Tale of the Tiger
“The pinnacle of his career was creating Tony the Tiger, one of the most celebrated and successful icons in the history of our industry,” said an in-house memo to Burnett employees eulogizing Tennant, who’d joined the agency in 1950 as its first full-time radio and TV writer-producer. Advertising Age mourned, “He was the creative director on many of the early campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes, and in 1952 he created the ‘Tony the Tiger’ character for Kellogg’s Co.’s Frosted Flakes cereal.”
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Tony the Tiger isn’t the only famous icon the obits have attributed to Don Tennant. The AP said he’d also created the Marlboro Man. Bloomberg News added the Pillsbury Doughboy. According to an Advertising Age ranking, the Marlboro Man is the most successful icon of the century. The Pillsbury Doughboy was listed sixth, Tony the Tiger ninth. If all three sprang from the brow of one man, that man was an advertising genius. Because posterity can’t afford to make mistakes about who the geniuses were, retired Burnett execs who’d never heard of Jack Tolzien were nevertheless troubled by the tributes. They discussed signing a letter to Advertising Age. One old Burnett hand called me.
Trying to sort out the truth, I came across an Advertising Age Web site that listed history’s great ad campaigns. It told me, “Tony’s original designer, children’s book illustrator Martin Provensen, first created an orange cat with black stripes and a blue nose who walked on all fours.” The site also honored the giants of the biz. Here it said that in 1935 Leo Burnett opened an agency “that spawned a distinctive ‘Chicago school,’ i.e., sentimental ads drawn from heartland-rooted values. He created such evocative icons as the Jolly Green Giant, Pillsbury Doughboy, Charlie the Tuna and Tony the Tiger.”
“Burnett’s not backing me up,” he grumbles. “I gave them this great icon they got all this mileage out of, and they’ve continued to ignore me. You can imagine my exasperation.” Though the Provensens soon took over the cereal box illustrating, by Tolzien’s account neither they, Burnett, nor Tennant brought Tony the Tiger into being. It’s clear that Marilou Wise didn’t either. Her friend Garnet Fay tells me he gave the Sun-Times biographical information that the paper misunderstood. “Marilou was an artist who drew Tony the Tiger,” says Fay. “Her studio contracted with Leo Burnett. She also worked on Snap, Crackle, and Pop and a lot of other recognizable artwork. I did not mean to convey she was the creator in terms of the idea. She did claim to create Diggum the Frog, which is a lesser personality in that world.”
“It sounds pretty authoritative to me,” says Weinstein, who joined Leo Burnett after Tolzien left and had never heard of him. Other alums are more skeptical. They offer still more names from the ranks of the long gone and nearly forgotten who’d been proposed over the years as Tony the Tiger’s creator. I was told that even art rep Jack Kapes once built a home he called “the house that Tony the Tiger built.”
Perz understands that in advertising, authorship is elusive. He asked me, “Do you remember the line ‘When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer’? Hal Tillson, the media director, was at lunch, sitting at a bar, having a beer, when two guys next to him ordered a couple of Budweisers. And one of them says, ‘Boy, when you’re out of Bud you’re out of beer.’ Tillson overheard it. Where do ideas come from? Many of them from anyone, anywhere, anytime. And somehow when they’re successful you find a lot of fathers.”
