Paul Silverman, Former Mullen Creative Chief, Dies

BOSTON Paul Silverman, Mullen's longtime creative chief and a New England ad legend who helped drive the agency's growth and establish its national creative reputation through the 1970s, '80s and '90s, died unexpectedly yesterday at his home in Manchester, Mass. He was 69.In the course of his career, Silverman helped shape the New England agency scene, guiding campaigns for Timberland, BMW, Monster.com and others that fueled the region's metamorphosis from an industry backwater into a vibrant creative center.There was an intelligence and playfulness to Silverman's ad work, a fusion of art and commerce that stemmed from his experience as a creative writer. That style informs Mullen's work to this day and to some degree served as a template for the region's other shops to follow. Ultimately, he paved the way for a new generation of creative leaders."Paul Silverman was the smartest person I ever knew as well as the key creator of our agency's creative culture," said agency founder Jim Mullen of his friend and partner of nearly 30 years. "As Hamlet said of his father, 'He was a man, take him for all in all. We shall not look upon his like again.'"Joe Grimaldi, CEO of the IPG shop in Boston, said, "Paul was simply brilliant. He was one of the key people who made Mullen a nationally ranked and internationally recognized agency."Hill, Holliday chief executive Mike Sheehan, said: "Paul was an exceptional creative talent and someone I always looked up to professionally. More than that, he was a truly great human being who cared deeply about others and always had a smile on his face, so he was someone I looked up to personally as well."Silverman, a deli-owner's son who had toiled as a reporter for local newspapers, joined Mullen about three years after the agency's founding by Jim Mullen. The latter's art training and Silverman's writing background almost dictated a print focus; indeed, the agency's way with words remains its strength to this day, translating well to new-media assignments.After establishing itself as a solid regional player in the '80s, Mullen began to burst onto the broader ad scene about 20 years ago. Quirky but effective campaigns for Smartfood and Timberland often upstaged better-known rivals at awards shows large and small.Even 20 years later, BBDO N.A. chairman and CCO David Lubars recalled Silverman's gracious style at the 1989 Boston Ad Club Hatch Awards, where Mullen's work for Timberland and others fell short against Keds best-of-show effort by Providence, R.I., ad shop Leonard Monahan Lubars. "It was the height of good sportsmanship," Lubars said.Mullen's 1993 hire by BMW gave it a bona fide national showcase. Various magazines and news outlets honored "When I Grow Up," a memorable 1999 Super Bowl TV spot for Monster.com (with school kids hilariously extolling the dreary workdays ahead) as among the best ever to air on the game.[jwplayer ikCPc3nL-1kT9Z8rj] When the shop was sold to the Interpublic Group in 1999 for about $50 million, it was recognized as one of the nation's most successful midsize players. Jim Mullen soon ceded the reins to Grimaldi, who was named CEO. Silverman stepped aside for Edward Boches, who became CCO.In recent years, Silverman kept his hand in the ad biz, assisting Mullen and other shops with projects. But he mainly focused on fiction, publishing well-received stories in anthologies and on numerous literary Web sites.Modernista! co-founder Lance Jensen summed up Silverman's impact: "Mullen sets the standard for class. For premium. For craft. They take this profession extremely seriously. They are perfectionists. Clearly, Paul was instrumental in setting this standard. I am sure Paul's influence upon them and the greater ad community is permanent."In addition to his wife Teresa, Silverman is survived by a daughter, Miranda, currently an account executive at the Boston agency MMB.A graveside funeral service will be held on August 14 at 11:00 a.m. at the Puritan Lawn Memorial Park in Peabody, Mass.Mullen.com's Paul Silverman tribute, with examples of his best work through the yearsSilverman's Web site, which focuses on his post-Mullen creative writing career• • • • •Adweek's New England print edition published this profile of Silverman in 1991, as his star, along with the agency's, began to rise in earnest:Paul Silverman: Deli-Man's Son Makes GoodCD Drives Mullen Into Top Creative Tier(Adweek N.E., June 3, 1991)If Paul Silverman, Mullen's first and only creative director, had to pinpoint the two things that most profoundly shaped the way he approaches his work, he might well pick pastrami and literature. His father owned a deli in Boston's tough, working-class Roxbury section, where Silverman was born 51 years ago. It was there that the soft-spoken, award-winning copywriter who never intentionally sought a career in advertising first learned the art of selling. "It was a classic Boston Jewish deli, [which means] it was like a classic New York Jewish deli crossed with an Irish Catholic cafeteria," Silverman recalls. "My first glimpse of advertising was the way my father dealt with people. You don't just serve food in a deli, [you] talk to customers, promote it." Silverman has been applying those sales tactics on a daily basis over the last 15 years at what has become one of the industry' premier print agencies -- an agency that last month shined at the New York Art Directors' Club awards show by picking up a total of three golds and six silvers for print work on behalf of flagship client Timberland and former client Smartfoods. Silverman, given to chatting in a quiet, conversational tone, considers awards show wins important because they make an agency's name better known and act as "third-party endorsements" of creative. But while he's obviously pleased with the tally of recent wins, including last year's best of show at New England's Francis W. Hatch Awards show, he maintains that creating advertising solely to win awards is a bad idea. "Our job is to go out there and do good advertising and publicize it through awards show wins," he says.Prizes, he says, are a barometer of the agency's work rather than an end in themselves. Mullen Advertising, Silverman insists, will never do work merely "to impress [an] awards show aristocracy."Mullen's creative success parallels its business success. The agency, located about 30 miles north of Boston in a Jacobean/deco-style mansion in the serene woods of Wenham, Mass., has managed to avoid New England's economic slide, growing from a $20 million agency five years ago into an $85 million player of national repute. Even Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos of Boston, long New England's creative powerhouse, has been somewhat eclipsed by this upstart to the north.Mullen's creative product under Silverman's direction has been smart and sharp, but some of it has also lost the agency business. Smartfoods walked out last summer after the agency developed a Veryfine TV commercial that pitted the fruit juice against Pepsi-Cola, Smartfoods' sister company under the PespiCo mantle. Nevertheless, Silverman and agency president Jim Mullen have nurtured their charges by creating a comfortable, low-key work atmosphere that Silverman describes as the antithesis to the stress and tension that permeate other agencies. "He's produced the kind of good work that comes from a balanced view of the business," says Bink Garrison, chairman of Ingalls, Quinn & Johnson -- a larger Boston agency that is one of Mullen's main competitors. Steve Bautista, who once worked as a copywriter for Silverman and is now an associate creative director at Pagano Schenck & Kay in Providence, another Mullen competitor, says of his former boss, "Paul is a very eloquent spokesman for advertising on the whole. He is really a writer who just happens to be doing advertising." In fact, after studying history and government at Boston University and earning a master's degree in the history of ideas at nearby Brandeis University, Silverman had plans to write that elusive great American novel. He embarked on a career as a fiction writer, keeping himself fed and clothed by working as a reporter for newspapers and trade magazines in Massachusetts and New York. He got as far as publishing a number of stories and even had a short novel, The V-Mart File, about an urban riot, published in 1970. But while living on Cape Ann on the Bay State's North Shore, he began writing freelance advertorials for Chain Store Age and other trade magazines on behalf of major companies such as DuPont and Armour, and it was these pieces that "got me thinking in advertising terms," he says. The clincher came in 1974 when a magazine sales rep introduced Silverman to Jim Mullen, who at the time was captaining a one-man ad firm that catered mostly to local boating suppliers and marinas. "Something clicked" and the pair soon began pitching clients together, recounts Silverman. Slowly "the accounts began to come in," he says. The agency's big break came in 1978 when it helped launch Inc., a national magazine for small businesses. "We named Inc. and did its first campaign," Silverman recalls with pride. Dubbed "The big business of smaller companies," the Inc. campaign "put us on the map," Silverman says. But Mullen's reputation for stylish -- even regal -- advertising is limited to its print work; the agency's broadcast work is perceived by industry observers as weak by comparison. Silverman, however, argues that New England is a print-based market, so it isn't unusual for a regional agency to first make its mark in that medium. Proudly pointing to the shop's recent TV campaigns for Genesee beer (an account Mullen added to its roster just six months ago) and Veryfine fruit juice, he says that kudos for the agency's TV and radio work will come soon. Silverman admits that he regularly receives job offers from larger ad agencies, but he has no immediate plans to leave the shop. If he ever does leave, he says, he might take up fiction writing again or try his hand at a screenplay. Or else, he muses, "I'll probably just open a deli."

Brand Marketing

Paul Silverman, Former Mullen Creative Chief, Dies

David Gianatasio

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

David Gianatasio