Industry Giant - Andy McKelvey Dies

Last week the industry lost one of it’s founding giants as Andrew (Andy) J. McKelvey, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan after battling pancreatic cancer. He was 74.

In the early 1960s, McKelvey decided that advertising was a promising growth industry of the future, and he returned to New York where in 1963, he got a job as an account manager at a Madison Avenue ad agency, handling consumer products like Vaseline Hair Tonic.

In 1967 he borrowed $18,000, some office space, and with one part-time assistant started the Yellow Pages ad agency, called Telephone Marketing Programs (later became known as TMP Worldwide). Through a steady stream of acquisitions the agency became the nation’s largest Yellow Pages national advertising agency with thousands of workers handling nearly a third of the national Yellow Pages ad business.

McKelvey has served as a Member of the Board of Directors of Yellow Pages Integrated Media Association. He served as Directors of the Yellow Pages Publishers … Association and the Association of Directory Marketing from 1994 through September 1996.

McKelvey was best known for transforming a fledgling Web site, the Monster Board, into one of the leading online jobsites. Monster.com. McKelvey was skeptical at first that the Web was going to be the future of job searches, but he eventually became convinced, bought Adion in 1995, and the Online Career Center (Monster’s larger rival at the timep) while invested heavily including buying Super Bowl ads that helped make Monster.com the popular first choice in the growing online job search world.

We’ll have more in an upcoming YP Talk article later this week.  But our condolences go out to his four children and six grandchildren.

About these ads