Park Row, 1891.

BBDO is an agency name made of four people. Each letter stands for a surname, and the earliest of them belongs to a man who opened his business decades before the initials existed. The Hagley Library in Delaware, which holds the agency’s records, says the George Batten Company was formed in 1891 as a general advertising business. In a post published on 23 August 2021, the library’s project archivist Ashley Williams wrote that the only other employee was Margaret Hopkins, who recalled one small room at 38 Park Row in New York, equipped with two desks, a typewriter, files for about twenty-five papers, a copy of Ayer’s directory and a dictionary.

The archive post gives a picture of the young agency’s habits. Batten insisted in the early years on writing the advertisements himself. He signed a lease for office space in the Potter Building on 28 May 1892, and the company stayed there until January 1906, when it moved to the eleventh floor of the Metropolitan Annex near Madison Square. Its stated belief, the library says, was “we do not care to be responsible for advertisements that cannot be read aloud in our own home”, and it adopted two slogans: “we go anywhere for business” and “there is a lot of business that we do not want.”

William H. Johns joined the company straight from college in 1892. Hagley says he was elected president after Batten’s death in 1918 and helped to oversee the merger that followed a decade later.

The other three names came from a newer firm. Wikipedia says the Barton & Durstine Company, founded by Bruce Barton and Roy Durstine, opened in January 1919, and that when Alex Osborn joined in July 1919 it was renamed Barton, Durstine & Osborn. A second Hagley post, by Alice Hanes on 28 October 2022, says Osborn had run a small agency in Buffalo, New York, before joining Barton and Durstine and eventually moving to New York City.

Four names, then four letters.

The two firms became one in 1928. Hagley’s 2021 post dates the merger to 15 September 1928 and quotes a memo from the time: although the two firms were competitors, “practically all of their accounts are of different lines and different industries.” The merged agency took all four surnames as its name, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. Wikipedia says it was abbreviated B.B.D.O. or BBD&O, and later simply BBDO.

The long name was a gift to comedians. Hagley’s 2022 post says The New Yorker reported that the partners took a terrible ribbing about the corporate name, and that a quip from the Jack Benny radio show described the agency’s name as sounding like “a trunk falling downstairs.” Wikipedia places that line in a broadcast of 21 November 1948, spoken by Mary Livingstone. Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn are still in the name the agency uses today, reduced to their initials.

The partners left a written record as well as a name. Hagley’s 2022 post says Barton published The Man Nobody Knows in 1924; that Durstine, a former reporter for the New York Sun, wrote a 1920 book on making advertisements whose central chapter is about sincerity; and that Osborn coined the term “brainstorming” and promoted the technique in Your Creative Power in 1948. Wikipedia says Osborn introduced brainstorming to the agency in 1940.

The agency has had two long-term New York homes. Wikipedia says the merged firm occupied 383 Madison Avenue for 59 years before moving to 1285 Avenue of the Americas, and it names New York City as BBDO’s headquarters today.

Initials, slogans and a holding company.

Advertising-agency identities are built from unusual raw material. Many agency names began as the surnames of their founders, set side by side or shortened to a run of initials, and over time those initials can become a wordmark that few people read as names at all. Above the agency brands sit holding-company names, which tend to be shorter, more abstract and designed to work on annual reports, stock listings and conference stages rather than on client work.

Because an agency sells ideas rather than packaged goods, its brand surfaces are unusual too. The lobby and reception area act as a shop window for visiting clients and job candidates. House symbols, small objects or colours associated with a founder, can turn up on desks, award shelves and merchandise. Pitch decks, credentials documents and case-study reels carry the identity into rooms the agency does not own, so the type, colour and layout rules have to survive being projected, printed and shared as files.

For a designer, the useful lesson is how a business-to-business identity balances heritage, signalled by founders’ names and dates, against the need to look current to the next client in the room.

From client lines to a mantra.

Part of BBDO’s public record is made of other companies’ words. Wikipedia says the agency gave DuPont the slogan “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry” in 1935, with the words “through chemistry” removed in the 1980s, and that it introduced “It’s everywhere you want to be” for Visa in 1985. Hagley borrowed the Visa line for the title of its 2022 post, “BBDO: It’s Everywhere You Want to Be”, which announced the opening of the agency’s records to researchers.

In 1986 BBDO became one of the founding agencies of a holding company. A MediaVillage history column of June 2021 says a planned merger of Doyle Dane Bernbach with Needham Harper turned that year into a three-way tie-up with the agency network BBDO, under the then-new holding company Omnicom. The four initials stayed in use as the name of a network inside the group.

The agency’s own words about itself have shifted more recently. Manifest Media reported on 21 February 2025 that BBDO had rolled out a new brand philosophy titled “do big things”, and that, according to a release shared by BBDO, the agency had until then been working on a methodology of “the work, the work, the work”. The new line, the report said, was meant to signal a deeper cultural shift. Nancy Reyes was quoted as chief executive of BBDO Worldwide.

Later that year the network grew by absorbing another name. Marketing-Interactive reported on 1 December 2025 that, after Omnicom’s takeover of Interpublic, Omnicom was folding FCB into BBDO and building its creative structure around three global networks: BBDO, McCann and TBWA. So a name that began as four surnames in 1928 now also takes in a network that Interpublic had owned since 2001, when Wikipedia says it bought FCB’s holding company, True North Communications.

For a design guide, BBDO shows how an agency can turn a long partnership name into a short set of capitals while keeping every founder in it. Compare Omnicom, the holding company BBDO helped to form in 1986, and Interpublic, whose FCB network was folded into BBDO in 2025. For this guide we use oxblood, brick and lamp black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep BBDO’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.