PAGE • 34 | PIONEERS
PAGE • 35 | PIONEERS
G
eorge Lois was one of the primary architects of the Creative Revolution in American advertising in the 1960s. He was a leading figure at the world’s first creative agency and cofounded its second. This was a time when “creative” was a way to describe someone who had original ideas and not, as the Oxford American Thesaurus puts it, an “advertising buzzword… that simply means new or different.” Lois wholly or partially created some of the most exceptional and memorable ads in history. For better or worse, behemoths of consumerism such as Tommy Hilfiger, Jiffy Lube, ESPN, MTV, and many others have ingrained themselves
in American culture because of his indelible campaigns. The qualities that set Lois’s work apart from that of today’s advertising industry were because his stuff was unapologetic and transparent about the fact that it was selling a product, and he used ideas to hawk products rather than the other way around.
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Considering the breadth and quality of his advertisements, it’s all the more impressive that Lois is best known for his work at Esquire, where he created a staggering 92 of the most iconic magazine covers ever published in a mass-market magazine. They were visual battering rams, catalysts for dialogue about topics people
“ ONE OF THE PRIMARY ARCHITECTS OF THE CREATIVE REVOLUTION” found uncomfortable. With full backing from editor in chief Harold Hayes, Lois was given complete creative control. Sometimes Hayes didn’t even know what he was getting until the finished cover arrived. It was the type of arrangement that would be impossible in today’s sycophantic and flaccid media industry. Some have criticized Lois for exaggerating the scope of his influence and claiming other people’s ideas as his own. Regardless of the particulars, his work has undeniably had a lasting influence on the media world and will continue to. “I’m the
crossover guy,” says Lois of his career, which has borrowed as much from graphic design as it has from guerilla advertising tactics. Lois laughs when he remembers his advertising colleagues’ reaction when seeing him cut his type apart at his desk with all the earnest intensity of a Bauhas student. “‘Geez,’ they’d say, ‘He’s a real dee-signer.’ I took that kind of design sensibility and put it together with a kind of kick-ass sensibility and made my own kind of advertising.”