In 1995, Laurel Cutler was the first woman to be honored as the advertising industry "Man of the Year,” following in the footsteps of Martin Puris, CEO Ammirati & Puris; Allen Rosenshine, CEO BBDO; Jack Bowen, retired CEO of DMB&B, to name only a few winners.
Cutler is a Director at Foote, Cone & Belding Communications, Inc., the largest agency in the United States, where she was a member of the Management Board, Executive Vice President and Global Director of Marketing Planning, and also Vice Chairman of FCB/Leber Katz Partners. She joined Leber Katz Partners in 1972 to establish the Marketing Planning function, dedicated to building the brands that preempt the future. The department develops systematic assumptions about the consumer marketplace five years out. Six Future Focuses, accurately anticipating where the consumer is going, helped clients develop new products, new services, and new businesses worth over 2.8 billion dollars in sales in 1993.
In November of 1988, she was appointed a corporate officer of Chrysler Corporation, a Marketing Planning client since 1985. Cutler was chosen because of her "outstanding record in forecasting future trends in the marketplace" said Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca. While it was exhilarating to hold down senior management posts in two New York Stock Exchange companies, it was also exhausting so she resigned her post at Chrysler at the end of 1991.
Before joining LKP, Cutler was for eight years, Senior Vice President, Creative Director and a Director of the company at McCann-Erickson. In 1985 she was named advertising “Woman of the Year.” In November 1990, she was named one of the fifty most powerful women in America by the Ladies' Home Journal; one of the ten seminal thinkers of the 1980's by Fortune Magazine along with Walter Wriston, Peter Lynch, Milton Friedman, William Woodside, Peter Drucker, William E. Simon, T. Boone Pickens, Bruce Wasserstein, Benjamin Rosen, and Dr. Roy Vagelos. That was also the year she received the Wellesley College Alumni Achievement Award on the same day her first grandchild was born.
Cutler serves on the Board of True North Communications Inc. (the parent of Foote Cone & Belding), Quaker State, and Hannaford Brothers, Northern New England's largest supermarket group. She is also on the Advisory Committee on Public Issues to the Advertising Council and the Board of Directors of the Advertising Education Foundation.
Laurel has remarried and is focused on her husband and family, as well as opera and theatre and movies and books. She finally managed to retire from work and collect contemporary art instead.