“Innovation,” writes Harold Evans in his landmark book They Made America, is “inventiveness put to use.” That makes innovation much more than a new product that serves a useful but limited function in the marketplace—it’s an invention that transforms the marketplace and rearranges our map of the world.

There were many stellar innovations in the United States during the 20th century, when more ideas grew up to be world-changing businesses than at any other time in history. But even in that Renaissance of innovation, the men and women celebrated in books like They Made America were generally noted for one great innovation—A.P. Giannini built a bank, Thomas Watson a computer company, Juan Trippe an international airline.

But J. Walter Thompson, alone among advertising agencies, innovated again and again and again.

The 20th century saw much innovation in advertising; a business that started with just newspapers and magazines has gone electric, electronic and digital. But even measured against that record of incessant change, J. Walter Thompson stands far above all rivals. For most of its formative years, the firm established one industry after another, repeatedly reinventing itself and expanding its ability to serve clients in new and imaginative ways.

It all began with Mr. Thompson, who bought a small agency in 1877 and promptly changed its goals—and, in one masterstroke, the magazine business as well. At that time, magazine revenue came only from newsstand sales and subscriptions. Thompson pushed publishers to accept advertising, and that, very simply, changed the publishing industry in a way that has lasted to the present day. But Thompson didn’t stop there. Unlike competitors who saw their role only as creators and order-takers, he insisted on dealing with all of his clients’ business. Because the agency came to know its clients intimately, it developed relationships that survived the inevitable ups and downs. Even better, the agency came to see marketing and branding opportunities that might otherwise have been missed.
Thompson’s successor, Stanley Resor, was responsible for the next series of innovations. Some were methodological. Resor was the first advertising executive to commission market research. And he didn’t tiptoe into this field—he hired John B. Watson, the founder of behavioral psychology, to do Thompson’s research. And Resor hired his wife, Helen Lansdowne Resor, as a copywriter. And though she never held a vice president’s title, she was his closest collaborator for decades.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Mrs. Resor would have been as welcome in most executive offices as a boa constrictor; in those days, a woman’s place in a company was as a typist. But she not only assumed she had the right to do important work, she assumed that other women did too—and she used her power as a lever to make that happen. Women were welcome at Thompson. In a world where most consumer decisions were made by women, that was a huge paradigm shift.
Mrs. Resor was an agitator outside the company—she organized her colleagues to march in the New York suffragette parade in 1915—and within, as well: In 1910 she formed the Women’s Editorial Department, which relied far more on marketing data than on female intuition. She launched soap ads headlined “Nose pores—how to reduce them.” The innovation? For the first time, an ad was pitched to the needs of the consumer, not the qualities of the manufacturer.

In 1911, Mrs. Resor went further, when her ads for Woodbury’s Facial Soap featured the slogan “A Skin You Love to Touch” over a suggestive-for-the-time painting of a young woman being admired by several besotted men. Sex? In advertising? It’s ho-hum now; it was a certified innovation then.
Let us give Mr. Resor his due: He was creating a decentralized, antiauthoritarian environment where shared intelligence mattered more than a title and a corner office. Employees were encouraged to think big, and they did; in 1917, Thompson published a house ad that defined a “brand” and explained its importance both for the client and the agency. Today, integrated marketing strategies are commonplace; back then, this was another Thompson innovation.
The list goes on. Thompson disciplined the creative process with another innovation: copy and layouts. In the 1920s,Thompson was the first American agency to open international offices, and very quickly, it covered the globe. It was the first agency to use celebrities to endorse products. In l930, when there were just 44 television sets in the entire country, Thompson arranged for a client, Libby’s, to sponsor a TV show. In l960, Thompson broke with tradition and launched a new kind of advertising for television: a consumer-created portfolio of personal photos for a “Kodak Moments” campaign. The agency took risks for blue-chip clients—in 1972 ads in Ebony magazine, it used a black Santa to pitch Kodak’s pocket Instamatic camera.
In 2005, CEO Bob Jeffrey renamed the agency, shortening its stout and respectable 19th-century name to JWT. A contraction is not in itself an innovation, but it is, in this case, a signal: An agency that has been a monument to invention is looking to establish a lightning-paced, forward-looking environment that will deliver a new wave of innovation.