THE MEDIA BARONS.(Jack Klues of Starcom)

JACK KLUES

Starcom's chief executive may have established the brand in the US but he still has global goals.

In 1967 Leo Burnett gathered together the staff from his Chicago agency and delivered a speech called "When to take my name off the door." It was a speech about principles. Burnett was determined that the agency he founded in 1935 must always stick to his fervent business philosophy for as long as his moniker hung above the door. And he warned that if ever the agency troops "start giving lip service to this being a creative agency and stop really being one", then his spirit would materialise to rub out his name from every single floor in the Chicago agency.

So perhaps it's not surprising that in the past three years Leo's name has been rubbed from seven of the 20-odd floors of his Chicago flagship. Because almost a third of the gleaming riverside headquarters is now in the business of media, not creative. And the Leo Burnett name has made way for a new one: Starcom.

But it's unlikely that the launch of Starcom will have troubled Leo's ghost much. While other media operations have hacked hungrily at the umbilical tying them to their creative agency, Starcom still sucks from the Burnett teat.

Jack Klues, Starcom's chief executive, but wearing his Burnett Lifer badge with pride, has music for the ears of the lean, mean media independents. "We didn't form Starcom to see how fast we could grow our media business or contribute to revenues to the holding company. It was formed to ensure a superior media service to the full-service clients of the Leo Burnett company."

Don't pinch yourself. You haven't been transported back to the mid-80s, when such statements might have been rather more commonplace. Considering we're in the 21st century, this could possibly be the least ambitious mission statement ever crafted by a media company. It's certainly got some of the newer Starcom blood outside the US homeland grinding their molars in frustration. Anyone born into a more aggressive media environment might well find Klues' conservatism regressive. "Our connectivity to the brand agency is a big part of our competitive advantage and we would be foolish to walk away from that," he says, though in truth Klues never actually says things. He asks. His sentences lilt like questions, soaring upwards at the end. You wonder whether to answer.