The Greatest Designers of our Age #7: George Louis
A Big Man, A Big Idea.
I discovered George Louis when I was at college. Of course, it was the Esquire covers. They were (and remain) so damn unique. Why has no-one ever covered (ba-boom) them? Copied the style, picked up on “The Big Idea”? I have no idea. Those “Big” ideas as George calls them, the ideas that “Grab you buy the throat” as George says. But George was so much more than just the Esquire covers, as we will find out shortly. Ignore all the short articles about George, the “10 Best Esquire Covers” and all the rest of the clickbait rubbish. George was a giant of advertising, for sure – but was also heavily involved in the human rights movements of the 60’s, and continues to this day to battle for democracy and freedom of speech. He is still not afraid to cajole, provoke and attack where he sees unfairness in the world. His work ethic, even today, remains as sharp as ever. “If you don’t go to sleep everyday exhausted, you're a bum!” George is truly, one of kind.
Wildy controversial in its day. Wanting to make an anti-war statement on the Vietnam, George and his editor decided to go for a home run. Unwilling to use an actual GI killed in vietnam, George instead used his own portrait, taken during his time in the Korean War. This and other anti-war statements gather a building momentum of resentment towards the war, and led to the eventual dissolution of Americans abroad in south east asia.
My business model changed after the course of the conversations, but I may well yet find a way to use his Big Idea. It’s amazing to me that George, now 90 (!) is still working and creating amazing design work. One of a kind. I love the guy, and being able to talk to him for the first time, I must admit was one of the highlights of my life!
He’s some character, and his genius is still, after all these years, shining as brightly as ever.
As we slowly slide into bland homogenisation in almost every facet of human life, George is a reminder of what was once possible, with a creative mind and an undiminished craving for The Big Idea.
The outcome from my conversations with George. When I saw it, my brain exploded. I had been thinking about an ad campaign for about a year, and how to create it and what the content should be. I hadn’t really come up with anything, to be honest. After one phone call (it was just a call to discuss Zenn, no order for work or any signed agreeements) George emailed me this the next day. POW! “Advertising is poison gas. It should bring tears to your eyes, unhinge your nervous system and knock you out.” I was knocked out, for sure. “It is a direct hit.” Said George. Agreed.
Lois was hired by Reba Sochis at the age of 19 as a Pratt Junior before he was drafted by the US army to fight in the Korean war. After returning from the war, Lois started designing print and media projects at CBS advertising and promotional department. CBS at the time, had legendary Designer Bill Golden running the design show there, creator of the iconic CBS ‘eye’.
Asked what logo George wishes he had designed, he said it was the CBS logo. Says George: “I wanted to work for CBS television because they had just started with the CBS eye, and also Bill Golden was a terrific art director. I worked there for five years. I loved it there.” George no doubt learned a huge amount from the seasoned pro. “It hurt me to leave there, but I wanted to change the world of advertising.” And so continued with his grand vision.
Later in 1959, Louis took his first step in the rough and tumble world of New York advertising, and was recruited by DDB Communications Group inc., a worldwide marketing and advertising company.
After just one year at Doyle Dane Bernbach, the ambitious young creative teamed up with Fred Papret and Julian Koeing to make an advertising agency called Papret Koeing Lois, also known as PKL. The agency was a huge success, working for many large U.S. household names. It also became the first advertising agency to ever go public – some achievement – and a financial boon for its founders.
George created 92 magazine covers for Esquire through the 1960’s, developing ideas that were incredible. Such were the power of these impactful designs, that they are as fresh today as they were in the 60’s, and left a lasting legacy on magazine covers like no other. Those glamourous days of Esquire, were made possible by his wonderfully prolific partnership with his encouraging editor, Howard Hayes. Hayes was every bit an anarchist as Louis, happily dishing out provocation to every and anyone willing to look. The Sonny Liston cover is the perfect example.“Jesus Christ, Hayes,” the markting team said. “You call that Christmasy? What the hell are you trying to do to us?” Like George says – Poison Gas.
Lois remembers that during the shoot, “Ali said, ‘Hey, George ….’ which always meant he wanted to talk. He took his right hand out from behind his back and pointed at each of the arrows. And then he’d say the names of the people in this world that were out to get him. He’d point to one arrow: ‘Lyndon Johnson.’ The next one: ‘General [William] Westmoreland [who led the Vietnam operation].’ Then: ‘Robert McNamara.’ Each of the arrows [was] a person in the government that had hurt him.”
Although Lois is popular for dozens of marketing miracles and masterpieces that were responsible for radicalizing modern art and popularization of American and world culture, his most publicly recognised work remains the eye-popping 92 covers for Esquire magazine from 1962 to 1972.
His covers are famous as his most influential and provocative work. Interestingly, one of those covers never ran. It was an anti-war cover for December 1962 issue. Too damn controversial, even for George.
The exhibition of thirty-one of his Esquire covers took place in the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition portrayed Lois’s most profound work like Richard Nixon having lipstick, Lyndon B. Johnson (US president) holding a Hubert Humphrey (former Vice President) dummy, and influential American artist Andy Warhol – memorably drowning in a can of Campbell’s soup. Just brilliant. Why doesn’t anyone create anything as brilliant and funnny anymore? Has The Big Idea died?
You can see the diversity of his work by his unbridled imagination and his capability of communicating ideas through an image. Unlike modern age magazine covers having dense text lines on top of a picture of a celebrity, Lois’s covers attract people by the genius of his ideas alone. This was of course a time before photo-editing software like Photoshop, when pictures were developed by cutting and pasting, clipping or often drawing the elements by hand.
The Power of The Big Idea: MTV
Standout ad campaigns include his groundbreaking Xerox commercial showing a chimpanzee ably operating a photocopier and hugely successful “I want my MTV” ads. At the time, MTV was a dud, and the executives doubted George’s ability to pull in viewers and turn the ailing channel around. After a year of marketing no-one wanted to know. Don’t ever doubt George. Just don’t.
With his miraculous powers of persuasion, Louis managed to convince all the major pop stars of the day to appear for FREE in the smash hit tv spots. Pete Towshend, Mick Jagger, Cyndi Lauper, Stevie Nicks, Madonna, Adam Any, Lionel Richie, Hall & Oates, Bowie, and The Police and many more signed up. The channel exploded, and within months the music was playing in 98% of U.S households. The success of the campaign was so huge, that MTV staff were demanding that the ads be pulled off air, because they couldn’t handle all the calls from frenzied teenagers screaming “I want my MTV!!!” down the phone! Brilliant!
Louis’ funky pop and rock logo for MTV, wild, fun and perfectly on point for the eighties generation. Initially a flop, after this explosive agitating campaign, sales went through the roof and MTV rocked the nation.
“Madmen is nothing more than a soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up martinis and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising – oblivious to the inspiring civil rights movement, the burgeoning women’s lib movement, the evil Vietnam war and other seismic events of the turbulent, roller-coaster 1960s that altered America forever. The heroic movers and shakers of the Creative Revolution…bear no resemblance to the cast of characters on Mad Men. The more I think and write about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult. So fuck you, Mad Men, you phony gray-flannel-suit, male-chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic Republican SOBs!”
And there you go. This is what happens when real men, with real-life accomplishments talk about phoney actors and cheap lines, dreamt up by little men who live in between the lines on their laptops.
“Besides, when I was in my 30s I was much better looking than Don Draper.” You can be the judge.
Thoughtful. Later, he created Lois, Holland Callaway which was his last advertising agency. It created numerous unforgettable campaigns for clients like The Four Seasons and Minolta.
The marketing and advertising term “Big Idea” symbolizes an organization’s major undertaking of communicating its brand, product and or concept to the general public by creating a message that resonates with the prospects outside of its boundaries. This idea was developed by George Lois and used in all of his wildly successful advertising campaigns. After his high-profile work with MTV, Louis then worked with ViacomCBS to create and introduce the American pay television network Video Hits One (VH1). After a restless night trying to solve the mystery of coming up with a name for a frozen food line for his client Stauffer’s – it came to him in a flash of inspiration – “Lean Cuisine.” You may have heard of it – pretty catchy huh?
He also developed the marketing and messaging for the subsidy of Royal Dutch Shell – Jiffy Lube, an American automotive oil change brand. George’s advertising (once they had convinced the board and gained complete control of the creative) – again wielded magical sales results for his clients.
Over the years, some of George’s biggest clients included ESPN, USA Today, Pirelli tires and Xerox. Other mentionable clients are Aunt Jemima and interestingly – four US senators.
TOMMY
One of my all-time favourites in George’s billboard for Tommy Hilfiger. The story goes, that Tommy at the time, was pretty much an unknown fashion designer in 1986. Tommy didn’t have a clue who George was, but agreed to meet. George told Tommy he was mad to persue the campaign he wanted – girls in the Hamptons. (Yawn.) Reluctantly, he agreed to George’s vision – the beautfully designed billboard that encouraged the American public to guess who was the new kid on the block. (George initially pitched the idea of simple showing Lauren and Klien ads with big “X’s” through them – saying “This the old – here is the new.” Tommy was shocked – not a chance of that one going live!)
Of course, in the end, George was proved right – the ad went supernova, was hugely popular and succeeded in its goals – getting people talking – even if it was sometimes the wrong people. Louis was accosted in a New York restaurant weeks later by Calvin Klein. “You son of a bitch! It took me 20 years to get where he is today!” Louis response – “Schumck! Why do it in 20 years when you can do it in 20 days?!”
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My absolute favourite Louis ad. Intriguing – almost like a game of hangman – and engaging. Encouraging the viewer to think a bit more than the usual ad of the time. Of course, it helps when the ad is a 100 metre billboard in Times Square.
From Tommy:
“When we launched, I teamed up with George Lois to do a series of ads that compared me to all the designers I’d idolised for so long – Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein,” Hilfiger reminisces in his 1997 book All-American. “It was a gutsy move, and I’d be lying if I said I was entirely comfortable with it at the time. But Mohan, Joel, and George convinced me to go for it, to leapfrog the competition in marketing. It worked.”
Always keen to push further - from George:
"Knowing we struck gold, I then positioned him in three successive spreads as the leader of fashion’s third wave of designers: “First there was Geoffrey Beane, Bill Blass and Stanley Blacker… Then Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren…” followed by Tommy’s impish face pissing off every inhabitant of the Seventh Avenue schmatte business."
It’s no small feat to make Gill Sans look amazing, but George pulls it off here. Gill Sans later became synonymous with Hilfiger over the course of decades and extraordinary marketing budgets. Much in the same way Futura extra bold condensed (or at least the tweaked version of it) became synonymous with Nike – to the extent that they basically owned the font psychologically, in consumer’s minds.
George has an incredible legacy, one unmatched in modern times. His creativity and incredible sense of design and approach to problem solving is what makes him unique. His outrageous disregard anything other than a smash hit campaign leaves his peers in the dust, and as he says, he “Doesn’t give a shit!” about what anyone thinks! I love this guy! Born and raised in New York City…
His list of awards includes: The Art Directors Hall of Fame, The One club Creative Hall of Fame, a Lifetime achievement awards from AIGA and Society of Publication Designers and American Advertising Hall of Fame.
I'll leave you with an unmistakable stone cold classic. Just let this one, sink in.....ba boom.
George sadly passed away in November 2022. It was a pleasure to have spoken to him on a few occasions, across the oceans. It really was a wonderful experience to have just a moments of his time and talk to a true advertising legend.
Thank you George, for wonderful work and everything you created. You will always be remembered.
