August is a big month for Dallas advertising executive Steve Dapper.

With the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro just under way, his Publicis Hawkeye agency has produced commercials for one of the official Olympic partners – Bridgestone, the world’s largest manufacturer of tire and rubber products.

And with the 2016-17 school year at Iowa State University, his alma mater, about to begin, a professor in the College of Business will become the first recipient of a fellowship Dapper created and funded.

Dapper – who was raised in Fort Dodge and graduated from St. Edmond High School in 1964 – reached a pinnacle of his 47-year career with the birthing and nurturing of his own advertising business that he named Hawkeye.

The irony of a faculty fellowship funded by the CEO of a company carrying the name of “that other school” in eastern Iowa is not lost on David Spalding, dean of the ISU College of Business. To him, Steve is a gift that keeps on giving.

“We compete in a global market for faculty,” Spalding said. “The Dapper Fellowship and others like it are critical to attracting and keeping great faculty members.

“Steve brings cutting edge advice to projecting and marketing the school. We need to appeal to the 16- to 20-year-olds who are prospective students, the way Steve is able to do with his company.”

Dapper has been a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council of the business college since 1987. He’s the second-longest serving member of the group of 22.

“I may be the only C student serving on the advisory council,” Dapper said with a laugh, in a recent interview.

The first faculty member to be named a Dapper Fellow is Sridhar Ramaswami, professor of marketing, and it takes effect when classes begin August 15. The fellowship is a stipend that adds to the salary of the professor, who works primarily in the field of marketing strategy, and is endowed for 10 years. Ramaswami said he has known Dapper’s “entrepreneurial work over the years and have been impressed with his ingenuity and creativity.”

Dapper is chairman and CEO of Publicis Hawkeye, based in Dallas, after a career that included CEO positions at the nation’s two largest direct marketing companies, Wunderman and Rapp Collins Worldwide in New York City, where he climbed the corporate advertising ladder straight out of Ames. He founded Hawkeye in 1999 above his garage in Bronxville, New York, with his beloved golden lab, Jessie, and moved it to Dallas in 2004.

Looking for a way to expand Hawkeye’s horizons, Dapper sold the agency to Publicis Groupe of Paris in 2014. The global advertising giant merged the company with its Dallas agency to form Publicis Hawkeye and asked Dapper to stay on as chairman and CEO. It has about 220 employees in Dallas and 100 in Hawkeye’s offices in Charlotte, Buffalo, Minneapolis and Vail, Colorado.

Dapper was born in Cedar Rapids to Helen and Gordon Dapper. After living in Faribault, Minnesota, for three years, the family moved into the Dodger Apartments at Sixth Avenue and 24th Street in Fort Dodge and Steve, then 9, started fourth grade at Corpus Christi School.

His father was a World War II Navy veteran who served on the USS Hornet when it was sunk by the Japanese in 1942, claiming 140 lives. In Fort Dodge, he was manager of the Sport Bowl but one day left the family – “dad disappeared out of everyone’s life,” Steve said – and his mother was left to raise Steve and his sister Mary Jo on her own. Steve spent a lot of time with the family of his best friend, then and now, Greg Sells – “they kind of adopted me” he said of Greg’s parents Lyle and Louise Sells.

Dapper channeled his energy toward sports. “I was no great athlete, but I played basketball and was a hurdler in track at St. Edmond. I knew how to jump over things,” he said. “Mom was awesome, a single woman in Fort Dodge trying to support two kids. It wasn’t easy.”

Sells, a track and basketball teammate, points out that Dapper set school records in the low and high hurdles.

“Steve and I considered ourselves ‘sprinters’ – didn’t really want to run out to the turkey farm and back each day (four miles roundtrip),” Sells recalled. “We did everything we could (e.g. tie and retie our shoes) to be the last to leave the school grounds for the run. The route went right by Steve’s apartment in the Dodger Apartments. We would detour at that point. Watch Bandstand and Johnny Carson (“Who Do You Trust”) and we’d keep one eye out for the team as they ran back to the school. After they passed we’d sneak out and then try and look exhausted as we returned to the school grounds. I hope the statute of limitations has passed so we don’t retroactively get in trouble.”

Growing up in Fort Dodge, Dapper said, “Somehow I always strived to succeed. It instilled the idea of friendship and family, good Midwestern values, that have driven everything I have done. Live your life well, care for other people.”

Both of Dapper’s parents have passed away – he got to say goodbye to his father at a VA Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the day he died in 1996. His mother died eight years ago. His sister lives in Marion, Iowa.

Dapper and his wife Phyllis, also an Iowa State graduate who he met when they worked at the Nugget Lodge in Aspen, Colorado, were married in 1968. After Steve graduated from Iowa State in 1969, he had two job offers. Neither appealed, so he decided to aim high and go to the world’s largest stage for advertising – New York City – to begin his career.

Nothing in the “How to Apply for Your First Job” textbook recommends the way he applied at the Dancer Fitzgerald and Sample agency: He sent a telegram out of the blue announcing when he would be there to interview.

“I sent a telegram to Dancer Fitzgerald saying I would be there on June 10 and that I would stop in and see you at 10 a.m.,” Dapper recalled. “So I arrived at their offices at 347 Madison Avenue. I said, ‘I’m Mr. Dapper, here to see Holly Smith.’ She came out of her office and replied, very facetiously, ‘Oh, we’ve been expecting you.'”

He was hired anyway – and in the “small world” department – got a chance to meet the chairman, Gordon Johnson, soon after starting work. The chairman, he learned, had played football at Cornell College in Iowa with Fort Dodger Lyle Sells.

Along the path of his corporate climb in New York ad agencies, Dapper detoured to start his own ad agency with friend Frank Henderson. They sold it to a Pittsburgh company in the late 1970s.

In 1999, he decided again to go out on his own – founding Hawkeye over his garage at his home in Bronxville, New York.

“I was working at Rapp Collins and everyone knew I loved Iowa, the Hawkeye State,” he said. “We needed a name, and Hawkeye made sense – the vision and velocity, making our mark on marketing by being more perceptive in what we saw. Hawkeye was the scout in The Last of the Mohicans – we were going to take our clients out of the morass.”

He bought a sales promotion company in Dallas in 2000 and moved the agency there in 2004. It grew to a company of more than 700 people when Dapper decided in 2014 to sell it – half to a software company in India and the other half to the global advertising giant Publicis Groupe of Paris.

Publicis Groupe merged the company with its Dallas agency to form Publicis Hawkeye. Eight years before the sale, Hawkeye did nothing in digital. Today, 65 percent of what it creates has a digital component such as building websites, creating mobile applications and targeted emails.

Publicis Hawkeye counts as clients such companies as Bridgestone, BASF, Cargill, T-Mobile, Tru Green, The North Face, American Airlines, Allstate, Peterbilt Trucks and Anheuser Busch.

Most of what Dapper did in the early stages of his career involved print and direct marketing advertising. Both remain important parts of his business today, but there’s increasing focus on digital and video – “we’re creating websites, and are doing films that run on YouTube and Facebook,” he said. “That’s what keeps me interested. We try to leverage creativity, data and technology – the trilogy of those coming together is the future of marketing.”

Dapper served for 15 years on the board of Direct Marketing Association, which represents 15,000 member companies, and was its chairman of the board two years. He is a frequent speaker on the future of direct marketing and technology’s effect on today’s consumers. Dallas Magazine named him one of the 500 top business executives in Dallas in 2015.

When he’s not working, Dapper collects coins, and any baseball cards that have Duke Snider on them; he has a whole set of cards from 1955.

His daughter, Amanda, 39, is married to Teo Ferreira and they have a daughter, Raquel, who is 4. They live in Miami Beach, Florida. Dapper’s daughter, Elizabeth, 36, is now working for Publicis Hawkeye in experiential sports marketing group on accounts such as The North Face and Anheuser Busch. His wife Phyllis’ mother, Dorothy Carlson, is 102 and lives in a retirement home in Omaha.

Dapper was one of 10 advertising leaders nationwide who contributed a chapter to the book, “Inside the Minds: The Art of Advertising.” His message was simple: “A Few True Golden Rules – Be current, be curious and never stop listening.”

“I am still curious – curiosity has always driven me, why people buy things and why people react,” he said. “At Hawkeye, everyone is treated as family. We try to have good communications. We stress the value of friendship, the value of team.”