PROVIDENCE — The city was alive with new ideas.

Talented, young account executives called on company presidents to pitch ways to sell their products to an emerging generation of middle-class consumers.

It was the golden age of advertising. And the ad men in New York, Boston and Providence created a communications industry in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s that would help build the post World War II economy into the biggest in the world.

Two of the young upstarts were Don Creamer and Rob Trowbridge, who both went to Brown University. They set up Creamer Trowbridge Company in an empty office in downtown Providence, with borrowed money and no clients.

Using their brains, ambition, wit and persuasive personalities, they made their own rules for running an ad agency and won accounts, first small and then larger. Over three decades, they built their business by signing Fortune 500 clients, acquiring 18 other agencies and opening offices in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Hartford and Boston. Billings topped $400 million.

Then, in the mid-1980s merger frenzy that swept the industry, Creamer sold the world’s seventh-biggest ad agency to a British outfit for $64 million in cash and a new Porsche.

But that’s all history.

Creamer, now 85 and living in Warwick Neck, and one of his sidekicks, Jim Baar, 79, of Providence, still have a lot to say about the advertising industry. Their new book, But Wait! There’s More! (maybe), to be published next month by Xlibris, recounts the wild, early days of advertising and the evolution of an industry they say has gone all wrong.

And they’re not shy about criticizing the demise of advertising or how the popular media paints the industry.

Here’s Creamer’s take on the hit cable TV show, Mad Men, a sleek drama about U.S. culture in the 1960s that is set in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue:

“Mad Men (is) just another slick porno sitcom that happened to take place at an ad agency. But all those boozed-up people at that agency made clear very early that they didn’t know anything about the agency business. They certainly couldn’t have created the great ads that were created in that period. I would have fired all of that crowd before lunch.”

Adds Baar: “That’s entertainment, not advertising. All they do is drink and (make out) with girls. We’re not prudes and we did drink martinis for lunch. But then we went back to the office and created great ads. What’s missing in that show is all the hard work that went into making the great ads.”

Creamer and Baar also say the best ideas from the early days of advertising can be recaptured and built on to create a business model for the knowledge-based companies that are setting up shop in Providence.

It’s all about brainpower, they say, sharing ideas and commitment to the product and the business.

That’s the way it began when Creamer, a South Providence native, returned to Providence after serving in the Navy on a PT boat in the Philippines.

The city was an East Coast business hub with 240,000 people and a pool of emerging, locally controlled companies. The banks, manufacturers, department stores and jewelry companies all needed an advertising agency to create a message that would make people go out and buy something they may not have known they needed. Already by the mid-1950s, there were two dozen agencies in the city competing for the business.

Providence had a strong tradition of supporting the arts and had become a magnet for creative people. Some were graduates of local colleges. Some came back from the war. Some moved here to work with other creative people.

“Advertising was an attractive business to get into,” Creamer recalls. “It was new, exciting and you could make a profit by creating something new. You didn’t need an investment of machinery or heavy financing. All you needed was brainpower.”

Previously, advertising had been about buying space in newspapers, or, as Creamer jokes, painting a sign on the side of a barn.

But the new ad men were about creating unique content that connected the entrepreneurs’ products with the consumers.

From a tiny office leased in 1954 for $65 a month on the top floor of the old Marwell Building, Creamer and Trowbridge set out to win clients with a simple business plan: face-to-face meetings; personal relationships developed over time: persistence; bonding with clients; understanding and becoming part of the business; solid research; project planning; and small groups of complementary people focused on a single project.

“In reality, you were really selling your brainpower,” says Creamer, who likes to quote an ad exec and industry legend named Fairfax Cone who said, “The inventory (the creative staff) goes down the elevator every night.”

Creamer’s business model worked, and the agency moved several times in Providence as it won more accounts.

One of the biggest was Speidel, the German chain company that set up a factory in Providence’s jewelry district and, under new owner Paul Levinger, pushed into consumer products.

Creamer had been chasing Speidel’s business since he apprenticed with his first agency, Knight & Gilbert. Now on his own, he picked up some of Speidel’s “collateral work,” posters, counter cards and product sheets and catalogs. But the lucrative ad account was held by the prestigious firm Marschalk Co., of New York City.

As Speidel produced more costume jewelry, watchbands and watch bracelets, Creamer continued to work the relationships with Speidel’s managers. His big break came after Speidel had been sold to Textron and decided to market a men’s fragrance, called British Sterling cologne.

Creamer and his team of ad men helped coordinate the launch of the product for several hundred distributors and sales agents during a swanky, alcohol-drenched weekend in Bermuda. Their promotion included a stunning Playboy magazine Playmate of the Month model who emerged during the presentation and became the living symbol of the men’s cologne. Sales rocketed above $2 million and Creamer pitched more ideas to sell the product.

When Speidel pitted Marschalk against Creamer in 1971 for the ad account, Creamer won. It had taken him 18 years since he first pitched the company, but once he had the Speidel account, he kept it for 17 years.

As Creamer’s and Trowbridge’s agency grew, it opened more offices and moved the headquarters to New York City.

Baar, a New York City native and a former newsman for United Press International in Albany, Washington and Providence, had also worked in public relations for 10 years at General Electric and for an agency in Philadelphia. He joining Creamer’s firm in 1974 as head of public relations.

He developed the company into a stronger, full-service agency that offered advertising, promotion, marketing, research, production and public relations – anything a client needed.

Baar says that even as the agency evolved through acquisitions and name changes, it remained focused on big ideas, creative advertising, service to clients and great campaigns.

Among the agency’s efforts: “Now, that’s Italian,” for San Giorgio; “Give your watch a new twist — twist-o-flex,” for Speidel; “The stuff legends are made of,” for British Sterling; and “I like the way it looks on me,” for Stouffer’s.

Baar stayed with Creamer for about 10 years until he left for Hill & Knowlton.

Soon after, Creamer got caught up in the merger-and-acquisition movement that was consolidating the industry. Bigger is better became the mantra on Madison Avenue.

Creamer started to look for a European-based company to buy to support his clients’ needs overseas. At one point, he and his team traveled to England to target Wright, Collins, Rutherford & Scott, a public company on the London Exchange. But Peter Scott, chairman of WCRS, turned the tables and offered to buy Creamer’s agency, then called HBM Creamer.

After negotiations over price and terms on both sides of the Atlantic, Creamer agreed, in 1986, to sell to a company that was half his agency’s size, for $64 million in cash, personal service contracts for him and his top executives and a snazzy Porsche.

Within two years of the acquisition, Creamer’s agency was absorbed by WCRS, and all but disappeared.

Creamer moved back to Rhode Island. He opened a consulting firm and later did some real estate investing.

Baar worked for Hill & Knowlton for a while before taking a corporate communications job at Computervision. He also wrote several books.

The two ad men stayed in touch, and occasionally ran into Trowbridge, who is still around. At a cocktail party, after swapping stories about the old days and agreeing that the advertising industry was destroying itself, Creamer and Baar decided to collaborate on a book.

Since then, they say, the demise of the $500-billion, global advertising industry has only quickened. They decry the “mega-agency pigout of the last 20 years” that is more about buying up competitors and other companies that have nothing to do with advertising. The goal is to make money, the two say, not create great ads or build a business.

What has been lost is the creative drive that sparked the industry, the two men say, and part of the problem is that the agencies have been taken over by midlevel managers in huge, global conglomerates. Because advertising is only one of the business segments, it doesn’t have the corporate focus to create great ads.

Also, they say, internal competition and scant collaboration among the various departments and individuals in the umbrella companies have created fractured, dysfunctional organizations.

Creamer and Baar point to the struggles between print and online divisions for resources and staff that goes on at almost all media and communications companies. They say the people working for the same conglomerate are concerned primarily with protecting their own turf and don’t trust each other.

“The digital people look at the print people as dinosaurs,” Baar says. “The print people look at online people as hippie-dippies.” The results, Creamer and Baar say, are lousy ads that sell emotions and not the product, ads that are impersonal, with no identity of the company and the product. There’s no connection with the consumer.

Look at the slogans, the two men say. Has anything memorable been created in 15 years?

And the bottom line drives the decisions.

“Everybody is answerable to the bookkeeper,” Creamer says. “The business has lost focus. They’ve forgotten what we are trying to do, create great ads.”

The two men say the spirit and business model from the roots of the original agencies can be recaptured to reignite the advertising business and also to help develop the new knowledge-based industries, such as software development, information technology, biotechnology and the life sciences.

They call their new business model “the communication think tank.”

It’s based on creating an organization made up of smaller units of five to eight creative individuals who would be encouraged to develop strategies by sharing their knowledge, skills and talent to create a product, service or idea. The purpose of the collaboration is to unlock each individual’s specialty to make contributions to a focused goal. The result of the collaborative effort would be greater than the sum of its parts.

Creamer says Rhode Island can be a center for communication think tanks, whether in advertising or in other businesses.

He says Rhode Island has an attractive location, great universities and potential pools of investment capital. It can also pick off some of the top communications talent that are abandoning the agencies swallowed up by the mega-companies. Creamer adds that his model dovetails with the state’s public policy to make Rhode Island the center of a new, innovation economy.

“Providence is perfect for this model,” says Creamer.

There is also another central idea to Creamer’s and Baar’s success that comes through any conversation or any chapter of their book — have fun, no matter what happens.

They laughed when Hurricane Carol hit soon after Creamer opened his first office, and the water rose so high that the elevator broke and they had to meet prospective clients on a dimly lit first-floor landing. They laughed when they were promoting the Speidel account on the Jackie Gleason TV show and the chimp Bingo, a star on the broadcast, ran amok in his white diaper in the elevator. And they laughed through all the cocktail parties with clients when too many drinks were served and they came up with zany off-the-cuff ideas to win the accounts.

Last week, they were chuckling again as they pitched their book and told stories from the old days. Their sense of humor cuts through all they’ve accomplished.

And what about that Porsche?

When Scott, the WCRS chairman, flew into T.F. Green Airport to complete his purchase of the U.S. ad agency, Creamer picked him up in the Porsche — an expensive, dark blue 920S coupe.

“Marvelous motorcar,” the Brit told Creamer, sinking into the handcrafted blue leather front passenger seat.

“I’m glad you like it,” Creamer said. “You bought it for me.”

jkostrze@projo.com