John Kinsella, who nurtured Leo Burnett's valuable stable of advertising mascots like Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy as CEO during Chicago's heyday as an advertising industry capital in the 1980s, died Feb. 10. He was 93.

The Joliet, Illinois, native also was a founder of the Big Shoulders Fund, the Catholic school advocate and scholarship provider. He's credited with later honing its focus by getting donors directly involved with individual schools, as he did with Immaculate Conception St. Joseph School on Chicago's Near North Side.

"He was a force of nature—rousing the team, always fired up, always seeing a way forward," said Josh Hale, Big Shoulders' CEO. Kinsella, he says, corralled Burnett colleagues to develop branding and marketing strategies.

After Kinsella became CEO in 1981, a decade after founder Leo Burnett's death, he set out to revitalize "creative"—the heart of advertising content—that had begun to lag in the service of consumer packaging giants Procter & Gamble, Phillip Morris and Kellogg, among other clients. The famous Marlboro Man was riding toward the sunset as Big Tobacco was besieged by anti-smoking activists and plaintiffs' attorneys.

Burnett was on its way to slipping to 10th in billings among U.S. advertising firms, from fifth a decade earlier, mainly, Kinsella said, because it avoided an industry merger wave at the time. But a 1985 staff survey found that research needed to develop compelling sales pitches was lacking.

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"There was a recommitment to Leo's mission and principles," Rick Fizdale, a future Burnett CEO, told Crain's in 1989. The agency started "Camp Leo," a retreat for the creative staff and client service directors to review the year's work, and trademarked a "Reaching for the Stars" logo, capitalizing on a pet phrase of the founder.

Another Burnett CEO-in-the-making, Bill Lynch, recalls that Kinsella considered marketing as content's equal in developing advertising campaigns.

"We were marketing partners with many of our clients," helping them build their own departments, which allowed Burnett "to know what brand managers know," Lynch says. Burnett won business from hometown advertisers like Kraft Foods and Beatrice Foods and billings climbed to $2 billion.

"He was always encouraging you, pushing you to get a better idea. He was hard to satisfy sometimes," Lynch says. "Was it uncomfortable at times? Yes. He wore his feelings on his sleeve."

Kinsella started as a trainee at McCann Erickson in 1954 and joined Burnett five years later. He retired from the CEO position at the end of 1986, the year Big Shoulders began, as he approached a mandatory retirement age of 58. Burnett eventually did join the merger party, doing a deal in 1999 that led to an acquisition by Paris-based Publicis Groupe in 2002.

Kinsella remained a strong advocate for his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, and for DePaul University, where he got an MBA. As for Immaculate Conception, "he really took it from close to closing to being a powerhouse," Hale says.

Andrew McKenna, former McDonald's chairman and civic leader, was in the Notre Dame class immediately following Kinsella's. "John's 'Irish' was 'Irish'. Everyone loved John," he says.

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