Ed McCabe has been part of several different advertising agencies in the course of his career and recently headed his own agency. He has had a surprising career. He landed his first agency job when he was 15 years old, joining McCann-Erickson in Chicago. He later moved to New York and wrote for Young & Rubicam, Benton & Bowles, Marschalk, and Carl Ally. In 1967 he cofounded Scale, McCabe, and Sloves (SMS). In 1974, when he was 35, he became the youngest person ever to be elected to the Copywriter's Hall of Fame. McCabe is known for his crisp, concise copy, and he has written on everything from automats to automobiles, nose pollution to hi-fi. In 1971 SMS was given the advertising contract for Perdue Farms chickens. McCabe managed to turn Perdue's chickens into America's first brand-name chickens, based on a television campaign built around the line, "It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken." This campaign caused Perdue's premium-priced chickens' sales to increase sevenfold.
One of the first accounts for SMS was Volvo, a $3 million account that the agency took away from the rival Carl Ally agency. Advertising Age then picked the company as agency of the year. In 1977, Ogilvy & Mather paid almost $15 million to buy the agency, and by 1987 SMS management had repurchased 30 percent of the agency. In 1987, SMS was billing $700 million worldwide. By that time, however, McCabe had departed. He was the genius behind most of the advertisements that made the company as successful as it has been. He was a high-school dropout when he came to the agency. He started phasing out his activities in 1985 and pulled out entirely in January 1987, stating:
It held no more allure for me: The bigger it got, the more it became the kind of place I always wanted to escape. I have nothing to do with where Scali, McCabe, Sloves is going, but I have a lot to do with where it's been.
In 1990, McCabe went to Miami and seemed to ...