Emerson Foote; Retired Ad Agency Executive
Emerson Foote, who helped found the nation’s largest advertising agency and went on to become chairman of one of its rivals but quit the business in a dispute over cigarette ads, is dead.
Foote was 85 when he died in a convalescent home in Carmel, N.Y., on Sunday of complications after an appendectomy.
He was the last surviving founder of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications Inc., an advertising agency started in 1942 when Albert Lasker--sometimes called “the father of modern advertising”--retired and sold the Lord & Thomas agency to his three top managers, Foote, Fairfax Cone and Don Belding.
Foote served as the New York-based president and a director of the agency until 1950, when he retired due to illness.
He later recovered and was lured to another major ad agency, McCann-Erickson Inc., where he served as president from 1960 to 1963 and as chairman of the board from 1962 to 1964.
The Chicago-based Foote, Cone agency recently was ranked the nation’s biggest and No. 8 in the world, with 1991 billings of more than $5 billion. Among its major clients are Citibank, RJR Nabisco, Mazda, Coors and S. C. Johnson.
An official of McCann-Erickson said the New York agency’s U.S. billings make it the nation’s seventh largest, while its international operations are ranked third in the world.
Foote was born in Sheffield, Ala., and got his start in advertising as a copywriter with the Leon Livingston Advertising Agency in San Francisco.
At Lord & Thomas, Foote moved up the corporate ladder through his success with the Lucky Strike cigarette account, the agency’s largest.
After the buyout, Foote, Cone created several successful radio commercials, and its clients included the Walt Disney and Samuel Goldwyn film production companies.
A former chain-smoker, he became a director of the American Cancer Society and a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke. It was his anti-smoking position that led him to resign as chairman of McCann-Erickson in 1964 after the commission endorsed a U.S. surgeon general’s report that linked cigarettes to lung cancer.
