Direct From Chicago . . . It's Howard Draft

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chicago When Howard Draft started out in the advertising business, he applied for jobs at Chicago’s two biggest agencies, Leo Burnett and J. Walter Thompson. They turned him down. Dejected, he fell back on his second choice: direct marketing. “When you come out of school, you don’t want to be hired by a direct marketing agency,” recalled Draft nearly 30 years later. “You wanted to be hired by a general agency.”

In the wake of last week’s confirmation of the merger between his “below-the-line” agency (a term that Draft hates) and the traditional Foote Cone & Belding, Draft, a man not afraid to speak his mind, is precisely where he has wanted to be all along, leading not just a conventional ad agency, but a hybrid he believes is the future of marketing.

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