Neil Drossman, Adman who sold with a smile, has died at the age of 83
Neil Drossman, who brought a cheeky humor and tireless work ethic to the award-winning print ads and television commercials he wrote for clients including Meow Mix cat food, Teacher’s Scotch whiskey and 1-800-Flowers, died Nov. 25 in the Bronx. He was 83.
His son, Edward, said he died of prostate cancer in a hospital.
From the late 1960s until this year, Mr. Drossman was a copywriter and executive at several agencies, some of which were headed by the advertising guru Jerry Della Femina and some he helped run himself.
“He was one of the smartest people I know, very quiet, and he had a passion,” Mr. Della Femina, who hired Mr. Drossman from Della Femina, Travisano & Partners, in the early 1970s, said in a telephone interview. “He really wanted to win.”
One of the most enduring lines Mr. Drossman wrote was for Meow Mix: “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name.” That came at the end of commercials in which cats appeared to be singing (“Meow meow meow meow / Meow meow meow meow”) for their chicken and seafood.
He wrote commercials for Stick Ups, small deodorizing discs made by Air Wick that could be stuck anywhere in the house, with the punch line “This is a good place for a Stick Up.”
For a print advertisement with 1-800 flowers, Mr. Drossman wrote: “There are 800 reasons to send flowers. Guilt is 700 of them.”
And to convey the message that each branch serves the neighborhood differently, Chemical Bank wrote, “Flatbush is not Flushing.” The line that followed – “Flatbush is the ghost of Ebbets Field and Jackie Robinson steals his house” – was personal: it reflected on his upbringing in Brooklyn, his love for the Dodgers and his anger at their move to Los Angeles when he was still a teenager. teenager.
Paul Kruger, creative director and partner at Della Femina Advertising, where Mr Drossman worked until recently, described him as tireless.
“He was an ideas machine,” Mr. Kruger said. “He spit out line after line after line and came up with new things. He said, ‘One more thought, one more thought.’
In 1973 and 1974, Mr. Drossman wrote full-page testimonials for Teacher’s Scotch in the voices of such celebrities as Groucho MarxGeorge Burns and Mel Brooks. The Brooks ad is written as an interview with the character of Mr. Brooks, the 2000-year-old man.
“Sir, when was Scotch discovered?”
“It was during the ice age. We had so many tons of ice that we didn’t know what to do. So we made drinks, all kinds of drinks.”
The Teacher campaign won Della Femina, Travisano a Clio Award for Creative Excellence in Advertising. It also earned Mr. Drossman a writing award from what is now the One Club for Creativity.
Mr. Drossman and his colleagues earned Clio Awards in 1980 for three campaigns: for Air Wick Stick Ups, Meow Mix and the Einstein Moomjy carpet store. His Emery Air Freight ads (“It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your package is?”) won a One Club award in 1978.
Neil Arthur Drossman was born on February 26, 1940 in Brooklyn. His father, Edward, owned a jewelry store. His mother, Anne (Rosenberg) Drossman, worked in the store and took over after her husband died in 1971.
After graduating from Alfred University in upstate New York in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Mr. Drossman worked at CBS News before beginning his advertising career. Among the agencies he worked for were Daniel & Charles, Delehanty Kurnit & Geller and Kurtz, Kambanis & Symon.
Mr. Della Femina recalled his reaction to seeing ads Mr. Drossman had written for other agencies. “You look at an ad and you say, ‘I wish I had done that,’” he said. “His portfolio was full of such advertisements.”
After approximately twelve years with Della Femina, Travisano and a subsidiary, Drossman Yustein Clowes, Mr. Drossman founded Drossman Lehmann Marino Reveley in 1983. In 1994, he joined Ryan & Partners as an equity partner, and the firm became Ryan. Drossman & Partners. In 2002, he and art director Bob Needleman started Needleman Drossman & Partners, which became a division of Della Femina Advertising.
When Reader’s Digest hired Needleman Drossman to revamp its image in 2003, Mr. Drossman took that venerable publication into somewhat daring territory. One of the ads in the campaign was shown a woman in a bathrobe while holding a copy of the magazine and looking into the camera.
“If we were to get any closer to our readers,” the headline read, “we would have to use protection.”
Mr. Drossman, then chairman and co-creative director of his agency, said the aim of the campaign was “to make people think twice about the Digest.”
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife Ellen (Danor) Drossman; his daughter, Jill Drossman; his sister, Phyllis Bullhack; and three grandchildren. He lived in Manhattan.
Not all of Mr. Drossman’s copywriting was humorous. In 2008, a commercial praising Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey for being one of America’s 50 best hospitals featured a young boy playing alone with a glove and a baseball.
‘If every hospital performed this well’ says the narrator, “Hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved. Who knows, Finn might not be alone now. Maybe he had something going on with his grandfather.’