George Lois, Esq: A true Mad Man.

George Lois succinctly summed up the inevitable paradox of the Pop Art movement. That it would become such an integral part of the very culture it was celebrating & would eventually be forced to feed on its own entrails.It’s essentially the same syndrome that ate away at The Simpsons from within.




George Lois is the original Mad Man of Madison Avenue. Credited with inspiring the Donald Draper character in MAD MEN, he protests the comparison & detests the“no-talent sons of bitches in that stupid TV show walking around smoking & drinking & womanising..." Or so he says, in an interview in the current Autumn/Winter Edition of Men's Style magazine, as he peddles his new book of industry aphorisms, Damn Good Advice. He’s responsible for some of the most talked about campaigns in the history of advertising. In an industry where success is measured not by how far your ad pushes the envelope but how much product it moves off the shelf, Lois’ best ad campaigns are all the better for actually being about the product. Having developed the now infamous Volkswagen 'ThinkSmall' campaign, George Lois proudly professes that it shone so brightly not because it turned advertising conventions on their head, but because it successfully “sold a Nazi car in a Jewish town, just 14 years after World War 2.” The campaign even got a nod in the third ever episode of MAD MEN, in which Don Draper decries the whole thing: “I don’t know what I hate about it the most… the ad or the car.”

Most people incorrectly recall this cover as depicting Marilyn Monroe. Both she and Jane Mansfield declined, leaving Italian actress Virna Lisi to make the face that made history. “The movement wanted liberation from women’s typical roles. Like any Greek male, I wondered where it would take us.” Far from being a simply humorous gender reversal, the image questioned female standards of the male roles that liberated women were increasingly seeking. In a single snapshot, it asked the same thing as the article inside: to what extent had the glass ceiling acted as a lens, distorting the vision that American women had for their future?

One thing George Lois and Donald Draper can both agree on is they “sell products, not advertising.” So says Draper in the season 2 finale, but you can guess that Lois said it first. Having said that, Lois also acknowledges the power of advertising to both transcend its product & transform the public perception of what makes it The Best in its range:

“Every instinct told me that great advertising, in and of itself, actually becomes a benefit of the product! And I can prove it: great advertising can make food taste better, cars ride smoother, and a suit fit better.”

Far from the age old adage that advertising works by somehow ‘duping’ our subconscious via a rationalized manipulation of our heartstrings, this comment suggests the sublimated opposite: that humanity has an inherent attraction to innovative ideas, and that we collectively & commercially reward brands associated with new kinds of creativity.

This cover was taken a year after Muhammad Ali’s Heavyweight Championship title was revoked for his refusing the Vietnam draft. Posed depicting Castagno’s martyrdom of St Sebastian, Lois had to talk Ali (and his priest) into portraying a classically Christian image. More than that, it says something about our simultaneous celebration/condemnation of celebrity persecution. We further applaud our public heroes for overcoming whatever hurdles may fall before them, whether or not that same public has been implicit in laying them down.

What George Lois is most recognized for, however, is the 92 front covers he made for Esquire magazine between 1962-72, For his first cover, he went against 10 to 1 odds and called the upcoming heavyweight world championship in favour of Sonny Liston. When he turned out to be right, Esquire was all of a sudden the darling of the news stand, with circulation skyrocketing fourfold. A year later, he used Sonny Liston for the cover again, giving American culture its first black Santa. The irony that Liston had done time for armed robbery was lost on neither George Lois, nor the American public. Controversy was certainly a calling card for these covers, but it wasn’t the only quill in Lois’ quiver. This new outlet allowed Lois to cut back on the typical clutter of body copy & the obligation to include a picture of the product. Here, he could focus on The Big Idea as a single moment, clashing society's images together, playing with paradox in ironic ways . It is a testament to George Lois’ work that it is seen as beyond advertising & publishing, with 32 posters from the collection now housed permanently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So strong was his ability to sum up a conflicting issue, with a controversial cover, to sell a contemplative article, that they have become more than mere images of icons, but iconic images unto themselves.

September 1965’s ‘crosshair’ cover perfectly points out the violent fracturing of the postmodern age; Lois celebrated other media in his magazine covers, toting the repeated power of a broadcast image; the role of TV becoming increasingly important to politics- Nixon tended to win publicity polls on radio debates, but television viewers preferred Kennedy; George Lois getting his Don Draper on, whether he likes it or not.

George Lois received MTV's Best Music Video of 1983 for this Bob Dylan clip, quite fitting considering he'd coined the successful 'I Want My MTV'  campaign for them a year earlier. Inspired by the fact that almost every line contains a Biblical reference, Lois found ways to weave in more than 500 years of art history. The abstract relation between image & text reveals what is going on in Lois mind's when his creativity is let off the advertising leash a little.


/mr_metaphor.