Len Sirowitz, an award-winning promoting artwork director whose inventive work within the Sixties included memorable print adverts for the Volkswagen Beetle — like one declaring, “Ugly is barely skin-deep” — and a marketing campaign for Mobil wherein a automobile was dropped off a 10-story constructing to make a degree concerning the perils of dashing, died on March 4 at his residence in Manhattan. He was 91.
His daughter, Laura Sirowitz, confirmed the loss of life.
Mr. Sirowitz joined the influential Doyle Dane Bernbach promoting company, referred to as DDB, in 1959, at 27, and spent the following 11 years on the agency conceiving the look of adverts for quite a few accounts with wit and keenness.
“It was fairly early in my profession that I started to comprehend that my message wanted to not solely be daring and daring, however it should stem from the reality … and contact individuals’s feelings,” he instructed Dave Dye, who runs the promoting weblog From the Loft, in 2015.
Volkswagen was maybe Mr. Sirowitz’s most essential 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?” wherein they positioned a Beetle turned on its roof, like a lifeless bug. The reply to the query: “By no means.” (Although, after a couple of photographs 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 pressured the benefit with which house owners might discover components.
For Sara Lee, Mr. Sirowitz and Mr. Levenson created a TV business wherein individuals handled annoyances like haircuts and site visitors jams, then consoled themselves with a bit of the corporate’s cake, introducing a soon-to-be enduring jingle: “All people doesn’t like one thing / However no one doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
For Mobil’s public service newspaper and TV adverts about freeway security, Mr. Sirowitz illustrated how crashing at 60 miles per hour would have the identical influence as a automobile dropping from 10 tales. “And it’ll get you to precisely the identical place — the morgue,” the narrator mentioned.
One other TV advert for Mobil confirmed a pair canoodling in a automobile as the person drives towards the blinding lights of oncoming site visitors, ultimately 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 similar time.”
And for the Higher Imaginative and prescient Institute, an affiliation of lens and body producers, Mr. Sirowitz produced dozens of promotions that ran in Life journal persuading individuals to have their eyes examined extra typically. One notably dramatic advert ran in all-black with copy by Leon Meadows studying, “That is how yellow daisies in a inexperienced pasture towards a blue sky look to many Individuals.”
Bob Isherwood, a former worldwide inventive director of Saatchi & Saatchi, referred to as Mr. Sirowitz a “hero artwork director” for his circulate of recent concepts and totally different approaches.
“It was simply an concept that he placed on the web page,” he mentioned in a cellphone interview. “While you see adverts like that you simply assume, ‘Oh, God, I want I had completed 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 Artwork College students League of New York in Manhattan at age 12 and, two years later, his acceptance to the Excessive Faculty of Music and Artwork (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia Excessive Faculty of Music & Artwork and Performing Arts). There, he met his future spouse, Myrna Florman, a music pupil referred to as Mickey, when he was 17 and she or he was 14.
Mr. Sirowitz graduated in 1953 from the Pratt Institute, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in promoting. He spent the following two years within the Military, 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 Military discharge, Mr. Sirowitz labored on the L.W. Frohlich pharmaceutical advert company in addition to Gray Promoting, CBS and Channel 13, the general public TV station in New York.
Along with working for DDB’s business shoppers like Sony, the place Mr. Sirowitz created a whimsical marketing campaign primarily based 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 Nationwide Committee for a Sane Nuclear Coverage confirmed a cockroach towards a white background with the headline: “The Winner of World Warfare III.”
One other advert in 1968, for the Coalition for a Democratic Various, carried, in large letters, the headline “For what?” Under it, textual content by Dave Reider, a copywriter, described the hopelessness of the Vietnam Warfare, 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 through the years.) By then he had been voted artwork director of the 12 months for 1968 and 1970 in nationwide polls by Advert Weekly. He was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1985.
His company’s shoppers included Swissair, McDonald’s, Smith Corona and Royal Caribbean Cruises. Nonetheless, in 1995, the agency closed after shedding a number of accounts, and Mr. Sirowitz joined the company Ryan Drossman & Companions as vice chairman.
He quickly retired and returned to the Artwork College students League, the place he drew large-format, charcoal nude portraits 4 days every week till the beginning of the pandemic.
“I attempt for daring, dramatic interpretations of the mannequin’s pose, drawn with spontaneous sweeping strains, and most significantly it must be a part of a powerful, well-designed composition,” he instructed the establishment’s journal, Lines from the League, in its 2012-13 situation.
His composition model got here by way of clearly in his advert campaigns, together with one in 1991 for America West Airways, wherein he solid the improvisational comic Jonathan Winters — wanting robust and sporting camouflage — in a parody of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had just lately commanded U.S. troops within the Gulf Warfare.
The advert declared, “Saying Air Superiority for Civilians,” and supplied airfares discounted by as much as 40 %.
The marketing campaign, nevertheless, was rebuked by the group Veterans of Overseas 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 Related Press. “America West is the smallest of the most important airways. We needed to do to the type of promoting that might put them on the map in a single fell swoop.”
