.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} Lessing-Flynn has its own story to tell, shaped by several characters.

First there was founder Paul Lessing, “the storyteller,” who wrote long dissertations about his clients’ products for print and direct-mail advertisements and started “The Melting Pot,” a newsletter filled with pages upon pages of his ideas. “Its mission,” Lessing wrote in the first issue, “will be to dispel heresy and preach the pure gospel of advertising.”

Next came Roy Flynn, “the client entertainer,” who was one day found tucked underneath his desk sleeping after taking clients out on the town the night before. Today there is Connor Flynn Jr., “the bookkeeper,” and Joe Rosenberg, a former “underground hippie late night disc jockey,” whose name is in the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the original KFMG radio staff.

Then the agency has its longtime clients that have been as much a part of its 100-year history as its leaders. The longest standing is Cownie Tanning Co., today known as Cownie Furs and run by Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie. With the agency being more involved in developing presentations for Cownie’s energy conservation and environment efforts than his retail store, Connor said, “He’s a lousy retail client, but a great political client.”

Lessing-Flynn also placed the first advertisement for Vermeer Manufacturing Co.’s hammer mill sheller, which launched the company’s business in the 1950s. It still works with the 60-year-old manufacturer.

The oldest marketing company west of Chicago prides itself on these roots and attributes much of its success to retaining Paul Lessing’s focus on storytelling and Roy Flynn’s emphasis on close relationships with its clients.

“We consider (Lessing) a storyteller, and that’s where we start with clients that we work with today,” said Tom Flynn III, Connor’s son, who joined the company in 1993. “A lot of companies talk about branding, and we believe in that, too, but what we think that means is you’ve got to tell that story for each of those clients so that people can make that connection. There’s been a lot of things that have changed – computers, new media – but when you go back and look at the advertising business itself, it’s still about telling our clients’ story so we can help them sell products and services.”

Connor added, “I don’t know that our philosophy has changed that much, but the tools have changed.”

The agency started with a focus on advertising in newspapers and direct-mail pieces, but today it can add radio, television, billboards, the Internet and a whole range of Web-based marketing tactics to reach consumers. But although advertising has become more “Web-centric,” Connor said it also has given advertisers “an opportunity to go back and tell that story. They don’t have time to read it in print anymore, so you really drive them to the Web to tell the story.”

Many of Lessing-Flynn’s 40 or so clients are in agriculture or focused on business-to-business advertising. Recently, the agency has picked up a major hospital in Wyoming, MetaBank and Ag Leader Technology Inc., an Ames company focused on precision farming and global positioning systems. It has about $11 million in capitalized billings and strives to remain diverse, looking beyond Des Moines for clients.

“In Des Moines, you can’t afford to find a specific niche,” Connor said. “It’s just not a big enough market. You really have to be a little more diversified than you would in an area like Chicago or Minneapolis, where they have more consumer products.”

The company has remained under the Flynn family leadership since Lessing sold a stake of the company to Roy Flynn in 1918. Flynn remained with the company until 1967; his son Connor joined in 1948 after serving in World War II and selling advertising for three years for Wallaces’ Farmer magazine. Under Connor’s leadership, Lessing-Flynn gained many new clients, including Vermeer Manufacturing and Roto-Rooter Inc. Connor Jr. joined the company in 1968 and became president in 1981, and Joe Rosenberg joined in 1974. (Connor Flynn Sr.’s brother, Pete Flynn Sr., started Flynn Wright Inc. in 1984 after working at Lessing-Flynn)

The company survived the Great Depression, two world wars and the dot-com bust that drove many advertising agencies out of business at the turn of the century. The agency’s leaders attribute its enduring success to focusing on existing clients rather than working to get new business, even admitting that they are bad at new business development.

“We’ve never ignored our existing clients,” Rosenberg said. “Always first and foremost the existing clients were most important to us, and we never spent time elsewhere that should have been spent on them. Everything new and different was above and beyond.”

Lessing-Flynn also takes a “copy-contact approach” to working with clients, where an account person functions as the creative lead and copywriter for the client and plays a key role in account planning, rather than funneling everything through a creative director like at most agencies.

At the same time, the agency has not ventured too far outside its areas of expertise. For example, it will help design and write copy for a Web site, but doesn’t handle the programming for it; the leaders claim that strategy saved Lessing-Flynn during the dot-com bust. It also has not gotten heavily involved in social media, an approach that uses podcasts, blogs and social networking sites to advertise.

However, Lessing-Flynn has been a quick adopter of technology. Rosenberg remembers being one of the first agencies with an Apple computer in 1978 and since then, it has adopted Acrobat, Photoshop and other software as it comes out.

“One of my proudest moments,” Connor said, “was in 1970, getting an ad from concept to shipping to the publication in one day. A black-and-white ad. … Now we’re knocking out four-color ads in hours, minutes.”

The company has a small force of about 13 employees who work at its office on Ingersoll Avenue near 31st Street. Most have been with the agency for more than 10 years, even without special benefits that many companies are adding in an effort to retain employees, Rosenberg said.

“I always felt the secret to success in any agency is really running an anarchy,” Connor said, “because you have so many different personalities that you have to satisfy, so why try to satisfy any of them? Just let them sink or swim based on their own ingenuity, creativity and initiative. You find out pretty quickly who’s going to make it or not.”

Though Lessing-Flynn aspires to find new clients in areas including finance and health care, it doesn’t want to grow too quickly. In fact it notes that some of the best advertising ideas, such as the Aflac Inc. duck, come from smaller agencies.

“Getting big is not any assurance that you’re going to be great,” Rosenberg said. “It just means you’re big. You charge more and have more insulation between the people who run the company and the people who do the day-to-day work, and you have 30 people who feel that they better contribute, and they end up ruining things.”