A sample of an energy-saving compact florescent light bulb, right, is displayed alongside a conventional incandescent light bulb.
NYT / Emile Wamsteker
As one of seven children growing up in a working-class family in Providence’s Armory District, Bob Jeffrey revered John F. Kennedy’s calls for public service and appreciated his mother, Gilda, a community activist who fought slumlords and apathetic politicians.
Today, as the executive who is credited with turning around the faltering JWT, one of the world’s top advertising agencies, Jeffrey has set aside some of his time to engage in a new public service campaign: helping New York City teenagers — and maybe the rest of the world — combat climate change. Jeffrey has provided the support of his agency, the fourth-largest full-service network in the world, to a campaign to raise money to provide energy-efficient, compact fluorescent light bulbs to poor families in New York City.
The project is the brainstorm of Avery Hairston, a high-school freshman whose mother, Sara Levinson, is a successful business executive and friend of Jeffrey’s.
Their story is a tale of how public service can be inspired by youthful idealism, made possible with innovations of the digital age and quickly expanded with ideal connections in the worlds of business and advocacy.
As Hairston recalls, the idea came to him as he was reading a Starbucks advertisement in the New York Times. It read: "If everyone who received this newspaper today switched one lightbulb in their house to a compact fluorescent light, it would be like eliminating the emissions of approximately 89,000 cars for one year.”
Hairston brought up the ad to friends on Facebook.com, an Internet site on which young people commonly share information and photographs.
“I talked to my friends, and they jumped right into it,” Hairston said in a telephone interview from his home in Manhattan. “We decided to help the people who can’t afford the bulbs themselves.”
The initial cost of compact fluorescents is more than standard light bulbs, making them an unlikely purchase for the poor. But they provide big long-term savings in energy use and working life.
Hairston and his friends created a nonprofit entity, RelightNY and a Web site, relightny.com. They lined up allies: the Natural Resources Defense Council volunteered to be an adviser; the Open Space Institute, a land conservation organization, agreed to be fiscal sponsor; and Help USA, a nonprofit that helps the homeless, agreed to distribute the bulbs.
“Our goal is to inspire America and maybe the rest of the world to do more to take cooler showers, to use less power,” Hairston said. “We set a goal for raising $1 million by the time we graduate in 2010.”
Hairston and his friends launched their campaign about a week ago at the JWT offices on Lexington Avenue in New York. At that point, they had already raised more than $20,000.
They showed videos expressing support from Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the NRDC, and Maria Cuomo Cole, a daughter of the former New York governor who chairs Help USA.
Jeffrey gave a speech quoting Pearl S. Buck, who once said, “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible — and achieve it, generation after generation.”
Jeffrey said after seeing Hairston and his classmates in action, he couldn’t agree more.
The RelightNY is a simple idea, Jeffrey said, “but the great ones usually are.”
He said he supports their efforts because they are inspirational, and because JWT is committed to working to stop global warming.
JWT was the group’s first sponsor. But Jeffrey said other big names quickly followed: Live Earth, Virgin Mobile, Philips, Rodale, KickApps and Dale and Thomas Popcorn.
To celebrate the launch of RelightNY, Jeffrey said JWT was replacing the bulbs in every desk lamp at the company — nearly 1,000 bulbs.
RelightNY says it plans to buy a new bulb with every $2 donation. The bulbs not only reduce energy use dramatically, they last up to 10 times longer than standard incandescent bulbs.
Jeffrey, in a story in Advertising Age, a trade publication, noted that Hairston had connections essential to making things happen. He attends a school that describes itself as the oldest independent school in America, dating back to 1628. His father, Charles Hairston, is an award-winning TV producer. His mother has been president of MTV, NFL Properties and women’s publishing at Rodale.
“It’s a good thing he does,” Jeffrey wrote, “for his big idea was too big for any 15-year-old kid: a charity to buy CFL bulbs for the residents of New York’s housing projects.”
At the time, the business and political worlds were embracing climate change and compact fluorescents in a big way.
Wal-Mart announced in January an aggressive program to promote the energy-saving light bulbs.
Congress, now controlled by Democrats, started a series of hearings on climate change and several pieces of legislation were proposed.
Former-vice-president-turned-environmental-advocate Al Gore won an Oscar for his documentary film on climate change.
Last weekend, Jeffrey was visiting his mother, now living in Cranston, and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews. He said he was jet lagged from trips to the headquarters of his company’s parent company, WPP Group, in London, but he wanted to meet with a reporter from The Providence Journal to talk about RelightNY.
Over lunch at Julian’s, a trendy restaurant on Broadway, not far from where he grew up, Jeffrey said he continues to have a great affinity for Rhode Island.
Soft spoken, but intense, Jeffrey, 53, described growing up in an Italian-Irish family. He attended the Asa Messer Elementary School, St. Mary’s School, and La Salle Academy.
His mother was credited with being a major force in getting the West Broadway neighborhood declared an official neighborhood, making it eligible for federal home-improvement grants.
Jeffrey remembered his mother’s work with PACE, People Acting through Community Effort. She would try to get slumlords to clean up their houses by protesting where it hurt them, in their own affluent neighborhoods, Jeffrey said.
His parents adored John F. Kennedy. He repeated the Kennedy slogan: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Jeffrey attended Manhattan College, majoring in English literature. He came back to Rhode Island for a year, hoping to get a job at The Providence Journal or some other local newspaper, he said.
“I just wanted any job I could get,” he said. “I grew up in a family where people read newspapers every day. And I saw that slumlords didn’t want their names in the Journal. I saw that journalism could get things done.”
When Jeffrey didn’t get a job in journalism, he returned to New York City and found work in advertising. He said he enjoyed the creativity, and liked the idea of combining art and commerce.
He worked for two New York agencies before cofounding Goldsmith/Jeffrey in 1987. The agency had creative accounts such as ESPN, JP Morgan and Bergdorf Goodman before it was acquired by Lowe & Partners in 1996.
Jeffrey stayed with the new agency and opened a West Coast office, where he handled accounts with Sun Microsystems, Eddie Bauer and Charles Schwab.
He joined the J. Walter Thompson agency as president of its New York office in 1998. He became head of North American operations in 2001 and then chief executive officer of the company’s worldwide operations in 2004. He became chairman in 2005, supervising 8,500 employees.
He soon changed the name to JWT and he was widely credited with revitalizing the country’s oldest ad agency, which had been losing accounts and credibility.
One writer in Wired.com said Jeffrey put together a digital team and stamped “digital all over the stodgy old shop.”
By that account, Jeffrey’s strategy was to get Web-promotion dollars from the agency’s packaged-goods clients, while also attracting more tech-oriented companies.
In an interview on CNBC last year, Jeffrey said his goal was to completely integrate all commercial programming, paying particular attention to non-traditional media.
In an article in the Economist magazine in 2005, Jeffrey said the launch of a new Ford Fusion car, one of JWT’s clients, provides an example of where advertising has moved. Even before the car was on sale, JWT had begun promoting it on a Web site that offered “flash concerts” by rock bands and hip-hop artists.
“These are musical events to be held at secret locations and announced at the last minute via e-mail and text-messaging,” the article said. The goal was to attract younger, urban buyers.
Ad Age estimated the companies domestic revenues in 2006 at $469 million, with international sales adding another $844 million.
Although much of Jeffrey’s success stems from his skills with advertising on the Internet, he said he is one digital expert who doesn’t believe the Internet will lead to the demise of newspapers.
“I don’t think newspapers will go away,” he said. “I do think that newspapers should decide what they want to do best, and how it should relate to their Web sites.”
He said Levinson, a friend, asked him to help her son with his light-bulb project because he needed help with communications.
“The whole thing escalated in a good way,” Jeffrey said. “I always try to do some pro bono work — to use my skills to good uses.”
He also said he finds too many people are too quick to discount today’s younger generation.
“I actually think this generation is very bright because they are on the Internet,” Jeffrey said. “A lot of people are too cynical about politics. But I think all significant change is from the ground up. Bright ideas always flow from the ground up. And I predict this will catch on across the world.”
Jeffrey said he was talking to a nephew over the weekend who attends Moses Brown school. They’re interested in bringing the campaign to Rhode Island.
“I’m going to get him and his friends to come to New York to meet the kids there,” Jeffrey said. “I think these kids want to be activists. They feel personally accountable.”
When Jeffrey was promoted to the top job at JWT, some stories said he seemed like too nice a person to run a huge agency in the ultra-competitive world of advertising. What did Jeffrey think of those observations?
“I’m very entrepreneurial,” he said. “I’m comfortable with risks and change
“Also, I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Providence. I have a nice exterior, but I’m from a tough neighborhood.”
“Our goal is to inspire America and maybe the rest of the world to do more to take cooler showers, to use less power.”
Avery Hairston
RelightNY “I always try to do some pro bono work — to use my skills to good uses.”
Bob Jeffrey
JWT ad agency plord@projo.com
