ML - Michigan Avenue

2015 - Issue 4 - Summer - Art of the City - Hebru Brantley

Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!

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68  michiganavemag.com photography by petya shalamanova Off the ClOCk Ad man Tom Bernardin gets personal. KicKing BacK: "We've had a place at Lake Charlevoix in northern Michigan for about 30 years. It's very cottagey, small, on the water. It's just heaven." Running Man: "I love to run. With all the traveling I do, I always have my running shoes with me because it's the best way not only to manage stress but to manage jet lag." giving BacK: "My nephew and his identical twin sisters have Stargardt macular degeneration. The sight that remains is the peripheral vision—it's like walking around with a big black spot in front of your face. So I started being involved with Foundation Fighting Blindness." at the taBle: "I will try anything. I was in Mexico and one of our agency principals said, 'Would you like to try deep-fried worms? They're a specialty.' They were fne. There's not a lot to them." The ad business, Bernardin says, is "in my blood." He grew up the son of the creative director for a Detroit agency that had Chevrolet as a client during the "Big Three" heyday. Along with his three broth- ers, Bernardin would accompany his father on magazine photo shoots. His dad's jet-set life made a lasting impression on the young man. After graduat- ing from Hillsdale College in Michigan, Bernardin eagerly accepted the first job offer he got—at McCann Erickson ad agency. After that company sent him to Frankfurt and then Rome, he returned stateside to work for Saatchi & Saatchi and eventually headed Bozell and later Lowe New York before getting the call from Leo Burnett. During his decade as CEO, aside from the recession days of 2008, Leo Burnett has seen revenue growth year upon year. What drives Bernardin, he says, is a goal that is at once strikingly simple and audacious: "to be the best in the world, bar none." In addition to intensifying the agency's "laser-sharp focus on the power of cre- ativity," Bernardin has made his global company's 85 offices more consistent and more engaged across geographic borders. "Leo Burnett was a global agency run, for the most part, by Chicago-based people, mostly all Americans. Having lived abroad for as long as I did, I found that kind of odd," says Bernardin, who speaks f luent Italian. He created a new board of directors with members from geo- graphically diverse offices. "We are not competing with one another internally," he says. "We're fierce competitors, very aggressive, but we hunt as a pack." That cohesion has grown more vital as the hunt has grown more intense, especially given a fast- changing digital revolution. The agency behind icons like the Marlboro Man, the Jolly Green Giant, and the Pillsbury Doughboy certainly has always prized creativity. "The difference," Bernardin says, "is we had a couple of media back then: mainly print, and then TV came in." Now, there's a proliferation of platforms to connect with people, or "screens of various sizes," as Bernardin says. "The power of cre- ativity, the value of it, has never been greater." Neither has people's ability to talk back to advertising. "If you do your creative job correctly," Bernardin says, "the world will tell you through social media that, yes, you are the most talked- about thing in the world today." Bernardin speaks f luidly about his business— somewhat less so about his life beyond it. The only family picture in his office is a large, sepia-toned photograph taken years ago of his son and two daughters standing on a dock at a lake in Michigan. They face away from the photographer. "I don't display my family because that's very private to me," he says. "That one's okay because it's from the back. I know what they look like." The image is as resonant as one of his agency's campaigns. "The most powerful ideas are actually very simple," Bernardin says. "You think, Wow, how powerful, how obvious, how simple—except nobody thought of it." MA clockwise from left: The HumanKind mural sets a cultural tone for visitors in Leo Burnett's main lobby; a larger-than-life installation of Leo the Man's distinguished glasses; shelves in Bernardin's office exhibit artifacts of his career, including two Grand Prix Cannes Lions, white and red rockets representing two design acquisitions, crayon art made by his grandchildren, and, of course, his iconic pencil. "If you do your job correctly, socIal medIa wIll tell you that, yes, you are the most talked-about thIng In the world today." —tom bernardin PEOPLE View from the Top

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