Jerry Mander, who created plans to build two dams in the Grand Canyon in 1966 and advertising campaigns for nonprofits like the Sierra Club to fight organizations raising awareness about the dangers of economic globalization, He died in April due to iconoclastic thinking. 11 At his home in Honokaa, Hawaii. he was 86 years old.
His son Kai confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.
In 1966, while Mander was working for the San Francisco advertising agency Freeman & Gossage, David Blower, executive director of the Sierra Club, took up conservation groups’ opposition to the federal government’s construction of a hydroelectric dam. I asked for help putting it together. Colorado River.
A full-page newspaper ad made by the agency captured national attention and angered supporters of the project in Congress. Congress denied the Sierra Club’s allegations that the dam would cause flooding and desecrate the canyon.
“Only you can save the Grand Canyon from flooding…for profit.” Read the ad headline written by Mr. Mander. It contained coupons with messages that readers could clip and send to government officials such as President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.
The act of clipping and mailing coupons “radicalizes the sender at least as much as it impresses the recipient,” Mander said in “70 Ads That Will Save the World: An Illustrated Memoir of Social Change” ( 2022). For those in power who received 5,000 coupons, the action “could actually have a much greater impact and attention than, say, thousands of tweets,” he added.
This campaign and other factors caused the government to withdraw plans to build the dam in early 1967. (The Internal Revenue Service also revoked the Sierra Club tax exemption in an attempt to influence the law.)
Working with the Sierra Club allowed Mander to see a future where his marketing skills could be used for the public good, rather than for maximizing customer benefit.
After the agency founder Howard Gossage died in 1969 and the agency subsequently closed, Mander became involved in non-profit organizations with campaigns against the development of San Francisco and against the San Francisco water project. Helped launch Public Interest Communications to help people and individuals. Northern California.
He then moved to the Public Media Center and was a Senior Fellow for nearly 20 years, writing advertisements for non-profit organizations such as Planned Parenthood. citizen, Earth Island Research Institute (founded by Mr. Brower) and the Sierra Club.
One of his high-profile advertisements for a planned parenthood abortion rights campaign in 1985 appeared in a newspaper. A photo of a bombed-out abortion clinic. His list of nine reasons why abortion is legal. Of his three coupons with different messages, one was addressed to Attorney General Edwin Meese III.
Jono Polanski, creative director of the Public Media Center, said in a phone interview, “He was a counterculture type who wanted to reset the framework of how people viewed modern life. In a full-page print ad that Mander is good at, Polanski said, “He deconstructed the problem and said, ‘How do you tell people a story and give them a place to do something about it?’ I could say,” he added.
Jerrold Irwin Mander was born in the Bronx on May 1, 1936 and was raised in Yonkers, New York in Westchester County. His father, Harry, owned a company that made linings for men’s clothing in Manhattan’s clothing district.his mother, Eva Mander was a housewife. Kai Mander said his parents didn’t realize that his son’s name sounded exactly like a political term for manipulating constituencies to support a particular political party.
He graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, and in 1959 received a master’s degree in international economics from the Columbia Business School. Before he moved to San Francisco, he got a job in the publicity department of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
He soon opened his own public relations firm, whose clients included Commission, an improvisational theater group. In early 1966, he ran a bold advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle, recalling the Pentagon’s plans to airdrop toys to children in Vietnam. The ad promises that the commission will collect war toys for the Pentagon (two whimsical recommendations: a plastic bazooka and a napalm-launching atomic tank) and drop them from helicopters into the Pentagon. Did.
His full-time advertising career began with a call from Mr. Gossage. Gossage said he loved the war toys ad and asked the agency he partnered with to join him.
His work increasingly reflected his skepticism about the social impact of technology, advertising and television. These concerns led him to write “His Four Arguments to Eliminate Television” (1978). In it, he argued that the media isolates viewers, dulls their minds, and lays the groundwork for tyranny.
In the 1990s, he targeted economic globalization embodied in organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
In the early 1990s, he founded the International Forum on Globalization, a think-tank to guide activists concerned about how the organization’s policies were adversely affecting health and environmental standards, food security, and employment around the world. gathered people.
“He understood the issues, knew all the thought leaders, and had a great ability to take very complex issues and put them together to make sense for people’s lives,” said Forum. said Debbie Barker, former co-director of
Over the next decade, the group published reports on a variety of issues and held multi-day teach-ins with thousands of people in multi-organizational cities. At the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, police used tear gas on protesters who cordoned off parts of downtown.
“We’re entering the world of corporate governance,” Mander told an audience of 1,300 at a Seattle teach-in. He found that 52 of the world’s largest economies are corporations, and that “corporate profits are higher than ever, but real wages are falling. The CEO of a large company has a higher average line than his workers.” earns 419 times as much as he does.”
The think tank was funded in large part by Douglas Tompkins, an environmentalist and founder of the Esprit and North Face clothing brands. He also hired Mr. Mander as his director of programs for the Deep His Ecology Foundation, which is dedicated to protecting wild nature.
The forum’s momentum slowed after the 9/11 attacks as many activists turned to anti-war protests.
“Every time I spoke to him, Jerry would say, ‘We have to put the IFG back on,'” he said. John CavanaghHe chaired the group and served as director of the Policy Research Institute. “Some say we didn’t succeed because we didn’t stop those agencies. But it slowed them down and made them more skeptical.”
In addition to son Kai, Mr. Mander has another son, Jari, and his wife, Kuhan Pike Mander. The marriage of Annika Wesel to Elizabeth Garsonin ended in divorce.
