designed business card. It was for an advertising agency. He was the president.

Leoland

When great pitchmen die, animation makes them immortal.

When I worked on the Kentucky Fried Chicken business, some years after the death of its founder and corporate face, Colonel Harland Sanders (whom my boss once repeatedly called “the Captain” while setting up a disastrous presentation before dozens of horrified franchisees), much debate was dedicated (and, I imagine, is to this day) to how to deal with the image of the man in the white suit. A significant amount of money was spent on a series of branding explorations, which seemed to resurface whenever sales were down. Should the Colonel’s image be drawn realistically, or cartoony, or with an Andy Warhol silk-screen effect? And regarding TV, was simply showing his animated face on the bucket enough? Or should his animated, disembodied head be a graphic “bug,” a constant presence in the lower-right corner of the screen? Or should he be fully animated, featured skipping through live action in the spots, his voice provided by an actor like, say, Randy Quaid? Or finally, should we just cease using his likeness altogether because, really, who wants to think of a dead guy when they’re munching out?

My agency tried each of these approaches at one time or another. I imagine the agency that had the Wendy’s account after the owner and pitchman, Dave Thomas, died struggled with similar brand-legacy concerns. And the people doing Orville Redenbacher’s current popcorn commercials have chosen to sign off with a grainy black-and-white film clip of what I couldn’t help but see as the old man’s ghost. It didn’t make me think about hot buttered popcorn. It made me think about death, and a recently disturbed grave site.

Stepping out of the Chicago chill and inside Leo Burnett Worldwide, I wondered if the master brand-character maker Burnett, who died in 1971, had a say in how his own brand legacy would be managed. My guess, as a visitor escort took me up a special guest elevator, was yes, judging by the preponderance of his signature on the walls, the legendary apple baskets on the lobby tables (carrying on the mandatory creation myth*2), and Leo’s words and likenesses everywhere, as ubiquitous as mouse ears in Orlando (not surprising, since Disney is a Burnett client).

The cumulative effect a visitor feels after just a few minutes inside is that the agency was founded not by a man but (like Disney) by a mythological figure. Or at the very least by someone who tacitly understood Middle America’s love affair with dreams and symbols.

Regardless, today Leo Burnett Worldwide, which is now owned by the French communications consortium Publicis Groupe, has ninety-seven offices in eighty-four countries with more