Marion Harper Jr., Former Advertising Executive, Dies

Marion Harper Jr., an advertising executive who began with the McCann-Erickson agency as a trainee in New York as a recent Yale University graduate in 1938 and as president 10 years later took it from the sixth-largest to the second-largest agency in the nation behind J. Walter Thompson, died Wednesday at his Oklahoma City home. He was 73.

Harper, who presided over the establishment of the huge Interpublic Group of Companies, formed out of McCann-Erickson in 1961, was known as an innovator who applied research to pretest ads, believed in semantics to help shape human behavior and motivate consumers and created a competitive system among agencies in which a company’s subsidiaries often worked for competitors.

When he was eased out of the chairmanship of Interpublic in 1966, the organization that includes SSC&B;, Lintas World Wide in New York and Dailey & Associates in Los Angeles had 91 offices in 47 countries with 8,500 employees. He continued as chief executive of Interpublic for two years and then went on to lead other agencies before retiring.