J. Walter Thompson (JWT), incorporated by James Walter Thompson in 1896 and formerly an advertising agency, is currently a marketing communications company. It has been owned by WPP plc since 1987.
Video J. Walter Thompson
History
The company has been pioneering brands since 1864 and is known for its longstanding relationships with clients, among them Unilever/Lever Brothers (109+ years); Mondel?z International/Kraft Foods (89+ years); Kimberly-Clark (84+ years); Nestlé (81+ years); Kellogg's (80+ years); and Ford Motor (67+ years). Other notable clients include Avon, Treasury Wine Estates, Edgewell/Schick, Tudor, HSBC, Johnson & Johnson, Newell, Air Canada and the United States Marine Corps.
J. Walter Thompson, of the WPP Group, is the world's best-known marketing communications brand. Headquartered in New York City, J. Walter Thompson is a global network with more than 200 offices in over 90 countries and employing over 12,000 marketing professionals.
JWT celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2014. It traces its origins to the Carlton & Smith agency, which opened its doors in 1864, one of the first known advertising agencies in the United States. Founder William James Carlton started selling advertising space in religious magazines, but almost nothing is known about the partner named Smith.
In 1868, Carlton hired James Walter Thompson as a bookkeeper. Eventually, Thompson found that soliciting and sales were much more profitable, and he became a very effective salesman for the small company.
In 1877, Thompson purchased the business of his employer for $500 and, a year later, purchased the office furniture for $800. He changed the company designation to J. Walter Thompson, as he felt that James Thompson was too common a name in New York. One of his first clients was a personal friend - Robert Wood Johnson, one of the three brothers who founded Johnson & Johnson - for whom Thomson personally wrote advertising for the toothpaste brand Zonweis
Thompson, who had served as a U.S. Marine during the Civil War, had first been employed by Carlton & Smith to sell space in religious publications. Under his leadership, the agency became the seller of advertising space in many American magazines and periodicals. By 1889, 80 percent of the advertising in the United States was placed through J. Walter Thompson.
More growth followed, and J. Walter Thompson became the first American agency to expand internationally with the opening of J. Walter Thompson London in 1899. The business subsequently expanded across the globe, being one of the first American agencies in Egypt, South Africa and Asia.
J. Walter Thompson was among the first agencies to employ writers and artists to create interesting advertisements for their clients, replacing the standard ads created by in-house departments. It was also the first agency to provide a wide range of advertising services to clients, including copy, layout, package design, trademark development and rudimentary, market research. Many of these methods can be seen in notable work that the agency has produced, including work for Kraft Cheese that resulted in the creation of the grilled-cheese sandwich, a campaign for Swift & Co. that added measurement marks to sticks of butter, the Toys "R" Us Kid slogan and jingle, De Beers diamond ads ("A Diamond is Forever") and the "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner" campaign.
The agency is credited with hiring the first female copywriter, Helen Lansdowne Resor. While with the agency, she pioneered ideas including celebrity testimonials, sex appeal, and was responsible for developing its reputation as an agency where bright young women could succeed. Lansdowne went on to become the first female creative director in the industry. To honor this legacy, in 2014 J. Walter Thompson announced a $250,000 scholarship opportunity called the Helen Lansdowne Resor Scholarship. It assists and promotes talented female creative advertising students who aspire to join the ranks of creative leadership.
Maps J. Walter Thompson
Digital capabilities
JWT has launched Colloquial, a content-marketing joint venture unit with Group SJR; acquired WANDA Digital, an independent digital agency in Turkey; and acquired iStrategyLabs (ISL), a Washington, D.C.-based digital agency.
Creative awards
Under Matt Eastwood, JWT's worldwide chief creative officer, JWT earned a total of 80 Lions at the 2016 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, its highest total ever at that point. Of the 80, the company earned two Grand Prix, an Innovation Lion, a Product Design Lion, nine Gold Lions, 23 Silver Lions and 43 Bronze Lions, alongside 122 shortlists. JWT LATAM was also named the Cannes LATAM Network of the Year, and JWT Amsterdam was named the Cannes Innovation Agency of the Year.
Across 2016's awards circuit, JWT also saw a noticeable boost in its creative performance: at Spikes Asia, JWT was the fifth most awarded network, up from thirteenth in 2015; at the Clios, it was the sixth most-awarded and was Clio Health Network of the Year; at the D&AD Impact, it jumped to second most-awarded agency worldwide and earned the Network of the Year title at Dubai Lynx and Goafest.
Clients
In the mid-1970s, J. Walter Thompson was hired by the military dictatorship of Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet, to "refurbish the image of the regime" after international and Chilean human-rights organizations had documented extensive violations.
Other significant clients have included:
Distinctive ads
Further reading
See also
- History of advertising
- Tamara Ingram
- Helen Lansdowne Resor
- Stanley Resor
- James Walter Thompson
References
External links
- Official website
- Guide to select collections from the JWT Archives in the Hartman Center at Duke University
- "The J Walter Thompson (JWT), London, advertising agency client account files and other office papers, 1926-1977". History of Advertising Trust. Retrieved 1 May 2015.
Source of article : Wikipedia
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