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Edward H. Meyer, an empire-building chief govt who, utilizing an iron-willed administration fashion and a laser give attention to even the smallest particulars, reworked a midsize New York promoting company into the worldwide energy referred to as Gray Group, died on Tuesday at his condo in Manhattan. He was 96.
His dying was confirmed by a Gray spokeswoman.
Mr. Meyer joined Gray Promoting, because it was then identified, as an account-services govt in 1956, when the company was billing about $34 million a yr.
He was named president in 1968 and assumed the reins as chairman and chief govt in 1970. Over the subsequent 35 years he constructed Gray, one of many final main companies to stay unbiased, right into a behemoth that an organization spokeswoman mentioned 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 evokes awe in staffers of each rank,” a 2003 profile in Adweek famous. “He additionally evokes worry.” The article quoted a former Gray center supervisor who mentioned that staff would usually go silent the second Mr. Meyer stepped into an elevator, and that some would visibly tremble outdoors his workplace earlier than conferences.
Whereas gracious and sometimes incisively witty in interviews, Mr. Meyer didn’t duck such characterizations. “I simply are likely to assume I’m not benevolent,” he advised Adweek. “However everyone says, ‘Boy, he admires brains, he loves individuals who get it achieved. For those who can match these standards, you’ve obtained it made at Gray.’”
Mr. Meyer believed that serving shoppers required much more than whisking their prime executives to four-star eating places.
“I constructed my profession and the company on the assumption shoppers come first, and the job of the man on the head of the company is to know their needs,” Mr. Meyer advised the New York Instances promoting columnist Stuart Elliott in 2006. “Not what they like for dinner, however their promoting wants, higher than anybody on the company.”
Mr. Meyer made good on his phrases. In 1988, for instance, he took a flip cleansing shrimp and ready tables at a Purple Lobster restaurant in Orlando, Fla., to get a really feel for the interior workings of the chain, a consumer that Gray provided with the memorable tagline “For the seafood lover in you”
As a waiter, he had his shortcomings, spilling espresso on one patron. “She advised me no apology was needed,” he later recalled, “as a result of it was good to see somebody my age doing that job.”
Through the years, shoppers took observe. “Ed is Gray and Gray is Ed,” an govt for Procter & Gamble, a cornerstone consumer for many years, advised Adweek.
Such hands-on dedication made much more sense for Mr. Meyer, on condition that he had an uncommon quantity of pores and skin within the recreation.
“I used to be one of many few guys who owned an enormous hunk of the company he ran,” he advised Mr. Elliott after the sale of Gray, which netted him an estimated sum near $500 million. “Each penny I had was in right here, so I had extra at stake than anybody else”
“I sweated it more durable,” he added. “I overruled individuals as a result of I couldn’t afford to be a pleasant man.”
Edward Henry Meyer was born in New York Metropolis on Jan. 8, 1927, the second of three kids of Irving Meyer, a producer of youngsters’s clothes, and Mildred (Driesen) Meyer.
After graduating from the non-public Horace Mann Faculty within the Bronx, he enrolled in Cornell College. He took day off in 1945 to serve in the USA Coast Guard Reserve for 2 years and, after returning to Cornell, acquired a bachelor’s diploma in economics in 1949. He then entered the manager coaching program within the Bloomingdale’s division of Federated Division Shops (now Macy’s Inc.).
Mr. Meyer started his half-century in promoting in 1951 when he took a job with the Biow Firm, a small company. It was there that he started his lengthy and fruitful relationship with Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati-based packaged-goods big, by engaged on its Lava cleaning soap account.
His work with Procter & Gamble continued 5 years later when he jumped to Gray. It didn’t take him lengthy to provide outcomes.
In 1959, the company received the account for Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Flakes laundry cleaning soap, a model that was in a prolonged hunch as opponents touted their new and improved substances.
As account supervisor, Mr. Meyer directed analysis into the model’s most loyal customers, who turned out to be new moms. In response, Gray centered on the model’s perceived purity, arguing that Ivory Flakes had been tender and delicate sufficient for laundry child garments and fabric diapers.
A ensuing tv spot featured a professorial man in a bow tie who calls himself “the world’s solely baby language translator” deciphering an toddler lady’s fussy ramblings as a consequence of carrying scratchy diapers that had been washed in opponents’ soaps. After just some months, the model had reversed an 11-year decline in gross sales, based on a former Gray govt interviewed for an inside historical past of the company compiled in 1992.
An early proponent of globalization for the business, Mr. Meyer seen 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 and marketing.
“After I took it over, it was a home, United States, promoting company that had simply begun to explore the world,” Mr. Meyer mentioned of Gray in a 2001 interview with Enterprise As we speak journal. Beneath his steerage, he continued, “Gray grew to become a really international company, within the ’60s and ’70s, which was the appropriate time to do it as a result of you’ll be able to’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 yr after the company’s sale. In 2014, he and his spouse bestowed $75 million to Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan to increase and consolidate its most cancers care and analysis applications below the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center.
To many within the business who had come to see Mr. Meyer and Gray as one and the identical, his departure after so many many years appeared nearly unimaginable. Mr. Meyer, apparently, agreed. In an interview with Chief Government journal late in his profession, Mr. Meyer mentioned his seemingly endless tenure as Gray’s chief.
“When will I retire?” he mentioned. “To paraphrase Warren Buffett, 5 years after I die.”
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