Mr. Meyer: Grey originally started business as an advertising agency in 1917, so it's one of the earlier agencies. But it was very New-York- centric for some time, because it was started in New York by two men who ran the business as a private business, as all agencies were, for 50 years. Their ambition really was to build a strong advertising agency in New York, and that's what the agency was until after the Second World War. Then as they reached an age where they were beginning to think about the long-term future of the business and their withdrawal from it, they decided to take this comfortable, mid-sized advertising agency they had constructed and see if as a last act ' as their grand finale ' they could make it into a truly world-class communications enterprise, for which I have nothing but admiration for them, because ordinarily men at that age would have said, 'I want to protect the asset I've built. I don't want to invest any further in this business ' I want to look forward to a comfortable retirement.ý They didn't do that, and they hired a bunch of us ' I was one of the young Turks of that era; they invested in hiring people with skills that the agency didn't have, people who had handled a different level of business, Fortune 100 companies, brought us in and said, 'See if you can take the base we have built, and explode it into a broad-based leading communications company.ý So the first modern era of Grey, if you will, really began in about 1956/1957 when a new team was brought in to take the agency and ' working with the owners of the agency in their final years ' moved it into a whole new league from where it had existed before. It was a successful endeavor because from that point on the agency caught fire and moved rapidly into the ranks of the global top 10. The size and importance of our clients grew and within 5 years Grey was handling some of the most prominent advertisers in the country. During that period and throughout the 1960s the agency built up its roster of package good brands. We also went public in the 60s, in fact, Grey was one of the first advertising agencies to do so. We took the Agency public to raise capital for expansion, to prepare for the future exit of our founders, and to lock in the next generation of leadership. Having achieved top tier status in the US in the late 1960s Grey turned its attention to the international scene and rapidly built or bought offices around the world. By the late 1970s we were in all the major markets in the world and since then it's been a matter of filling in the gaps. Then in the 1980s, recognizing that our clients' needs were changing and that advertising was just one of a number of marketing and communications disciplines that they needed to build their brands, Grey started allied enterprises, which represented a variety of additional skill sets that clients needed, all under the rubric of marketing and communications. When you come into the 1990s, and more importantly, the millennium, the agency is now a global enterprise in 90 countries, and more importantly, it's not just an advertising agency anymore; it's really a marketing and communications company in 10 well-developed lines of business, with another three or four coming along right behind it. Advertising is just one of a number of activities under the overall umbrella of marketing and communications that we're now engaged in.
Tickers included in this excerpt: GREY
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.