EGN NEWS DESK
Len Sirowitz, an award-winning promoting artwork director whose inventive work within the Sixties included memorable print advertisements for the Volkswagen Beetle — like one declaring, “Ugly is barely skin-deep” — and a marketing campaign for Mobil through which a automobile was dropped off a 10-story constructing to make a degree concerning the perils of dashing, died on March 4 at his house in Manhattan. He was 91.
His daughter, Laura Sirowitz, confirmed the dying.
Mr. Sirowitz joined the influential Doyle Dane Bernbach promoting company, generally known as DDB, in 1959, at 27, and spent the subsequent 11 years on the agency conceiving the look of advertisements for quite a few accounts with wit and fervour.
“It was fairly early in my profession that I started to comprehend that my message wanted to not solely be daring and daring, but it surely should stem from the reality … and contact folks’s feelings,” he instructed Dave Dye, who runs the promoting weblog From the Loft, in 2015.
Volkswagen was maybe Mr. Sirowitz’s most necessary account, and the homely Beetle, nicknamed the “Bug,” was his and copywriter Robert Levenson’s automotive muse. Their collaborations for the German automobile maker included the advert “Will We Ever Kill the Bug?” through which they positioned a Beetle turned on its roof, like a dead bug. The reply to the query: “Never.” (Though, after a couple of pictures of the automobile, its roof collapsed.)
The pair additionally devised an advert that confirmed a motley Beetle constructed of inexperienced and beige fenders, a blue hood and a turquoise door, which have been cobbled collectively from fashions between 1958 and 1964. The advert harassed the convenience with which house owners may discover elements.
For Sara Lee, Mr. Sirowitz and Mr. Levenson created a TV industrial through which folks handled annoyances like haircuts and visitors jams, then consoled themselves with a bit of the corporate’s cake, introducing a soon-to-be enduring jingle: “Everybody doesn’t like one thing / But no one doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
For Mobil’s public service newspaper and TV advertisements about freeway security, Mr. Sirowitz illustrated how crashing at 60 miles per hour would have the identical impression as a automobile dropping from 10 tales. “And it’ll get you to precisely the identical place — the morgue,” the narrator stated.
Another TV advert for Mobil confirmed a pair canoodling in a automobile as the person drives towards the blinding lights of oncoming visitors, finally resulting in a crash. A narrator says: “We at Mobil promote gasoline and oil. We’re in favor of driving and love, however not on the identical time.”
And for the Better Vision Institute, an affiliation of lens and body producers, Mr. Sirowitz produced dozens of promotions that ran in Life journal persuading folks to have their eyes examined extra typically. One notably dramatic advert ran in all-black with copy by Leon Meadows studying, “This is how yellow daisies in a inexperienced pasture towards a blue sky look to many Americans.”
Bob Isherwood, a former worldwide inventive director of Saatchi & Saatchi, referred to as Mr. Sirowitz a “hero artwork director” for his move of contemporary concepts and totally different approaches.
“It was simply an concept that he placed on the web page,” he stated in a telephone interview. “When you see advertisements like that you simply assume, ‘Oh, God, I want I had performed that.’”
Leonard Sirowitz was born on June 25, 1932, in Brooklyn. His father, Abraham Sirowitz, immigrated from Ukraine in 1905 and held numerous jobs, together with taxi driver and jewellery polisher. His mom, Sadie (Schoenwetter) Sirowitz, ran the house.
Mr. Sirowitz’s ardour for drawing led to research on the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan at age 12 and, two years later, his acceptance to the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts). There, he met his future spouse, Myrna Florman, a music scholar generally known as Mickey, when he was 17 and he or she was 14.
Mr. Sirowitz graduated in 1953 from the Pratt Institute, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in promoting. He spent the subsequent two years within the Army, principally at Fort Dix in New Jersey, and he married Miss Florman throughout his service in January 1955. She survives him, alongside along with his daughter; a son, Michael; and one grandson.
After his Army discharge, Mr. Sirowitz labored on the L.W. Frohlich pharmaceutical advert company in addition to Grey Advertising, CBS and Channel 13, the general public TV station in New York.
In addition to working for DDB’s industrial purchasers like Sony, the place Mr. Sirowitz created a whimsical marketing campaign based mostly on the portability of its four-inch-wide TV, he additionally took on political causes as a volunteer.
A full-page newspaper advert in 1965 for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy confirmed a cockroach towards a white background with the headline: “The Winner of World War III.”
Another advert in 1968, for the Coalition for a Democratic Alternative, carried, in large letters, the headline “For what?” Below it, textual content by Dave Reider, a copywriter, described the hopelessness of the Vietnam War, demanded that President Lyndon B. Johnson step down and argued for Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to be the Democratic nominee for president.
Mr. Sirowitz was DDB’s senior vp and affiliate inventive director when he left in 1970 to type his personal company, Harper Rosenfeld Sirowitz as co-chairman and co-creative director. (It was renamed quite a few occasions over time.) By then he had been voted artwork director of the yr for 1968 and 1970 in nationwide polls by Ad Weekly. He was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1985.
His company’s purchasers included Swissair, McDonald’s, Smith Corona and Royal Caribbean Cruises. Still, in 1995, the agency closed after dropping a number of accounts, and Mr. Sirowitz joined the company Ryan Drossman & Partners as vice chairman.
He quickly retired and returned to the Art Students League, the place he drew large-format, charcoal nude portraits 4 days per week till the beginning of the pandemic.
“I try for daring, dramatic interpretations of the mannequin’s pose, drawn with spontaneous sweeping strains, and most significantly it ought to be a part of a robust, well-designed composition,” he instructed the establishment’s journal, Lines from the League, in its 2012-13 challenge.
His composition model got here by means of clearly in his advert campaigns, together with one in 1991 for America West Airlines, through which he solid the improvisational comic Jonathan Winters — trying powerful and carrying camouflage — in a parody of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had not too long ago commanded U.S. troops within the Gulf War.
The advert declared, “Announcing Air Superiority for Civilians,” and supplied airfares discounted by as much as 40 %.
The marketing campaign, nonetheless, was rebuked by the group Veterans of Foreign Wars for being in poor style, and America West quickly after filed for Chapter 11 chapter safety.
“To me, nice promoting ought to make your palms sweat,” Mr. Sirowitz instructed The Associated Press. “America West is the smallest of the foremost airways. We needed to do to the type of promoting that might put them on the map in a single fell swoop.”
