Howard Draft, chairman/CEO of DraftWorldwide, is CADM’s 1999 Charles S. Downs Chicago Direct Marketer of the Year. At age 45, he’s the youngest-ever recipient of the award.
Sheldon Soble, president of Creative Benefits Inc., immediate past president of CADM and chair of the Downs Award committee, will present the award during Chicago DM Days.
“Howard Draft, an international agency leader, is a home-grown direct marketer who never forgot his peers, his community and, I might add, his local direct marketing association…He and his colleagues epitomize generosity of manpower, dollars and spirit for worthwhile professional and charitable causes around the globe,” Soble says.
Draft’s charitable works begin at home. He’s a board member of the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, chairman of the 1999 DM Days in New York and a frequent conference speaker. He’s also a member of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, a trustee of his alma mater, and a volunteer with Pediatric AIDS Chicago, among other activities.
Draft joined the industry as direct marketing was gaining momentum. With a B.A. in philosophy and art history from Ripon College, Ripon, WI, he joined Stone & Adler in 1977 as an assistant account executive. He became one of the 13 original employees of Kobs & Brady Advertising the next year. By 1982, he had become the first president of the agency’s New York office, which he established. Two years later, at just 31, Advertising Age named Draft “One of the Best and Brightest Young People in Advertising.”
He ascended to president in 1986, seeing the agency through acquisitions by Ted Bates, then Saatchi & Saatchi PLC, and opening the first international office in Madrid in 1987. When Draft became chairman/CEO the next year, the agency was renamed Kobs & Draft, and repositioned as the worldwide DM arm of the newly created Backer Spielvogel Bates, then as a separate entity of Saatchi & Saatchi. In 1995, through a management buy-back, he created Chicago’s largest independent DM firm: DraftDirect Worldwide.
To fulfill his vision of building one of the world’s largest marketing agencies, he launched an aggressive acquisition program in 1997, which inspired the new identity and name: DraftWorldwide.
Today, the agency is the third-largest direct response agency in the world. It has billings of more than $1.8 billion and employs 2,000-plus people. It helped pioneer direct-to-consumer health-care marketing by developing the first pharmaceutical infomercial to be cleared by the Food and Drug Administration. It also elevated the role of research-Sprint’s “10 Cents a Minute” campaign was driven by Draft’s research that showed consumers wanted simplicity in telecommunications pricing.
Draft is contributing to the future of the profession by investing in professionals. DraftWorldwide’s annual executive training seminar brings together representatives from each of the agency’s 44 offices for a one-week instructional session. “Our training is manifested in ways that reach, literally, around the globe,” Draft says.
The Downs award, CADM’s most prestigious honor, is named for Charles S. Downs, the late advertising director of Abbott Laboratories, who was a founder of CADM and its first president in 1955-56.
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