When Omnicom completed its $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group on Nov. 26, it didn’t just create the world’s largest agency holding company. It also retired several iconic names in advertising — including MullenLowe, soon to be folded into TBWA.
To the business world, this is an epic story about scale, strategy and the end of a legacy network. Here in Marblehead, the story is a local one.
In 1970, Jim Mullen wasn’t an ad industry household name. He was a Hood Sails employee with a penchant for offshore racing, and he was trying to earn enough money to build a boat and sail around the world. He needed an apartment close to the sail loft, which led him to Mechanic Street.
Between regattas and shift work, and with zero agency experience, he started writing ads. The marine companies around him needed support, and he had the instincts of both a craftsman and a storyteller.
“I never had been inside an agency or even met anyone who had,” he told me. “But I’d written through college, gone to art school after graduation, and thought, ‘How hard can this be?’”
Thus, Superfine Productions was born.
Very early on, Jim teamed up with Paul Silverman, who would become the agency’s legendary creative director. Jim brought entrepreneurial instinct and a sailor’s sensibility; Paul brought creative rigor and drive. What they didn’t have was anyone who actually knew how an ad agency functioned.
Coincidentally, also working in Marblehead sail lofts at the time was my dad, Steve Haesche — a Newhouse-trained artist and veteran of New York and Boston ad agencies. He had walked away from advertising deliberately, choosing instead to cut sails at night, race on weekends and dabble in marine photography. But Jim, Paul and their tiny staff needed someone who could turn raw creative instinct into a functioning business. Dad joined the fledgling team, and together they began building what would become Mullen Advertising.
“Jim once told me he’d hired Steve because he was an ex-Marine who could keep the rest of the staff in line,” writer Bob Payne recalled, “but what he discovered he’d hired was a brilliant creative director.”
As the work grew, the team moved out of the Mechanic Street apartment and into Marblehead’s early 19th-century Custom House at 2 ½ Lee Street—a narrow brick building facing the Boston Yacht Club parking lot, each floor a single small room. The client roster looked less like a modern agency portfolio and more like a who’s who of the harbor: Hood Sails, Little Harbor boatbuilders, Paceship Yachts, Direcktor Yachts, Merriman Industries, Datamarine.
Then came a turning point. In 1979, Dad introduced Jim to the Boston Ad Club’s Hatch Awards and urged him to enter something — anything — to build credibility regionally. Their very first submission, for client Old Town Canoe, won Best of Show, stunning Boston’s legacy agencies. Suddenly the question became: Who are these people up on the North Shore?
Those early days also produced the now-legendary “Unsinkable Legend” Boston Whaler ad, in which the team cut a boat in thirds to see if it would still float. (It did.) The campaign remains one of New England’s most iconic pieces of creative work.
Through successive moves to Beverly Farms, Manchester and Wenham, Mullen’s reputation soared. National accounts followed, and Dad found himself back in the very industry he’d tried to escape — only now he was a grown-up, saddled with two daughters and a mortgage. While he worked, my sister and I swam in the Beverly Farms office pool, colored in the Wenham studios and delighted in the manor’s intercom system.
In an email to me, longtime chief creative officer Edward Boches described the Mullen culture.
“It was truly entrepreneurial and collaborative, unlike any work environment I ever experienced. Jim believed deeply that those who built and contributed should share in the rewards — and he meant it. The profit-sharing checks were so generous that new employees sometimes thought they were mistakes.”
“That trust made us fearless,” Boches added. “We set goals that were unobtainable and reached them. We believed that if you unleashed creativity in everyone, and held everyone responsible for the work, you could will yourself into becoming one of the best agencies in the country. And… we did.”
“We shared in a semi-magical time when respect, loyalty and fun filled the agency,” said Mullen. “We worked and played hard and shared a commitment to an environment that encouraged each of our colleagues to excel.”
Janet Swaysland of Marblehead, co-founder of Mullen’s public relations department, added, “Jim was a leader of the future, unencumbered by conventional corporate thinking. He gathered great individuals and created conditions for them to create great work that mattered, together, surprising everyone.”
Over the decades that followed, Mullen Advertising became the largest independent agency in New England, was acquired by Interpublic, merged into global networks, rebranded as MullenLowe,and competed on a worldwide stage.
Now, with Omnicom’s restructuring, MullenLowe is abruptly no longer. It’s bittersweet. While the good old days were long gone before this latest merger, and the company’s spirit diluted by time and consolidation, the sunsetting of the name still lands with weight. It marks the end of a chapter that shaped lives.
Those who grew up in its orbit — either professionally or, like me, literally — are remembering its early magic and the people who made it possible, and the alumni chatter on LinkedIn validates Swaysland’s observation that “anyone touched by Jim’s beliefs and the culture he created surely carries those ideals forward far beyond the name on the door.”
So — a hearty cheers. To the Marblehead sailor’s side project that became a regional “little engine that could,” then a national ad agency, then a global one and now a piece of the largest advertising company in the world. It’s a seismic corporate story with humble beginnings down Old Town streets, in tiny Marblehead rooms where there was no choice but to lean in.
Kate Haesche Thomson is a marketing strategist and former Marblehead Current board member. She lives in Marblehead with her husband and two daughters.
