Chicago, 5 August 1935.

Leo Burnett opened his agency in Chicago in the middle of the Depression. Reel Chicago, marking the anniversary on 6 August 2015, said that when Leo Burnett, a Michigan native, opened his new advertising agency on 5 August 1935, he brightened the office with a bowl of red apples. English Wikipedia gives the same date and city for the founding of Leo Burnett Company, Inc., and says the agency began with three accounts. Before setting up on his own, Wikipedia says, Burnett had worked for Cadillac in Detroit, for the Indianapolis agency of Homer McKee and, from 1930, for Erwin, Wasey & Company in Chicago.

The apples came with a story that the agency kept telling. Reel Chicago wrote in 2015 that a newspaper columnist said it would not be long before Burnett was selling apples on the street rather than giving them away. B&T, reporting on 20 October 2017, told it as a remark from a competitor, who told a young Burnett he would be on the street selling apples before he ever made money in advertising. Both versions place the remark in the Depression years, and both tie it to the apples in the office.

The bowl became a fixture. afaqs!, in an article by Alokananda Chakraborty dated 4 December 2002, said that when the agency opened its doors in 1935, visitors were greeted with a large bowl of red apples, and said the apples had been one of the two distinguishing features of the agency ever since. Burnett himself put the apples into a speech to his staff. In the text quoted by The Drum on 24 February 2025, he listed among the signs that the agency had lost its way the day “when apples become just apples to eat or polish, instead of symbols of our spirit and personality”.

The second feature was a picture. afaqs! said visitors in 1935 also saw a single hand reaching for the stars, and that this was the agency’s corporate logo. It stood for one of Burnett’s sayings, which the magazine quoted: “If you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”

Burnett also kept a private archive of phrasing. English Wikipedia says he kept a folder in the lower left-hand corner of his desk called “Corny Language”, in which he collected words, phrases and analogies that struck him as particularly apt. Wikipedia says he favoured “warmth, shared emotions and experiences” over hard selling, and that the agency later worked from the 18th floor of the London Guarantee Building in Chicago.

A black pencil and a pair of glasses.

The agency’s third symbol was a writing tool. B&T reported on 20 October 2017 that a new identity for Leo Burnett London, devised by chief creative officer Chaka Sobhani and graphic artist Phil Bosher, nodded to the agency’s heritage, particularly the black Alpha 245 pencil and the thick-rimmed glasses associated with the founder. The London design placed the glasses around a balloon and added fruit imagery, which the magazine traced back to the apple story. Sobhani told B&T that the new visual identity needed to reflect an agency philosophy of turning up “human”.

The pencils were part of daily work as well as decoration. Juan Carlos Ortiz, a former president of Leo Burnett USA, wrote in The Drum in February 2025 that people in the agency’s Chicago building “aimed for the stars, no matter what floor they worked on, and wrote their ideas with black pencils”. In the founder’s speech that he quoted, Burnett pictured people working alone at typewriters and drawing boards, or making notes with the agency’s black pencils.

That speech set out how Burnett wanted his name used. English Wikipedia says he delivered “When To Take My Name Off The Door” at the agency’s holiday gathering in December 1967, and Ortiz wrote that it was given in 1967 at the opening edition of the agency’s December executive breakfasts at the Chicago Theatre. In the text, Burnett said his successors might one day want to take his name off the building, and that he would insist they did so when the agency spent more time trying to make money and less time making advertising. He closed by saying he would also erase “that star-reaching symbol” and burn the office supplies.

The star logo was redrawn as the agency grew. afaqs! said that in 1997 the agency began using the Leo Burnett signature as one of its corporate identities, alongside the original hand reaching for the stars. Then, for its 67th anniversary, Leo Burnett Worldwide unveiled a new corporate identity in August 2002: a minimalist pen-and-ink drawing of a person reaching towards three stars. The magazine said this was the third logo the agency had used, and that the signature logo would no longer be used. Richard Pinder, then regional managing director for Asia, told afaqs! that the new logo encapsulated the idea of “belief”, and that the figure symbolised an organisation focused on ideas centred on a human bond. The 2002 drawing kept the stars and the reaching gesture from 1935 while replacing the hand with a whole figure.

Apples, pencils and stars.

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 Bcom3 to Publicis, and then to Leo.

Ownership changed late in the agency’s history. English Wikipedia says that in February 1967 the founder transferred all of his voting stock to a charitable organisation, and that on 3 November 1999 Leo Burnett and D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles announced the creation of a new holding company, BDM, which was quickly renamed Bcom3. In September 2002, Wikipedia says, Bcom3 was acquired by Publicis Groupe, the Paris group founded in 1926. Reel Chicago described the agency as owned by Publicis Groupe in its anniversary note of 2015. Publicis has owned Leo Burnett since 2002, and the agency kept its founder’s full name for more than two decades under that ownership.

The work for clients often became the public face of the agency. English Wikipedia says the Pillsbury Doughboy was created for Pillsbury by Leo Burnett copywriter Rudy Perz, that agency employee Tom Rogers created Charlie the Tuna for StarKist, and that the agency was hired to make the Jolly Green Giant friendlier-looking, adding the character Sprout in 1972. Those characters belong to the client brands and carry their own identities.

The name changed in January 2025. B&T, in a report by Tom Fogden on 15 January 2025, said Publicis Groupe had announced that Leo Burnett and Publicis Worldwide would merge to form Leo, and that in Australia the change was a rename alone, with no change to structures. The magazine said the new Leo logo included both the “Leo” name and the Publicis lion, a staple of the group’s branding. Arthur Sadoun, chief executive of Publicis Groupe, was quoted describing Leo as “Hi meets AI”, and Agathe Bousquet spoke as co-president of the new network.

Reel Chicago put the visual change in one line on 14 January 2025: “Goodbye, apples. Hello, lions.” Its columnist Colin Costello wrote that the bowl of apples that once greeted visitors to the Chicago office had been replaced in the new identity by the Publicis lion, and recalled that the paper had long been told off by the agency for calling it simply “Leo”. Ortiz, writing in The Drum the following month, returned to the 1967 speech and its conditions for removing the founder’s name from the door.

The renamed network keeps the forename and drops the surname, so the agency’s Chicago founder and its Paris owner now share a single mark: a forename beside a lion.

For a design guide, Leo Burnett shows how a few everyday objects, a bowl of apples, a black pencil and a hand reaching for the stars, can serve as a house identity from 1935 to 2025, and how a merger can carry a name forward while changing its symbol. Compare Publicis Groupe, the Paris group that has owned the agency since 2002 and whose lion now sits in its logo, and Ogilvy, another agency named for its founder. For this guide we use apple red, pencil black and star gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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