Gordon Stevens, who has died aged 93, was chairman of the advertising group WPP after a high-flying international career with Unilever.

Stevens was director of marketing for the Anglo-Dutch frozen foods and household products conglomerate, controlling a vast global advertising budget, and subsequently chairman of Unilever US, based in New York.

In that role he was asked in 1987 whether he would endorse a hostile takeover bid for J Walter Thompson, the world’s third largest ad agency, by WPP – then a little-known start-up founded by former Saatchi & Saatchi director Martin Sorrell.

Stevens’s response was that although JWT’s creative work was celebrated, its internal problems were well known – and if WPP could sort them out, the bid had his support. Despite, by one account, “intense anti-British sentiment and lawsuits flying”, the bid prevailed, marking the beginning of WPP’s rise through multiple acquisitions to become a global advertising player.

Having retired from Unilever in 1988, Stevens took on other boardroom roles before becoming chairman of WPP in 1992 – succeeding the Madison Avenue legend David Ogilvy, whose own firm had also fallen to a hostile WPP bid and who once called Sorrell “an odious little jerk”.

Stevens, by contrast, respected Sorrell’s entrepreneurial drive and acumen, while Sorrell called Stevens “a very fair man who loved the business, loved people and through his [Unilever] experience was extremely knowledgeable … an excellent and challenging non-executive chairman”.

When WPP’s shares were in low water early in Stevens’s tenure, he defended Sorrell robustly against disgruntled shareholders at the company’s AGM; the share price duly recovered and multiplied.