Len Sirowitz, whose bold, unusual ads conquered an era, dies at 91
Len Sirowitz, an award-winning advertising art director whose creative work in the 1960s included memorable print ads for the Volkswagen Beetle—such as one who declared, “Ugly is only skin deep”—and a campaign for Mobil that featured a car building to make a point about the dangers of speeding, died on March 4 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.
His daughter, Laura Sirowitz, confirmed the death.
Mr. Sirowitz joined the influential advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, better known as DDB, in 1959 at the age of 27 and spent the next eleven years at the company devising the look of advertisements for numerous accounts with humor and passion.
““It was quite early in my career that I began to realize that my message not only had to be bold and audacious, but also had to come from the truth… and touch people’s emotions,” he told Dave Dye, who manages the advertising blog. From the atticin 2015.
Volkswagen was perhaps Mr. Sirowitz’s most important account, and the homely Beetle, nicknamed the “Beetle,” was his and copywriter Robert Levenson’s automotive muse. Their collaborations for the German automaker include the ad “Will We Ever Kill the Bug?” in which they placed a beetle on his roof, like a dead beetle. The answer to the question: “Never.” (Although after a few photos of the car the roof collapsed.)
The pair also devised an ad that featured a colorful Beetle made from green and beige fenders, a blue hood and a turquoise door, pieced together from models between 1958 and 1964. The ad highlighted the ease with which owners could source parts find.
For Sara Lee, Mr. Sirowitz and Mr. Levenson created a TV commercial in which people dealt with annoyances like haircuts and traffic jams, then consoled themselves with a piece of the company’s pie, introducing a soon-to-be permanent jingle: ” Everybody doesn’t like something / But nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
For Mobil’s public newspaper and TV ads on highway safety, Mr. Sirowitz how a crash at 60 miles per hour would have the same impact as a car falling from ten floors. “And it takes you to the exact same place: the morgue,” the narrator said.
Another TV ad for Mobil showed a couple riding in a car as the man drove into the blinding lights of oncoming traffic, ultimately leading to an accident. A narrator says: “We at Mobil sell gasoline and oil. We are for driving and love, but not at the same time.”
And for the Better Vision Institute, an association of lens and frame manufacturers, Mr. Sirowitz produced dozens of promotions that appeared in Life magazine to convince people to get their eyes examined more often. One particularly dramatic ad was shown entirely in black with text from Leon Meadows that read: “This is what yellow daisies in a green meadow against a blue sky look like to many Americans.”
Bob Isherwood, former global creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi, called Mr. Sirowitz a “hero art director” for his flow of fresh ideas and different approaches.
“It was just an idea he put on the page,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you see ads like that, you think, ‘Oh God, I wish I had done that.'”
Leonard Sirowitz was born on June 25, 1932 in Brooklyn. His father, Abraham Sirowitz, emigrated from Ukraine in 1905 and held various jobs, including taxi driver and jewelry polisher. His mother, Sadie (Schoenwetter) Sirowitz, managed the home.
Mr. Sirowitz’s passion for drawing led to studies at the age of 12 at the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan and two years later to his admission to the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art). arts and performing arts). There he met his future wife, Myrna Florman, a music student known as Mickey, when he was 17 and she was 14.
Mr. Sirowitz graduated from Pratt Institute in 1953, where he received a bachelor’s degree in advertising. He spent the next two years in the Army, mainly at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and he married Miss Florman while serving in January 1955. She survives him, along with his daughter; a son, Michael; and one grandson.
After his discharge from the Army, Mr. Sirowitz worked at the pharmaceutical advertising agency LW Frohlich and at Gray Advertising, CBS and Channel 13, the New York public television station.
In addition to his work for DDB’s commercial clients, such as Sony, where Mr. Sirowitz created a whimsical campaign based on the portability of the 4-inch TV, he also volunteered for political causes.
A full-page newspaper ad from 1965 for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy showed a cockroach against a white background with the headline: “The Winner of World War III.”
Another 1968 ad, for the Coalition for a Democratic Alternative, bore in large letters the headline “For what?” Below, a text by Dave Reider, a copywriter, described the hopelessness of the Vietnam War, demanded that President Lyndon B. Johnson resign and advocated that Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota become the Democratic nominee for president.
Mr. Sirowitz was senior vice president and associate creative director of DDB when he left in 1970 to found his own agency, Harper Rosenfeld Sirowitz as co-chairman and co-creative director. (It was renamed numerous times over the years.) By then he had been voted Art Director of the Year for 1968 and 1970 by Ad Weekly in national polls. He was included in the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1985.
His agency’s clients included Swissair, McDonald’s, Smith Corona and Royal Caribbean Cruises. Still, the company closed in 1995 after several accounts were lost, and Mr. Sirowitz joined the firm Ryan Drossman & Partners as vice chairman.
He soon retired and returned to the Art Students League, where he drew large-format nude portraits in charcoal four days a week until the start of the pandemic.
“I aim for bold, dramatic interpretations of the model’s pose, drawn with spontaneous flowing lines, and most importantly, it should be part of a strong, well-designed composition,” he told the institute’s magazine, Lines from the Leaguein the 2012-2013 edition.
His compositional style was evident in his ad campaigns, including 1991 for America West Airlines, in which he cast improv comedian Jonathan Winters – looking tough and wearing camouflage – in a parody of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who recently commanded about American troops in the Gulf War.
The ad read: ‘Announcing air superiority for citizens’ and offered airline tickets at discounts of up to 40 percent.
However, the campaign was reprimanded by the organization Veterans of Foreign Wars for being in bad taste, and America West filed for bankruptcy protection shortly afterwards.
“To me, good advertising should make your hands sweat,” Mr. Sirowitz told The Associated Press. “America West is the smallest of the major airlines. We wanted to make an advertisement that would put them on the map in one fell swoop.”