Thomas Rosser Reeves Jr. was born in Danville, Virginia on September 10, 1910 to the
Reverend Thomas Rosser Reeves and Mary Scott (Watkins) Reeves. He attended the University of
Virginia from 1928 to 1930. On December 2, 1934 he married Elizabeth Lovejoy Street, with
whom he has had three children: Rosser Scott, Abbott Street, and Elizabeth Lovejoy
Reeves.
In 1929 Reeves began working as a cub reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, but the next year switched into
advertising as the advertising manager of the Morris Plan Bank of Virginia. In 1934 he quit
Richmond for New York City and a position as copywriter for Cecil, Warwick and Cecil.
Dissatisfied with that agency's soft sell approach, he soon moved to
Blackett-Sample-Hummert, working in association with Duane Jones and the legendary
copywriter Frank Hummert from 1938 to 1939. From there Reeves moved to Benton and Bowles,
where he first worked with Ted Bates.
Bates left Benton and Bowles to form his own agency, Ted Bates and Company Inc., which
opened its doors on December 2, 1940; with him he took Rosser Reeves and two accounts,
Colgate-Palmolive and Continental Baking. Their first year's billings amounted to $4.5
million. Reeves advanced at Ted Bates from copy chief to chairman of the board, the position
he held at the time of his retirement in 1966. The Bates agency has historically been a
leading exponent of the hard sell school of advertising and has relied heavily on radio and
television spot commercials to give the maximum penetration to its clients' messages. With
the publication of his 1961 book Reality in
Advertising, Reeves became the major theoretician of the Bates philosophy. Written
originally as interoffice memos, the book is best known for its theory that all good
advertisements have a “U.S.P.”, a Unique Selling Proposition; that is, a
successful ad must promise something about the product that is unique and meaningful to the
potential purchaser. Using U.S.P. as the basis of its ads, the Bates agency has risen to be
the fifth largest advertising agency in the world, specializing in package goods ads and
handling such accounts as Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical, Brown and Williamson Tobacco
Products, Mobil Oil, and the Chase Manhattan Bank. By 1966 its billings had risen to $241
million. Reeves even adapted U.S.P. to the 1952 Eisenhower Presidential campaign, for which
the candidate filmed 32 spots for television, a practice that has since become common in
political campaigns.
Reeves' prominence in the advertising profession is attested to by his place in the
Advertising Hall of Fame, where he symbolizes hard sell advertising of package goods and of
political candidates.
Since his retirement from Ted Bates and Company, Reeves has served as president of the
Tiderock Corporation of New York City; as a limited partner of Bacon, Stevenson, and Reeves
and of Oppenheimer and Company; and as chairman of the board of Daniel Starch and Statt
Inc.
He has served the U.S. as deputy chairman of the President's Citizens Food Campaign in 1947
and was a member of the Federal Marketing Commission sent to West Germany in 1953.
A man of varied interests, Reeves is an accomplished yachtsman who published Boats magazine from 1953 to 1960; a skilled
chess player who captained the first U.S. chess team to Moscow in 1955 and has been chairman
of the American Chess Foundation since 1958; a jewel collector who in 1966 donated to the
Smithsonian Institution the Rosser Reeves Ruby, the largest star ruby in the world; and an
investor in oil and Jamaican real estate. He is a trustee of Randolph-Macon Women's College
in Virginia and of St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland.
