Edward H. Meyer, an empire-building chief government who, utilizing an iron-willed administration type and a laser deal with even the smallest particulars, reworked a midsize New York promoting company into the worldwide energy often known as Gray Group, died on Tuesday at his residence in Manhattan. He was 96.
His demise was confirmed by a Gray spokeswoman.
Mr. Meyer joined Gray Promoting, because it was then recognized, as an account-services government 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 government in 1970. Over the following 35 years he constructed Gray, one of many final main businesses to stay impartial, 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 workers would typically go silent the second Mr. Meyer stepped into an elevator, and that some would visibly tremble exterior his workplace earlier than conferences.
Whereas gracious and infrequently incisively witty in interviews, Mr. Meyer didn’t duck such characterizations. “I simply are inclined to suppose I’m not benevolent,” he instructed Adweek. “However all people says, ‘Boy, he admires brains, he loves individuals who get it achieved. For those who can match these standards, you’ve bought 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 idea shoppers come first, and the job of the man on the head of the company is to know their wants,” Mr. Meyer instructed the New York Occasions 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 Pink Lobster restaurant in Orlando, Fla., to get a really feel for the inside workings of the chain, a shopper that Gray equipped with the memorable tagline “For the seafood lover in you”
As a waiter, he had his shortcomings, spilling espresso on one patron. “She instructed me no apology was essential,” 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 government for Procter & Gamble, a cornerstone shopper for many years, instructed Adweek.
Such hands-on dedication made much more sense for Mr. Meyer, provided that he had an uncommon quantity of pores and skin within the sport.
“I used to be one of many few guys who owned an enormous hunk of the company he ran,” he instructed 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 tougher,” 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 youngsters of Irving Meyer, a producer of kids’s clothes, and Mildred (Driesen) Meyer.
After graduating from the personal Horace Mann Faculty within the Bronx, he enrolled in Cornell College. He took break day in 1945 to serve in america 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 large, 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 gained 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 elements.
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 woman’s fussy ramblings as a consequence of carrying scratchy diapers that had been washed in opponents’ soaps. After only a few months, the model had reversed an 11-year decline in gross sales, in keeping with a former Gray government interviewed for an inner historical past of the company compiled in 1992.
An early proponent of globalization for the trade, 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.
“Once 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 In the present day journal. Below his steering, he continued, “Gray turned a very international company, within the ’60s and ’70s, which was the fitting 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 broaden and consolidate its most cancers care and analysis packages beneath the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center.
To many within the trade 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 Govt 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.”
