John Malmo in his office at Archer Malmo. At 85, he still maintains a handful of clients.
Photographs by Karen Pulfer Focht
"You’ve really gotten a weird interview,” John Malmo comments as we’re wrapping up a conversation ranging from his life, work, and family to sponge mops and floor wax, baseball and billboards. I’ve made the long journey up three whole floors in the Cotton Exchange Building, from the Memphis magazine offices to the space occupied by Archer Malmo, the marketing agency named for Ward Archer Sr., and, well, the man sitting across the table.
If you listen to WKNO-FM, you’ve probably heard Malmo on the radio in the mornings, on your drive to work, in his “Ask Mr. Malmo” segments. (“I think, at least in some circles, they’re popular,” he says of the ’KNO segments. “I think that’s because they’re 90 seconds long.”) And if you’ve been reading print media in Memphis for a while, you may remember, too, his long-running column in The Commercial Appeal.
Listening to these segments myself, I’d formed a quite specific mental picture of the 85-year-old: white-haired, animated, lively, talks with his hands, small of stature (these turned out to be accurate). And, most specific of all: bowtied. I was sure I could hear a bowtie over the radio waves. So, one day on the elevator, when a fellow passenger asked me with that recognizable voice about the week’s Memphis Flyer cover story, I was a bit flummoxed to discover there was not a single bowtie aboard the elevator car.
That’s Malmo’s name on the agency’s logo, and he has an office here where he works four days each week, but he’s careful to point out that he doesn’t own, run, or direct the show. In 1991, Malmo sold his firm to Ward Archer & Associates, and Archer Malmo was born. These days, he maintains a limited number of accounts, and one senses functions as a sort of elder statesman-consultant in the agency.
Karen Pulfer Focht
Malmo rounds the corner in the agency offices carrying the baseball cap that he often sports.
Malmo was born in Milwaukee, but raised here in Memphis, where his family moved when he was 4 years old. He’s lived here ever since, with the exception of the years he spent in college and just after, and in the Army. He went to Sewanee first, but then when his father died, in the springtime, Malmo needed to be closer to Memphis — but didn’t much want to go to “Southwestern or Memphis State” (now Rhodes and U of M), so he went to Ole Miss – for three semesters.
Then he flunked out, got drafted. This was during the Korean War, but Malmo worked stateside, at the Public Information Office at Fort McPherson, in Georgia. He had a fondness for baseball, and a facility for publicity, so, he says, “I ended up being the publicist for the Third Army, for the Fort McPherson baseball team, which had several major leaguers on it. We had a great pitcher from the Cardinals” — baseball stars could get drafted, too — “so I was constantly sending releases about [Wilmer] ‘Vinegar Bend’ Mizell to the St. Louis papers.” He had worked briefly for TheCommercial Appeal, while still living in Memphis, and while he was in the Army, he was a stringer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reporting about, well, baseball.
After completing his service to the Army, Malmo finished his college degree at Boston University. (He thought first of pursuing his degree at Northwestern University; he remembers talking to their dean of admissions, who reviewed his transcript, and told him, “Mr. Malmo, your college record is absolutely atrocious.”) He wound up completing a semester at Southwestern “to get quality points,” then on to BU. While still a student, he began working as the night editor for a daily newspaper in Quincy, Massachusetts — the Patriot Ledger, with circulation around 50,000. “Greatest paper I ever worked for,” he tells me. What made it so great? I ask. “It was owned by a wealthy family who didn’t care about making any money.”
Never one to miss an opportunity for a laugh, Malmo refers to his own book as “bathroom reading.”
Malmo chalks up a good bit of his success to good luck. Decent judgment, too. His very first story for the Patriot Ledger required him to attend a meeting of the South Shore Planning Association. He sat in the back of the room, taking notes. The man running the meeting noticed him, and asked who he was, and why he was there. When Malmo answered that he was there for the paper, “He said, ‘Gentlemen, I move that we authorize $100 to give to this reporter in the back to write the story favorably for us.’” He didn’t take the money – even though $100 was about double what he was being paid to be there that night — but he did go back to the newspaper office and write two stories: one reporting on the meeting, and one reporting the fact that the Planning Association had attempted to bribe a reporter. He left both versions sitting on his editor’s desk.
If Malmo were someone else, someone more doggedly dogmatic, he might use this story as an anecdote about the triumph of conscience over corruption. But he’s more mischievous than that, and more self-effacing. “I can’t even remember which one they ran,” he says, slightly tickled.
After about three years in Boston, he moved back to Memphis. It was 1959, in early May; one night, snow fell so heavily that the next morning, he couldn’t find his car. “That was when I decided I wasn’t staying in Boston. I couldn’t live anyplace that it could snow three feet in May.”
Malmo’s spin is spinless, and the opposite of spineless. He’s all straightforward, straight-ahead clarity — not in the business of adding embellishments when the story doesn’t warrant any. The snow in Boston got too deep, so he dug himself out and headed all the way back to Memphis. Simple. Returned to Memphis, he wanted a job in advertising, but couldn’t get one, so he went back to The Commercial Appeal.
Simple, but not without art. In 2003, he published a book with the riddle of a title, When on the mountain there is no tiger, Monkey Is King. (No, it is not about Elvis. Or zoos.) The book includes “110 two-minute business pearls for everyone who works,” and its author may possibly have handed over a copy while remarking that it is “bathroom reading.” The chapters each bear an aphoristic title, with varying degrees of silliness — “Business slanguage just adds more alligators to the swamp,” for instance, begins a lesson on the uselessness of corporate lingo (or, as he puts it, “slumber-party, kickypoo talk”).
Malmo’s career is varied enough to have allowed for the creation of enough business “pearls” to drape strings of them around the downtown building where we’re talking. There was PR for the Cotton Carnival. Working for The Commercial Appeal at a few different times in his life. Working for an ad agency here in Memphis. Going in-house at the E.L. Bruce Company (later Cook Industries), which was at one time among Memphis’ largest employers; the company made hardwood flooring, wall paneling, laminated truck flooring, floor wax, and so on. Terminix, as it happens, was begun as a division of E.L. Bruce, since if you make hardwood flooring, it’s in your interests to figure out how to protect them from termites. Never one to keep a lofty distance from the work at hand, Malmo says, “I think I’m bald because hair doesn’t grow through scars, and I have crawled under many a house with Terminix guys trying to really get a feel for the business.”
He decided to start his own shop when he was on the receiving end of one too many a shoddy advertising-agency pitch. (Pro tip: Don’t sell your marketing services to a company without first researching what they make.) He bartered for a small office space above the old B & S Delicatessen, on South Second (“I didn’t have to go out to eat — I just had to open the door and sniff”), very bare-bones. His agency, John Malmo Advertising, grew into office space in the Sterick Building, then continued growing, to the Commerce Title Building, and then to 47 Union.
By 1991, Malmo recalls, “I was tired, and we’d lost a big piece of business.” He hated the feeling of hiring talented creative people from New York and elsewhere, bringing them down to Memphis, and then having to make gut-wrenching personnel decisions when the business contracted. “I never had really enjoyed running the agency anyway,” he says. “Being a management executive was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to make advertising, and I had really gotten enthralled with what I consider to be real marketing.”
Okay, so what’s “real marketing,” Mr. Malmo? “Real marketing is being able to maximize the assets of the company, to take advantage of existing opportunities, and to identify new opportunities that make the best use of the assets of the corporation. And once you do that, you may use all that other crap.” (“All that other crap” being advertisements and sales promotion and PR — what people might think of when they think of marketing.)
Malmo tells of talking with Hunter Fans, a client of his back in the early 1970s. There was a business recession, and the company was struggling. They were also, at that time, not primarily a fan company at all — Hunter were making baseboard heaters, mostly. But one “old guy in the back of the shop” was making fans, by hand, and that sole part of the business seemed to be doing well. Malmo intuited that customers would go for the nostalgia factor of a ceiling fan, and he also recognized that the market was ready for more energy-efficient cooling techniques, on account of the energy crisis. So, on his recommendation, the company pivoted to fans — and started turning profits (pun intended). To Malmo, all this falls under the rubric of marketing — analyzing the market’s appetites, understanding the company’s own assets, and finding how to fit assets to appetites.
At the beginning of our conversation, I mentioned that, in a past life, I used to study poetry; he shared that Betty, his wife — “she’s four years younger than I am, only 82” — was memorizing a poem by Robert Frost the other night, using her iPad. (Malmo and Betty have two children, Virginia White and John ‘Dede’ Malmo Jr., and two grandchildren; all live in Memphis.) People don’t read poetry like they used to, we lament, both feeling a bit curmudgeonly about it. And certainly they don’t memorize verse. But once a poem is lodged firmly in one’s consciousness, it’s there to stay, there to add texture and offer perspective on one’s own life.
Now, toward the end of our conversation, he brings up the topic of jingles, and we might as well be having the same discussion over again, now substituting Pepsi-Cola for Frost. “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot. 12 full ounces, that’s a lot. Twice as much for a nickel, too. Pepsi-Cola’s the drink for you,” Malmo sings across the table. “I haven’t heard that in probably 60 or 70 years,” he tells me, at least not outside his own mind. But the jingle is there to stay, pure and perfect. A kind of poetry.
Malmo-isms
In his own words: Here are John Malmo's most distinctly John Malmo moments from our January interview.
“I owe just so much to the opportunity to make every mistake possible. ”
“Real marketing is being able to maximize the assets of the company, to take advantage of existing opportunities, and identify new opportunities that make the best use of the corporation’s assets. Once you do that, then you may use all that other crap.”
“You have to have something to say. What do you have to say? Start there. You probably won’t have to go any farther.”
“Everybody in the media bends over so far not to express any opinions. I’m all opinion.”
“You learn so much by failure, and so little by success.”
“People have many more assets than they realize. What about your trucks? That’s an asset. And your distributors, that’s an asset. And your dealers, that’s an asset. What about your people? What about their knowledge? That’s an asset.”
“What drives this business is the medium. It’s not creativity. It’s the medium.”
“I’m a big believer in billboards. In-home media has really been so damaged. It’s almost impossible to get somebody’s complete attention with any kind of in-home media.”
“If you say the right thing to the right person at the right time, it doesn’t make any difference what typeface you put it in. If it’s the right people, the right time, and you’re saying the right thing, it’s going to be a huge success regardless.”
“See, you’ve got to have a guy who can get teary-eyed about nails, because he manufactures nails. And nails are his life. He’s got to be able to get teary-eyed about it. And if you don’t have anybody like that, you’re just always going to be selling nails.”
“I disagree with every definition of marketing that I’ve ever been able to find.”
Editor's Note: Local Treasures is an occasional series that celebrates our city’s senior celebrities, people whose impact over the decades has helped make Memphis a better place.
