Gene Case
Encyclopedia
Eugene Lawrence "Gene" Case (December 6, 1937 – September 9, 2010) was an American advertising
executive who developed campaigns for Mennen Skin Bracer
and Tums
, and developed ads for political campaigns for Lyndon B. Johnson
's 1964 presidential election
campaign, as well as for Nelson Rockefeller
and Robert F. Wagner
. Case was a founder of the firm Jordan McGrath Case & Partners.
Case was born on December 6, 1937, in Knoxville, Tennessee
, where his father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority
. The success his father had in the New Deal
helped shape Case's liberal philosophy, saying "I saw government lift [my home] region out of Appalachian-style poverty". He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University
, where he majored in architecture and was a member of the Quill and Dagger
society. He entered the advertising field in 1961, when he took a position as a copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson
agency.
While with Doyle Dane Bernbach
, Case worked with Tony Schwartz
as part of the team that developed the "Daisy ad" for Johnson's 1964 campaign. Depicting a girl counting petals plucked from a daisy, the voiceover changes to a countdown that ends with the mushroom cloud of a muclear explosion. Case wrote the copy for another Johnson ad in which a man who says he had always been a Republican speaks to the camera for four minutes about his fear of Barry Goldwater
being elected. Case worked for Nelson Rockefeller
's successful bid for a third term as Governor of New York
in the 1966 elections where he produced ads on pollution control, and he later worked on New York City
mayoral bids by Robert F. Wagner
and Bella Abzug
.
Case founded Jordan McGrath Case & Partners with Helmut Krone
in 1969 operating out of a suite at the Plaza Hotel
, with Pat McGrath joining shortly thereafter. A $500,000 campaign they nabbed that year for Angostura bitters
was the agency's first commercial account. There he developed the "Thanks. I needed that." campaign for Mennen's Skin Bracer aftershave and the Dragnet
-inspired "tum-ta-tum-tum" for Tums
antacid. At its peak in the 1990s the firm had 350 employees and $500 million in annual billings. He and his partners sold Jordan McGrath to the French
advertising firm Havas
in 1999.
Case established the advocacy ad group Avenging Angels in 2002, creating ads for liberal causes such as those that supported a ban on assault weapons, opposed the war in Iraq, sought to stem nuclear proliferation and for the Hudson River
advocacy group Riverkeeper
. He told The New York Times
that he was glad that he had made the shift back to issue advertising, saying "I've never been so productive, so happy — and so poor." Anti-Iraq War ads that Case had developed featuring Janeane Garofalo
and Susan Sarandon
in February 2003 were rejected by the major U.S. broadcast networks which said that they don't accept advocacy ads.
Case died in Manhattan
at age 72 on September 9, 2010, due to a heart attack
. He was survived by his third wife and their daughter, a daughter and two sons from his first marriage, a son from his second marriage and nine grandchildren.
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
executive who developed campaigns for Mennen Skin Bracer
Skin Bracer
Skin Bracer is an aftershave lotion created by Mennen and manufactured by Colgate-Palmolive....
and Tums
Tums
TUMS is an antacid made of sucrose and calcium carbonate manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline in St.Louis, Missouri, USA. It is a non-prescription drug and available at many retail stores, including drug stores, grocery stores and mass merchandisers. It provides relief from acid indigestion, heartburn,...
, and developed ads for political campaigns for Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson , often referred to as LBJ, was the 36th President of the United States after his service as the 37th Vice President of the United States...
's 1964 presidential election
United States presidential election, 1964
The United States presidential election of 1964 was held on November 3, 1964. Incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson had come to office less than a year earlier following the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Johnson, who had successfully associated himself with Kennedy's...
campaign, as well as for Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...
and Robert F. Wagner
Robert F. Wagner
Robert Ferdinand Wagner I was an American politician. He was a Democratic U.S. Senator from New York from 1927 to 1949.-Origin and early life:...
. Case was a founder of the firm Jordan McGrath Case & Partners.
Case was born on December 6, 1937, in Knoxville, Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
Founded in 1786, Knoxville is the third-largest city in the U.S. state of Tennessee, U.S.A., behind Memphis and Nashville, and is the county seat of Knox County. It is the largest city in East Tennessee, and the second-largest city in the Appalachia region...
, where his father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority
Tennessee Valley Authority
The Tennessee Valley Authority is a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter in May 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development in the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected...
. The success his father had in the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
helped shape Case's liberal philosophy, saying "I saw government lift [my home] region out of Appalachian-style poverty". He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, where he majored in architecture and was a member of the Quill and Dagger
Quill and Dagger
Quill and Dagger is a senior honor society at Cornell University. It is often recognized as one of the most prominent collegiate societies of its type, along with Skull and Bones of Yale University...
society. He entered the advertising field in 1961, when he took a position as a copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson
JWT
JWT is one of the largest advertising agencies in the United States and the fourth-largest in the world. It is one of the key companies of Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP Group and is headquartered in New York. The global agency is led by Worldwide Chairman and Global CEO Bob Jeffrey who took over the...
agency.
While with Doyle Dane Bernbach
DDB Worldwide
DDB Worldwide Communications Group Inc., known internationally as DDB, is a worldwide marketing communications network. It is owned by Omnicom Group Inc, one of the world's largest advertising holding companies...
, Case worked with Tony Schwartz
Tony Schwartz
Anthony Schwartz was an American sound archivist, sound designer, pioneering media theorist and advertising creator...
as part of the team that developed the "Daisy ad" for Johnson's 1964 campaign. Depicting a girl counting petals plucked from a daisy, the voiceover changes to a countdown that ends with the mushroom cloud of a muclear explosion. Case wrote the copy for another Johnson ad in which a man who says he had always been a Republican speaks to the camera for four minutes about his fear of Barry Goldwater
Barry Goldwater
Barry Morris Goldwater was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. An articulate and charismatic figure during the first half of the 1960s, he was known as "Mr...
being elected. Case worked for Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...
's successful bid for a third term as Governor of New York
Governor of New York
The Governor of the State of New York is the chief executive of the State of New York. The governor is the head of the executive branch of New York's state government and the commander-in-chief of the state's military and naval forces. The officeholder is afforded the courtesy title of His/Her...
in the 1966 elections where he produced ads on pollution control, and he later worked on New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
mayoral bids by Robert F. Wagner
Robert F. Wagner
Robert Ferdinand Wagner I was an American politician. He was a Democratic U.S. Senator from New York from 1927 to 1949.-Origin and early life:...
and Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug
Bella Savitsky Abzug was an American lawyer, Congresswoman, social activist and a leader of the Women's Movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to found the National Women's Political Caucus...
.
Case founded Jordan McGrath Case & Partners with Helmut Krone
Helmut Krone
Helmut Krone was an art director and is considered to be a pioneer of modern advertising. Krone spent over 30 years at the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach...
in 1969 operating out of a suite at the Plaza Hotel
Plaza Hotel
The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 20-story luxury hotel with a height of and length of that occupies the west side of Grand Army Plaza, from which it derives its name, and extends along Central Park South in Manhattan. Fifth Avenue extends along the east side of Grand Army Plaza...
, with Pat McGrath joining shortly thereafter. A $500,000 campaign they nabbed that year for Angostura bitters
Angostura bitters
Angostura bitters, often simply referred to as angostura, is a concentrated bitters made of water, 44.7% alcohol, gentian root, and vegetable flavoring extracts by House of Angostura in Trinidad and Tobago. They are typically used for flavoring beverages, or food...
was the agency's first commercial account. There he developed the "Thanks. I needed that." campaign for Mennen's Skin Bracer aftershave and the Dragnet
Dragnet (series)
Dragnet is a radio and television crime drama about the cases of a dedicated Los Angeles police detective, Sergeant Joe Friday, and his partners...
-inspired "tum-ta-tum-tum" for Tums
Tums
TUMS is an antacid made of sucrose and calcium carbonate manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline in St.Louis, Missouri, USA. It is a non-prescription drug and available at many retail stores, including drug stores, grocery stores and mass merchandisers. It provides relief from acid indigestion, heartburn,...
antacid. At its peak in the 1990s the firm had 350 employees and $500 million in annual billings. He and his partners sold Jordan McGrath to the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
advertising firm Havas
Havas
Havas is the second largest advertising group in France and is a "Global advertising and communications services group" and the sixth-largest global advertising and communications group worldwide, operating on the communications consulting market through three main operational divisions:*Euro RSCG...
in 1999.
Case established the advocacy ad group Avenging Angels in 2002, creating ads for liberal causes such as those that supported a ban on assault weapons, opposed the war in Iraq, sought to stem nuclear proliferation and for the Hudson River
Hudson River
The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
advocacy group Riverkeeper
Riverkeeper
Riverkeeper is an environmental non-profit organization dedicated to the protection of the Hudson River and its tributaries, as well as the watersheds that provide New York City with its drinking water...
. He told The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
that he was glad that he had made the shift back to issue advertising, saying "I've never been so productive, so happy — and so poor." Anti-Iraq War ads that Case had developed featuring Janeane Garofalo
Janeane Garofalo
Janeane Garofalo is an American stand-up comedian, actress, political activist and writer. She is the former co-host on the now defunct Air America Radio's The Majority Report. Garofalo continues to circulate regularly within New York City's local comedy and performance art scene.-Early...
and Susan Sarandon
Susan Sarandon
Susan Sarandon is an American actress. She has worked in films and television since 1969, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She had also been nominated for the award for four films before that and has received other recognition for her...
in February 2003 were rejected by the major U.S. broadcast networks which said that they don't accept advocacy ads.
Case died in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
at age 72 on September 9, 2010, due to a heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
. He was survived by his third wife and their daughter, a daughter and two sons from his first marriage, a son from his second marriage and nine grandchildren.