Ads, Magazine Covers Icon Dies at 91 – Billboard

George Lois, the hard-selling, charismatic promoting man and designer who customary a few of the most daring journal pictures of the Nineteen Sixties and popularized such catchphrases and model names as “I Want My MTV” and “Lean Cuisine,” has died. He was 91.

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Lois’ son, the photographer Luke Lois, stated he died “peacefully” Friday (Nov. 18) at his residence in Manhattan.

Nicknamed the “Golden Greek” and later (to his displeasure) an “Original Mad Man,” George Lois was amongst a wave of advertisers who launched the “Creative Revolution” that jolted Madison Avenue and the world past within the late Nineteen Fifties and ’60s. He was boastful and provocative, keen and in a position to offend, and was a grasp of discovering simply the fitting picture or phrases to seize a second or create a requirement.

His Esquire journal covers, from Muhammad Ali posing because the martyr Saint Sebastian to Andy Warhol sinking in a sea of Campbell’s tomato soup, outlined the hyper spirit of the ’60s as a lot as Norman Rockwell’s idealized drawings for the Saturday Evening Post summoned an earlier period. As an advert man, he devised breakthrough methods for Xerox and (*91*)’s and helped an rising music video channel within the Nineteen Eighties by suggesting advertisements that includes Mick Jagger and different rock stars demanding, with mock-petulance, “I Want My MTV!”

Lois boiled it all the way down to what he referred to as the “Big Idea,” crystallizing “the unique virtues of a product and searing it into people’s minds.” He was inducted into quite a few promoting and visible arts halls of fame, and in 2008 his Esquire work was added to the everlasting assortment of the Museum of Modern Art. Martin Scorsese, Tina Brown and Graydon Carter have been amongst his admirers.

His legacy was huge, though the precise dimensions are disputed. His claims to growing the Nineteen Sixties “I Want My Maypo” breakfast advertisements and to inspiring the creation of New York journal have been extensively contradicted. Some former Esquire colleagues would allege that he exaggerated his function at the expense of different contributors, similar to Carl Fischer, who photographed most of the journal’s well-known covers. But his overpowering power and confidence have been nicely recorded.

In her memoir Basic Black, former USA Today writer Cathie Black recalled bringing in Lois within the early Nineteen Eighties to suggest a brand new promoting strategy for a publication that struggled at first over easy methods to determine itself. Lois’ thought was to champion USA Today’s twin enchantment as a newspaper and journal, proposing the slogan, “A lot of people are saying USA Today is neither fish nor fowl. They’re right!” Before a gathering of the publication’s, together with founder Al Neuharth, Lois gave an Oscar-worthy efficiency, Black wrote, “bounding in like a 6-foot-3 teenager hopped up on Red Bull.”

“He flung his jacket to the floor, tore off his tie, then flashed one prototype ad after another, prancing around the room and keeping up a running monologue sprinkled with jokes and profanity. It was epic, almost scary. I was thrilled. When he was finished, the room sat absolutely silent.” All eyes turned to Neuharth, who sat “absolutely still, his expression hidden behind his dark aviator glasses.” Neuharth paused, eliminated his glasses and smiled. “We’ve got it,” he stated.

Lois’ longtime spouse, Rosemary Lewandowski Lois, died in September. A son, Harry Joseph Lois, died in 1978.

Lois, the son of Greek immigrants, was born in New York City in 1931 and would cite the racism of his Irish neighborhood for his drive “to awaken, to disturb, to protest.” He preferred to say {that a} profitable advertiser absorbed as many influences as attainable, and he prided himself on his data of every thing from sports activities to ballet. He was a compulsive drawer and for a lot of his life made weekly visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He enrolled in Pratt Institute, quickly met his future spouse and eloped together with her earlier than both had graduated. After serving within the Army throughout the Korean War, he joined the promoting and promotion division of CBS and in 1960 helped discovered the promoting company Papert Koenig Lois. Two years later he was recruited by Esquire editor Harold Hayes and remained till 1972, the identical 12 months Hayes left.

Esquire was a primary venue for the so-called New Journalism of the Nineteen Sixties, nonfiction tales with a literary strategy, and the journal would publish such celebrated items as Gay Talese’s portrait of Frank Sinatra and Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” But to learn the phrases, you had to purchase the journal, and Lois’ covers launched numerous conversations.

For a canopy story on “The New American Woman,” he featured a unadorned mannequin folded right into a rubbish can. A infamous 1970 cowl confirmed a grinning Lt. William Calley, the serviceman later discovered responsible of murdering unarmed civilians within the My Lai Massacre, along with his arms round a pair of Vietnamese youngsters, two different children behind him.

In the mid-Nineteen Seventies, Lois was among the many public figures who led efforts to free the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter from jail. Carter’s conviction for homicide was later overturned, and he was launched in 1985. Lois additionally wrote a number of books and was featured within the 2014 documentary about Esquire titled Smiling Through the Apocalypse.

Interest in Lois was renewed via the recognition of the AMC collection Mad Men, however he was not flattered, writing in his ebook Damn Good Advice that the present was “nothing more than a soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up martinis, and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising.”

“Besides,” he added, “when I was in my 30s, I was better-looking than Don Draper.”

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