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ALUMNI NEWS
st. george’s school
‘Mad Man’ Jack Shuttleworth ’49: Adventures in Advertising
// SPRING 2015
WHEN JACK SHUTTLEWORTH ’49 watches the AMC hit TV show “Mad Men,” which enters the second half of its final season April 15, the midcentury-modern office furniture and martini lunches look quite familiar. So do the machinations of the fictitious Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce advertising agency. That’s because Shuttleworth is one of two veteran account executives in the Class of 1949 who worked on Madison Avenue during the 1960s—the so-called “golden age of advertising” depicted on the show. The other was Bob Gleckler, who for years headed up the Oil of Olay campaign at Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest consumer ad agencies. Mr. Gleckler died last June. Shuttleworth said that aesthetically, at least, in many ways his and Gleckler’s days back on the avenue were much like those on the TV show—with at least one notable exception. “The office interiors are perfect,” he said. “That’s the way those agency rooms looked, the kind of furnishings they had,” he said. “But what’s way out of touch is the facial hair. This was ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,’” he added, referencing the 1955 best-selling novel by Sloan Wilson, later made into a movie starring Gregory Peck. “You had to dress well to work at an advertising agency. You had to be cleanshaven. If someone came through with stubble on their face, they wouldn’t get through the door.” It was a world that easily lent itself to drama, according to Shuttleworth. Because of the competitive, results-oriented nature of the business, personal lives took a toll. If a firm lost an account, account reps lost their jobs. “We called it ‘Pink-Slip Friday’ in those days,” he said. “Someone was always being let go.” It was a freewheeling atmosphere where ad reps didn’t have to punch a clock. “The three-martini lunch was standard operating procedure.” Shuttleworth said he was lucky to have gotten the opportunity to move up in the industry after he graduated from Bowdoin College and came home from serving as a troop commander at Fort Benning during the Korean War.
During the summer while he was in college he worked in the mailroom at Robert Orr and Associates on 59th Street in New York across from the Plaza Hotel. “They had the Pan American Coffee Bureau campaign: ‘Give yourself a coffee break,’” Shuttleworth said, which paved the way for unions to write a mid-morning break into their contracts. “That’s an example of advertising leading the way,” he said. His first full-time job was at the Kudner Agency from 1955–63, where he started out in market research. A common sight was the copywriters all sitting on the floor, jackets off, brainstorming for a pitch to make to a potential client. “Anyone could say anything,” he said.