Andrew McKelvey

Andrew McKelvey (October 13, 1934 – November 27, 2008) was an American business mogul and former chairman and chief executive of Monster Worldwide. He was a billionaire and a philanthropist through the McKelvey Foundation.

As a 14-year-old, McKelvey started a business in southern New Jersey, buying eggs from a farmer and reselling them to area residents for an additional ten cents per dozen.

McKelvey graduated from Westminster College in Pennsylvania. The Westminster College campus center is named in his honor.

After graduating from college, he operated a movie theater and served in the United States Army. After leaving the Army, he headed to Australia in the mid-1950s, where he hoped he could take advantage of the lag in social trends reaching that part of the world. While there, he began a jukebox business that became one of that country's largest.

He returned to the United States in the early 1960s, and took a job with an ad agency on Madison Avenue, promoting products including Vaseline Hair Tonic. At another agency, Meltzer, Aron & Lemen, he managed an account of a client that advertised in the Yellow Pages, which triggered the idea of pursuing the opportunity of advertising in telephone directories.

In 1967, he founded Telephone Marketing Programs (TMP) as an ad agency focusing on the Yellow Pages ad agency, and built the firm up through a series of acquisitions. The business expanded into help-wanted agencies in the 1990s, which provided his introduction into commerce online. In negotiating to purchase Adion, a help-wanted ad agency run by Jeff Taylor, he learned about the firm's Web site, known as the Monster Board. He purchased Adion in 1995 and eventually bought into the Internet strategy. He further solidified the prominence of Monster.com by acquiring rivals Online Career Center and FlipDog.com. Telephone Marketing Programs (TMP) was later known as TMP Worldwide, and eventually becoming Monster Worldwide. By 2007, the firm had more than 5,000 employees in 36 countries and had revenue of $1.35 billion.

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