George Lois, 91, was a famous advertising and magazine cover legend.

I Want My MTV” and “Lean Cuisine” were among the catchphrases and brand names George Lois popularized. He was a hard-selling, charming advertising guy and designer. George Lois passed away. He was 91.

The photographer Luke Lois, who is Lois’ son, said his father passed away “peacefully” at his Manhattan home on Friday.

George Lois, known as the “Golden Greek” and subsequently (much to his chagrin) as the “Original Mad Man,” was one of a group of marketers who helped spark the “Creative Revolution” that shook Madison Avenue and the rest of the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was arrogant and provocative, ready and able to offend, and an expert at choosing the ideal picture or phrase to seize the moment or elicit a demand.

His Esquire magazine covers, which featured everyone from Andy Warhol drowning in a sea of Campbell’s tomato soup to Muhammad Ali posing as the martyr Saint Sebastian, captured the hyper spirit of the 1960s in the same way that Norman Rockwell’s idealized illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post did. He created innovative advertising tactics for Xerox and Stouffer’s, and in the 1980s, he suggested advertisements with Mick Jagger and other rock icons pleading mock-petulantly, “I Want My MTV!” He also aided a growing music video channel.

In order to “crystallize the distinctive advantages of a product and burn it into people’s consciousness,” Lois reduced it to what he dubbed the “Big Idea.” His work for Esquire was included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 2008, and he has been honored in a number of advertising and visual arts halls of fame. Among his fans were Martin Scorsese, Tina Brown, and Graydon Carter.

His legacy was enormous, albeit its exact scope is in question. His assertions that he created the “I Want My Maypo” breakfast commercials from the 1960s and that New York magazine was inspired by him have been extensively refuted. He was accused of exaggerating his contribution at the detriment of other writers, including Carl Fischer, who took many of the iconic covers for Esquire, by several former coworkers. But his brash energy and self-assurance were widely documented.

Former USA Today editor Cathie Black described bringing in Lois in the early 1980s to suggest a fresh advertising technique for a newspaper that first battled with how to define itself in her biography “Basic Black.” The slogan “A lot of people are saying USA Today is neither fish nor fowl” was Lois’ idea to promote USA Today’s dual appeal as a newspaper and magazine. They’re correct! According to Black, Lois gave an Oscar-worthy performance in front of the publication’s members, including its founder Al Neuharth, “bounding in like a 6-foot-3 teenager hopped up on Red Bull.”

He threw his jacket to the ground, ripped off his tie, and began flashing prototype ads while prancing around the room and maintaining a continuous monologue punctuated with jokes and swear words. It was amazing, almost frightful. I was overjoyed. The room was completely silent when he was done. Neuharth was the center of attention as he sat “completely still, his expression concealed behind his dark aviator glasses.” After pausing, Neuharth took off his glasses and grinned. We have it, he declared.

Longtime spouse Rosemary Lewandowski of Lois In September, Lois passed away. Harry Joseph Lois, a son, passed away in 1978.

Lois, a Greek immigrant who was born in New York City in 1931, would later blame his motivation “to awaken, to disturb, and to protest” on the racism in his neighborhood. He took great pride in his understanding of everything from sports to ballet, and he liked to say that a successful advertiser absorbed as many influences as possible. He was a compulsive drawer and spent a large portion of his life going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a weekly basis.

He enrolled at Pratt Institute, where he soon met his future wife, and they eloped before either of them had earned their degrees. He joined CBS’s advertising and promotion division after serving in the Army during the Korean War, and in 1960, he helped launch the ad firm Papert Koenig Lois. He was hired by Esquire editor Harold Hayes two years later and stayed there until 1972, the year Hayes left.

Esquire was a key outlet for the so-called New Journalism of the 1960s, literary nonfiction stories, and the publication of such acclaimed works as Gay Talese’s portrait of Frank Sinatra and Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” were just two examples. However, you had to purchase the magazine in order to read the words, and Lois’ covers started a lot of conversations.

He used a naked woman folded into a trash can as the cover image for “The New American Woman.” Lt. William Calley, the soldier later convicted of killing unarmed civilians in the My Lai Massacre, was depicted grinning on a infamous cover from 1970 holding two Vietnamese children in his arms with two more children standing behind him.

Lois was one of the well-known people who spearheaded the fight to have the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter released from jail in the middle of the 1970s. Carter was released in 1985 after his murder conviction was later overturned. In addition, Lois published a number of books and appeared in the Esquire documentary “Smiling Through the Apocalypse” from 2014.

The success of the AMC show “Mad Men” sparked a resurgence of interest in Lois, but he was unimpressed, writing in his book “Damn Good Advice” that the program was “nothing more than a soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffed secretaries, suck up martinis, and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising.”

In addition, he continued, “I was more attractive than Don Draper in my 30s.”

Miniechat

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