Sincerely Yours

In his oak-paneled Park Avenue office one morning last week, Manhattan Adman Emerson Foote chewed gum and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes while he waited impatiently for the reporters to crowd into his press conference. Then he quietly dropped his bombshell. He announced that high-powered Foote, Cone & Belding, Inc. had resigned its $12,000,000-a-year account as advertising agent for The American Tobacco Co.

The resignation reduced F. C. & B.'s commissions by about $1,800,000 a year, 20% of its total volume. Never before had any agency voluntarily given up such a fat account (one of the twelve largest in the U.S.). Foote's reasons were the same, and just as general, as those given a week before by George Washington Hill Jr. when he quit as American Tobacco's $230,000-a-year vice president in charge of advertising (TIME, March 29). Like Hill, Foote said he had resigned because of "general disagreement over policies."

Provocation. While American Tobacco was headed by the elder George Washington Hill, Adman Foote had never openly questioned its raucous advertising of Lucky Strikes. "Would you argue with Babe Ruth," he explained, "if he were showing you how to hold a bat?" But after the elder Hill died a year and a half ago and 71-year-old Vincent Riggio succeeded him as president, Foote, like the younger Hill, was gradually provoked to a point beyond the bounds of "respectful disagreement," finally decided to quit.

His only concern, he said, was that the loss of the account would jeopardize the jobs of about 200 out of 1,000-odd F. C. & B. employees (who once included rambunctious Frederic [The Hucksters'] Wakeman). After "long and prayerful wrestling" with this problem, Foote said, he decided to sacrifice himself, if necessary. Flying to Chicago for a Sunday meeting with Partners Fairfax Cone and Don Belding, he offered to resign from the firm if his associates decided to keep the account. But Cone and Belding would not hear of it, said Foote, so the account was dropped instead.

Retaliation. Foote insisted it was as one-sided as that, although he conceded that "no agency ever before resigned an account of this size except to avoid being fired." This week, F. C. & B. was, in effect, fired. It had offered to carry on for as long as it took to find a successor, but American Tobacco wasted no time in finding one. Effective forthwith, it named Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, Inc. as the new agency for Lucky Strike advertising, turned its Pall Mall account over to Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles, Inc.

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