The irony of Mike Burns’s battle with Kevin Roberts is that they believe in many of the same things; they just use different words. Burns talks about Cheerios as if it were, well, a Lovemark. “Cheerios is about the circle of life,” Burns says, dressed in sandals and tanned from a weekend at his Hamptons house. He’s got classic Irish features—reddish-blonde hair, a ruddy complexion—and looks younger than his 48 years. “It’s the first finger food you eat when you’re 2, and it’s maybe the last food you eat when you’re 72 because it’s great for your heart.”

Burns tries to get comfortable on his couch, then stands up. “My lawyer is having a fit that I’m even talking to you,” he says. He is severely limited in what he can divulge about his departure from Saatchi because of the pending lawsuit. What he will say is that he loved General Mills. “They have these incredibly sophisticated and competitive marketing people,” he says. “Think about the categories they’re in. Basically, it’s a grain company, whether breakfast cereals or Hamburger Helper or granola bars. It’s all flour. Their ability to create consumer value and brand distinctions is unparalleled.”

Burns is the first white-collar professional from a Bronx family of cops and firemen and city schoolteachers. After graduating from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he landed at Dancer Fitzgerald. A year after starting, Burns had a heart attack at age 24. He was out of work for two months. “One of the things that really motivated me was a feeling I could never catch up from that,” says Burns. “I didn’t take a vacation for years.”

Around the time Burns returned from medical leave, 60 Minutes had just done a segment damning the food industry, including cereal makers, for the impact of sugar on kids. General Mills thought a product called Honey Nut Cheerios might appeal to the health-conscious mom. The idea was that honey and nuts had a more wholesome image than sugar, says Burns. To any kid growing up in the eighties, the Honey Nut Cheerios honeybee rivaled Cap’n Crunch for Saturday-morning ubiquity. By the end of the eighties, Brandweek had named Honey Nut Cheerios the “emerging brand of the decade.” Now it’s the country’s second-best-selling cereal, after original Cheerios.

In 1988, Burns and his colleagues created Kid Connection, a division within Dancer Fitzgerald. The thinking (then novel, now practiced by everyone) was that ads could target kids—the real purchasing decision-makers—not moms. The group employed child psychologists and anthropologists. Today, it still exists within Saatchi as the largest children’s-advertising resource in the business.

Burns and his crew had survived the purchase of Dancer Fitzgerald by Saatchi & Saatchi and the dumping of Maurice and Charles Saatchi. Then came Kevin Roberts.

From the wardrobe and the sermons alone, it was clear from Roberts’s first meeting with Saatchi’s New York office that a change agent was in the house. “This might be Saatchi & Saatchi, but its roots were still in the Wasp school of advertising,” says a longtime Saatchi staffer. “You never heard a curse word, you were as kind to the janitor as you were to the account executive. A lot of people were going, ‘What the hell is this man talking about?’ ”

Roberts’s first major initiative was to focus more on Procter & Gamble, the client he knew well. P&G was 30 percent of Saatchi’s American billing, and it represented an even larger share of Saatchi’s global revenue than General Mills. Still, in New York, General Mills had always been the star client. Roberts gave a series of presentations in 1998 stating that P&G was to become a top priority.

“It was, ‘If you work on P&G, you’ll get what you need,’ ” says a longtime Saatchi staffer who is agnostic in the Roberts-Burns feud. “Suddenly, if people on P&G said, ‘I need a new computer,’ you got a new computer. If you needed something that would have you do better at your job, you got it overnight. The effect was that General Mills wasn’t the only kid on the block that could strut its stuff.”

Inevitably, a rivalry developed between the General Mills and P&G cliques. Up-and-comers at the agency no longer automatically gravitated to Burns and his GM team. “People wanted to work on P&G because they knew they would get access to Kevin,” says a former Saatchi executive with no allegiance to either Burns or Roberts. “If you were on P&G, you could go to Kevin and say, ‘We need people on Oil of Olay or we’re going to lose it,’ and he’d put an army on it. On General Mills, he’d shrug and say, ‘Talk to Mike.’ But there was always a smaller profit margin on P&G because Kevin just threw resources at it until the goal was reached.” Roberts calls the profit-margin claim “nonsense.” “In the eight years I’ve been here, we’ve had our best people on General Mills. I didn’t get one call from the client saying they were underserved. Why would they have hired us to do Pillsbury in 2001 if they thought they were underserved?”