Pearlstein takes fitting bow in button-down advertising world.

Pearlstein takes fitting bow in button-down advertising world

The key to Leonard Pearlstein's personality may lie in his bow ties.

Pearlstein is president and chief executive officer of keye/donna /pearlstein, a West Los Angeles-based advertising agency that in the last few years has come to be one of the most respected in the industry and one of the most soughtafter by advertisers looking for a hot agency.

Each business day, Pearlstein ties one of his several dozen bow ties and straps on a pair of suspenders. Then he ventures out into the blue-grey world where neckties are the norm.

Pearlstein's world is the business side of advertising. Along with partners Paul Keye and Mario Donna, who form the creative side of the business, he has built an advertising agency that in the last two years has been gaining locomotive-like momentum in terms of new business, industry awards and plaudits from the press.

The agency has gained more than $32 million in new buildings in the past two years, for example, including prestige clients like Suzuki of America for its first-ever auto introduction (the Suzuki Samurai) and the state of California for its tourism promotion campaign. It won the local ad industry's top honor, the Beldings Sweepstakes Award, in 1983, and through the years has captured dozens of local, regional and national awards. It was named 1985 western agency of the year by Adweek magazine and was singled out earlier this year for feature coverage by Advertising Age.

Evidence of the agency's growing stature can also be found in conversations with executives in the local ad industry. The heads of just about all the major agencies in town consider keye/donna/ pearlstein one of the most successful and respected competitors in the marketplace. It isn't just respect for the dollar volume of the agency's work, because advertising executives invariably dwell on the quality of a competitor's work as well as its bottom line.

The recognition is nice, but Pearlstein takes it all in stride. He tries to keep it all in perspective by exercising his considerable sense of humor and avoiding the sort of pompous posturing that often goes with success.

"It's nice to get all that press. It's very flattering and it feeds our enormous egos," he says, "but it has nothing to do with our own evaluation of our work, which is much more brutal than anyone else's." He suggests that press accounts are sometimes exaggerated, especially when an agency is "discovered" as his has been.

"We're doing good work and we like to be noticed, but we would be foolish to believe that we're the only agency doing good work in town," he says. "And that's not false humility. One reason we have to do good work is that we're up against good competition."

Pearlstein is quick to point out, too, that his agency was doing fine work years before anyone started writing glowing articles about it. "There were a lot of people in the advertising business who thought we were pretty good at what we do before anyone started writing articles about us," he says.

Nonetheless, keye/donna/pearlstein has become what is known as a hot agency, which usually means an agency has won substantial new business and/or praise for its creative work.

Pearlstein is glad for the praise, but he dislikes any part of the steroetype tha a hot agency has to be primarily a talented creative shop.

"One of the small tragedies of advertising is that too many people are willing to accept the concept that if you're good at one part of the business you can't be good at another," he says. "Most agencies and clients seem to accept as gospel that if you're good at creative, for example, you can't be good at marketing or account management."

Pearlstein says the agency's goal is "to be terrific at everything." Keye/donna/pearlstein takes its marketing and account management functions just as seriously as its creative work, he says, spending as big a portion of its budget on marketing research as many of the larger agencies in town.

Another stereotype he likes to question is the image of creative departments as havens for huge egos.

"The advertising business definitely is creatively driven, but there are probably just as many big egos on the business side as there are in the creative department," he says. He describes his own ego as "pretty sizable," but he says Keye and Donna keep it in check.

Pearlstein started in advertising after graduating from UCLA in 1962, beginning at Ogilvy & Mather in New York. After working for O&M and other agencies there and in Los Angeles, he joined with Keye and Donna, who at the time were operating Keye/Donna & Associates, to found keye/donna/pearlstein in 1968. (The agency's decision not to capitalize its name has been interpreted to mean all sorts of things, but Donna, the agency's art director, says he designed it that way "because it looked good.")

He has been described as "the motor" of the agency, the energetic force that drives it while copywriter Keye and artist Donna tend to the creative chores. Gerry Rubin, the head of locally based Rubin Postaer and Associates, describes Pearlstein as "very upbeat" and one of the most formidable competitors in the industry.

"Len is a very distinctive and distinguished character just by virtue of his haberdashery," Rubin says. "The first time I saw him in a room full of people, wearing one of his bow ties, I knew he had to have either a lot of courage or a lot of confidence."

Pearlstein describes himself as very energetic and optimistic, "the kind of person who sees the glass three-quarters full even when it's half empty." He also likes to say that he has succeeded in advertising because "I have the world's shortest attention span, and advertising rewards short attention spans."

Remarks like those are evidence that Pearlstein is not about to take himself too seriously, even though he's very serious about his business. Further evidence can be found in some of the things he and his partners do just for fun.

Whenever the mood strikes them, for example, they like to hang banners on the front of their Olympic Boulevard offices. Before they moved in, they hung out a banner that said "Future site of keye/donna/pearlstein, home of wayward advertising people and nervous clients." And during the 1984 Olympics, when Pearlstein was struck by the surfeit of companies declaring themselves official Olympic this or official Olympic that, the agency hung out a banner that said: "keye/donna/pearlstein, the official advertising agency of Olympic Boulevard." Pearlstein lately has been considering a new one that would say "Quiet! Stress-level experiments being conducted inside."

This man is serious about his fun.

He may be one of the few executives in Los Angels who openly admits to enjoying fun. When asked why the agency hasn't sold out in the recent megamerger craze (k/d/p has been courted by lots of potential buyers) he says, "It's fun to be independent."

Pearlstein says the same thing when asked why he likes to wear bow ties: "They're fun." He adds that he wears suspenders because they're more practical than a belt. Therein may lie the key to Pearlstein: He's having lots of fun, but he's very practical too.

Photo: Pearlstein: One of the keys to k/d/p's growth

Photo: Journal Snapshot

Leonard Pearlstein . . .

Native of: Paterson, N.J.

Current residence: Pacific Palisades 

College: UCLA

Age: 46

Other achievements: Pearlstein is a former president of the Western States Advertising Agencies Association. Asked to cite his other achievements, he instead cites the agency's work, which he notes has won "a whole closet full" of prestigious awards. He also mentions the agency is one of only a few in the U.S. that have been asked to create commercials for the American Association of Advertising Agencies' anti-drug campaign.