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RANCE CRAIN Editorinchief
DAVID S. KLEIN Publishing/editorialdirector
ALLISON P. ARDEN Vicepresident,publisher
JACKIE GHEDINEAssociatepublisher
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Jack Connors, on pitching CEOs,
making friends and acting like a
trapper (rather than a skinner)
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Willie Sutton robbed banks because
that’s where the money was. Jack
Connors pitched CEOs because that’s
where the decisions were made—and
CEOs lasted longer than CMOs and ad
directors.
That, in a nutshell, is Jack’s business
strategy, and it helped him build Hill
Holliday Connors Cosmopulos into the
most successful agency in Boston and all
of New England. Jack was inducted into
the Advertising Hall of Fame this year,
and I took the occasion to chat with him
about his career.
If he weren’t such a consummate ad-agency guy, Jack would have made a
great Boston pol. He’s funny, candid, self-deprecating—just the right combination
to roll up the votes. He told me he’d
thought about throwing his hat in the
ring over the years, “but I think that we
ought to leave politics to the pros, and I
like the money in the private sector, to be
honest with you,” he laughed.
Jack admits he offended his share of
ad directors. “But I think the proof is in
the pudding. We have a very impressive
record at Hill Holliday of retaining clients,
and I think it’s because we built those
relationships with the top people, and it
wasn’t just to do their advertising. That
was obvious. But it was really to enhance
their reputation. To make the CEO stock
more important. . . . If you could make the
CEO look better, then you can go and ask
him for a raise once in a while. And you
can improve the margins.”
In the early days of his agency, Jack
said “the only people who would hire us
were the people who didn’t know better.”
One of his agency’s techniques was to
handle charity work for free, “and we
really didn’t care, to be painfully honest
with you, what they intended to cure. We
wanted to know who was on their board.
. . . Because the chairman of the bank, the
chairman of the insurance company, the
chairman of the mutual fund of those
organizations were on the board. And
after a couple of years of doing free work
for them, they’d go back and say, ‘We’re
getting great work from this Hill Holliday.
Why can’t we have some of that here at
the company?’” The agency worked for
Liberty Mutual, Bank of America and a
number of mutual funds over the years.
“So it worked,” Jack told me.
In the very early days of his career,
when he was working at BBDO as a
account guy on the regional Dodge
business, he was doing such a good job
that he was summoned to Detroit. They
told him he was being promoted to VP
and moving to Detroit. He quit the next
day.
In 1998 Interpublic bought Hill
Holliday and Interpublic CEO Phil Geier
tried to get Jack to come to New York. He
turned him down, just as he turned BBDO
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ARTOFENDURANCE
One of the founding partners of Hill Holliday
Connors Cosmopulos, Jack Conners was
inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame.
down. “I’m an entrepreneur. I’m not sure I
can spell it, but that’s what I am. And I
love Boston. I wanted to be home. And I
had the opportunity to build a big
business in my hometown. . . . So I
monitored all those public companies,
and I wanted to sell to Interpublic, but I
never wanted to run Interpublic. That
would be too much like herding cats.“
That isn’t a function of size but of
attitude. “You know, it’s like anything
else. There are trappers and there are
skinners. To be a trapper you’ve got to
put on snow shoes, you’ve got to go out
in the cold, you’ve got to set those traps,
and then you’ve got to go back and see if
there’s any animals in them. And it’s cold
out there.”
Most people sign up to be skinners,
Jack said, because you can stay warm
and you don’t have to be tramping about.
But he characterized himself as an “old
fashioned trapper. I love the hunt. And I
think it’s been said on occasion that my
interest peaks once we sign a contract. I
don’t think that’s quite fair, but there’s a
little bit of truth to it.”
His agency’s ability to handle
rejection was one of its keys to success,
Jack said. He likes to say that even
Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams, who
set the batting average record of .406 in
1941, failed six out of 10 times.
“And so the dirty little secret of my
career is that with all the great agencies I
competed with . . . no one ever kept score
of all the losses I had, the pitches I made
and lost, or made a fool of myself, or
wound up in third place or tenth place. . . .
So I’m thinking it’s about getting up to
bat.”
Of his three partners, Jack was the
last to leave. “I was the survivor, if you
will. Alan Holliday left after six months.
Steve Cosmopulos left in 1978 after 10
years, and my partner Jay Hill died, after
we worked together for 28 years, of
cancer.
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ART
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