American Image Maker

His early years were a far cry from apple pie and Little League. Yet today Peter Georgescu, MBA '63, shapes the way America thinks about itself.

By Jay Mathews

On the television screen, one of the latest and most successful products of Peter A. Georgescu's Young & Rubicam advertising and marketing firm unfolds with the softly lit warmth of a fond memory. A girl exchanges e-mail with a boy so smitten that he sends her a picture of her head grafted onto the body of a cherub. Young love. Computer modems. AT&T. It all hangs together, leading USA Today to call the 30-second spot one of the best telephone commercials in years. It employs images one might expect from as deeply dyed an American as Georgescu, MBA '63, Y&R's chairman and chief executive officer. Yet it is difficult to imagine a teenage life as remote from the scene in the commercial as Georgescu's was. When he was 15, about the age of the love-struck boy at the computer, he was in a Communist labor camp in Romania. He had been sent there when he was 8 and had spent nearly half his life cleaning sewers, planting telephone poles, and living in a room with his older brother and grandmother. Their only furniture was stacks of straw. The future leader of a $12 billion corporation devoted to worldwide communication could reach no one beyond the sound of his voice. In the view of many of Georgescu's friends and admirers, his fearlessness in pursuing intelligent risks and his unflappability in crises stem from those years. He suffered because his parents were heroes. Rica and Lygia Georgescu helped lead a successful coup to rid Romania of the Nazis near the end of World War II. Their fame and their firm belief in democracy led to their being declared traitors in absentia by the postwar Communist government in 1947 while they were visiting the United States.
       Peter and his brother, Costa, were still in Romania when their parents were labeled criminals. The boys spent seven years in the labor camp near the Soviet border--no school, no books, learning about discipline and character by surviving the most meager circumstances. They demonstrated how tough they had become when they were released in 1954.

Five months after Georgescu was freed and arrived in the United States knowing no English, he was a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, on his way to degrees at Princeton and Stanford. "That is where you have to start with Peter," said Dick Strubel, a private investor in Chicago who is one of Georgescu's closest friends. "He is extremely goal-oriented, and he truly believes that if he sets his mind to something, he will achieve it."
       Loyalty was also important to a boy whose father, an executive for Standard Oil of New Jersey, kept a spy network intact for three years from his Bucharest prison cell, where he was held from 1941 to 1944 by a government that was allied with Nazi Germany.
       Now 58, a tall, lean man with a slight remnant of his boyhood accent, Georgescu has been with Young & Rubicam 34 years, building a vast network of relationships in a company with annual billings of $12 billion. His tenacity, Business Week said, has turned a once-stagnant company into "a hot shop again."
       There have been several notable achievements for a company that includes Burson-Marsteller (public relations), Wunderman Cato Johnson (direct marketing) and Landor Associates (identity consultancy) as well as the Young & Rubicam advertising arm. A former head of Y&R's Chicago office, Georgescu engineered the capture of Chicago-based Sears Merchandise Group's $40 million apparel advertising account in 1993, oversaw the creation of the melodious "softer side of Sears" campaign, and championed the development of Young & Rubicam's BrandAsset Valuator, a formula for measuring brand growth that came out of an unusual $35 million study completed in 1994.
       Since taking over the chairmanship in 1995, Georgescu has secured the U.S. government contract to ease acceptance of the redesigned American currency, including the new lopsided 100-dollar bill. He has increased the agency's share of Colgate-Palmolive advertising from $350 million to virtually all of its global business, about $600 million. He and his team have won back a sizable portion of AT&T's business and added 7UP and Blockbuster Video.
       And in a coup as stunning in its way as his parents' triumph during the war, Georgescu and his team persuaded Citibank this summer to consolidate virtually all of its worldwide advertising and direct marketing assignments--an enormous account worth as much as $700 million--and give it all to Y&R. New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott called it "probably the largest shift in the history of Madison Avenue." Georgescu has drawn even more attention as a leading advocate of a daring pay-for-performance contract, where instead of the traditional 15 percent commission, the agency's earnings are based on a sliding scale that measures ad success against the campaign's stated objectives.
       Y&R executives say clients are drawn to Georgescu's intelligence, charm, and a remarkable belief in his own ideas, something he demonstrated as a young executive when challenged by his superiors. He rarely talks about the impact his boyhood had on his approach, but friends say it has critical importance.
       His parents' story is told in part in a 1989 book, Operation Autonomous, by a former British intelligence agent, Ivor Porter, who worked with the Georgescus during the war. Their son is looking for a writer who might be interested in interviewing his mother, still alive at age 89 in Geneva, Switzerland, and publishing the full version, which, as true as it is, sounds like a Hollywood script.
       The Georgescus became spies and conspirators not because of any political ambitions--Rica was a businessman who tried to avoid his country's factional strife--but because of their patriot-ism, intelligence, charm, command of English, and family ties to Juliu Maniu, a political leader and fervent democrat from their native Transylvania region.
       At the moment of his arrest in 1941, Rica managed to save Maniu from being implicated in his pro-British activities by having Lygia raise and plant a large sum of money in their house. This served as proof that Rica had not passed the funds on to Maniu as had been alleged.
       In prison, Porter said, Rica first "persuaded warders and duty officers to break the rules in small ways--not to padlock his door, for instance, unless there were Germans about. Later, provided there was no chance of a German visit, they let him walk in the garden and feed the colonel's goose. In the end the officers and warders began to work for him."
       The couple had ticklish moments. Their spy network's radio-telegraph operator had an unnerving fondness for getting drunk in a Bucharest restaurant and having gypsy musicians play "God Save The King" when the place was packed with Germans. Lygia, likened by U.S. spy chief Bill Donovan to American revolutionary heroine Molly Pitcher, transmitted messages to and from her husband during her prison visits and displayed her own bravado. She would sometimes walk back to the government surveillance car that followed her to the prison and ask, since they were going the same direction, if she might have a ride.
       Shortly after their coup succeeded, the Georgescus watched the Russians arrive and put them in more difficulty, to which they applied more of their legendary finesse. Porter said he watched the couple receive a Russian colonel and his entourage who had come to tell Rica, temporarily in charge of the ministry of economy and finance, that the Russians were going to take over the Romanian railways. The Communist officers were strongly discouraged from fraternizing with the Romanians, particularly known democrats like the Georgescus.
       "Lygia interrupted the conversation to ask if they would like a drink," Porter said. "The colonel looked at his watch. He had only 10 minutes, but, yes, he would like a drink. A little later Lygia looked in again. Why did they not all stay for dinner--she would be delighted if they could. Again the colonel glanced at his watch. Yes, but only if it were ready in 20 minutes. In the end, they stayed for two and a half hours, and by the end of the evening, the colonel no longer seemed to care what time it was."
       By 1947, the Communists were in power and ruled the Georgescus traitors. The couple was safe in America, but their sons were put in the camp, where they worked 12 hours a day, six days a week. There were efforts to persuade them to accept the ideology of their captors. "I was a rebel," said Peter Georgescu. "I wouldn't put up with their crap. I had a big mouth for a little kid, and what preserved me was I was a little kid. They didn't pay much attention to me."
       Peter and Costa's parents spent seven years and $250,000 looking for ways to get them out of Romania, including rescue schemes with mercenary pilots. The turning points were the death of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin on March 9, 1953, Peter's 14th birthday, and a clumsy attempt by the Romanian government to recruit Rica and Lygia as spies. The Georgescus revealed the offer publicly, a congresswoman friendly with President Eisenhower pushed the White House and the Kremlin, which had loosened up a bit with Stalin's death, and the boys were released to a front-page American welcome. Costa, as the older brother, got to throw out the first ball at Ebbets Field to open the 1954 baseball season. "That is the only thing I have ever resented my brother for in my whole life," Peter Georgescu said.
       The headmaster of Exeter was overwhelmed by Peter's grit and warmth and, despite his lack of preparation, let him into the school at the same grade as other 15-year-olds. "I had a record at Exeter, eight straight zeros in algebra, until they figured out I didn't know how to divide," he said. "After I learned that, I did okay."
       He wanted to join the Marines after Princeton, but had an ulcer and was turned down. He applied to business school at Stanford, eager to learn more about free enterprise and about a distant part of his adopted country. He was accepted despite an abysmal mathematics score and learned in California what extraordinary talent was coming out of colleges that lacked the gold-plated reputations of Princeton and the other elite schools he had grown familiar with in the East. "I learned to look for many other cues than that kind of pedigree," he said. "My business education at Stanford was very, very important to me." Of particular importance, he learned principles of analysis that he employed later at Y&R.
       Very early in his Y&R career he met his wife, Barbara Anne, for whom he worked briefly in the research department. As a young account executive, Georgescu became captivated with the research work that probed what potential customers wanted and needed. That might seem fine for ordinary young men, but why would the son of heroes, blessed with many of their talents, want to devote his life to selling mouthwash?
       To Georgescu, heroes persevere in order to make the world a place where the hardest thing a 15-year-old boy must do is persuade the girl he loves to go to the movies. If sweet breath helps him, what is more important than the design and marketing of the right product? And what is more interesting than turning the fruits of peacetime science into devices that will enrich millions of lives?
       Georgescu became the kind of salesman who threw people off balance with a sincerity they were unaccustomed to. A senior execu-tive at Bristol-Myers once objected when the 29-year-old Georgescu, brimming with enthusiasm, kept referring to what "we" were going to do for the product they were discussing. "Young man," the executive said, "it is not 'we.' It is our money. It is Bristol-Myers'." Georgescu's reply turned the executive into a firm ally: "Sir, I believe that you pay us to have the same kind of loyalty to your products and your objectives as you do. I don't see a difference between Bristol-Myers and Young & Rubicam, sir."
       In the age of multimedia, Georgescu wants to find a way to establish a connection to each buyer as intimate as the e-mail portrait shown in the new AT&T commercial. "There is not a single market out there," he said, "and with twists and turns it will be different for different people. That is what the language of the new media is. The right answers almost never lie in straight lines," he said. "You have to have the courage and the willingness to look around the corner."