Howard Who?
October 27, 2010

Howard Grossage was an advertising genius whose wisdom just beginning to be understood by agencies and marketing experts after forty years of his death. He was a man living in a completely different era way ahead of everyone else. Grossage was a quintessential west coast adman who came up with the concept of “interactive” advertising way before it crossed anyone else’s mind or moreover the internet, understood the concept of one-to-one marketing before it was called that and recognized the value of engaging the consumer in a dialog which would be understood today to be customer generated marketing or presaging word-of-mouth. He owned a small agency of about 12 people, Freeman, Mander & Grossage, in San Francisco between 1950 and 1960. Grossage never really made a big amount of money off of the ad business he co-owned. Howard was more of an environmentalist but back then no one really knew what that term meant. He ran serial ads a that stopped in mid-sentence and picked up in the next ad a week later to advertise Irish Whiskey. If you read up on some techniques that grossage thought of and used often you might just be able to bring your agency to the top.