Gossage.

Gossage. Gossage. Gossage. Of the many people I revere, Howard Gossage maintains a special role. His ideas and attitude and insight gave me hope when I was considering leaving "sales" for "marketing." Oddly enough, when I 'arrived' in 'advertising', I found a group of people who, for the large part, hadn't heard of Gossage. And it showed. In many aspects of their execution and realization. The beauty of Gossage was that he spent time with people -- he wandered amongst the masses and accrued the similarities rather than collecting the miniscule practical diffferences.

Here's an excellent site on the man, put together by Meenakshi Gautam, who seems to have been an advertising student at the time.