Advertising: Ex-Chain-Smoker’s Exit

People leave advertising agencies all the time and for all sorts of reasons, ranging from a knife in the back to a boot out the door. Last week one of the ad world’s top executives resigned his $150,000-a-year post for what, as he stated it, was a rather different motive. Said Emerson Foote, 57, chairman of McCann-Erickson: “I will not have anything to do with any advertising agency which promotes the sale of cigarettes.”

Foote first made a name for himself in the advertising business by working with Albert Lasker and George Washington Hill on American Tobacco’s tumultuous Lucky Strike account. As some middle-aged moviegoers still remember, the Hollywood version of The Hucksters, a broad 1947 caricature of the ad game, cast Sydney Greenstreet as a raucous Hill, while Adolphe Menjou portrayed Foote as a harassed, jittery yes man. Said Foote at the time: “I don’t think I could impersonate Mr. Menjou very well, and I don’t think he could impersonate me very well.”

In 1948 the advertising firm that Foote had helped to found—Foote, Cone & Belding—jolted fellow admen by resigning the $12 million-a-year American Tobacco business. Foote later left Foote, Cone & Belding, and landed in 1951 at McCann-Erickson, now the biggest agency in the world’s largest advertising combine, Interpublic. A former chairman of the American Cancer Society’s executive committee, he gave up chain-smoking five years ago. This year he was appointed to the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke. Now he hopes to work for anti-cigarette causes “as a volunteer propagandist, behind the scenes,” but plans to continue as a professional adman, even if he has to form his own agency to do it.