Jerry Mander’s ads didn’t save the world. As reproductive rights are rolled back in the United States, social media disinformation undermines political stability and the accelerating pace of climate change threatens to obliterate hard-won incremental progress, it’s obvious that the world that the Bolinas-based activist, social critic and adman has fought to save is still in danger.
“There’s no permanent victory,” Mr. Mander told friends and fellow activists at an online celebration of his new book, “70 Ads to Save the World,” organized by City Lights bookstore last week. “All we can do is hold them off as much as we possibly can.”
Yet Mr. Mander has more victories under his belt than most, and he has always understood the stakes. “70 Ads” is an illustrated memoir of a life devoted to holding off corporations and fighting for social justice with the savvy of an advertising wizard. A fierce critic of technology, capitalism and globalization, Mr. Mander spent 50 years helping activists make their points in the pages of the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other publications in the form of full-page ads.
He pioneered a style of attention-grabbing fundraising for environmental nonprofits, Indigenous movements and reproductive health care providers that changed conversations, filled the coffers of progressive organizations and prevented
catastrophes.
His work was easily recognizable. “To many of our daughters, this looks like a coat hanger,” a 1989 ad read in a plain, utilitarian font above a picture of a bent hanger. “Please. Sign the pledge to keep it that way.” Columns of newspaper-like copy presented statistics and apprised the reader of the stakes of the impending Supreme Court decision on Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which ultimately allowed states to chip away at abortion access. Near the bottom of the ad, readers could cut out a small coupon to sign a petition and send a donation to the National Abortion Rights Action League.
Contemporary readers leafing through any 50-year-old magazine will be struck by the wordiness of ads of the time, but Mr. Mander’s messages were lengthy even by those standards. Full-page ads were expensive, and nonprofits would usually have only one shot to get their points across. “Do-gooders” need their audience to get more engaged than corporations do, Mr. Mander explains in his book, so a single ad needed to capture attention, but also contain enough background information and sophisticated argument to compel the reader to action.
“Jerry, through these ads, figured out how to get uncompromised radical concepts in front of millions of people’s eyes,” Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, said at the book event. “And then he mobilized them to take action through those little coupons.”
In “70 Ads to Save the World,” Mr. Mander compiles a history of the progressive movement through his own work for groups like the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, Earth Island Institute and Turning Point Project interspersed with accounts of his own career. The City Lights event was a tribute by activists from around the world to the work of the 86-year-old activist.
Raised by working-class Jewish immigrants in Yonkers, N.Y., Mr. Mander graduated from Columbia Business School in 1959. After a year in the public relations department of an international manufacturing corporation, he skipped town to join friends in San Francisco, where he soon opened his own P.R. firm with clients like avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and the improv theater troupe The Committee.
Mr. Mander’s first foray into advertising was a collaboration with the Committee: a satirical anti-war gimmick in response to a Pentagon plan to airdrop toys to Vietnamese children. It caught the eye of visionary advertiser Howard Gossage, who soon became Mr. Mander’s mentor and hired him to work at his agency, Freeman & Gossage. One of their early ads together became Mr. Mander’s first major victory as an environmental activist.
In 1966, a congressional bill would have authorized a hydroelectric project that seems unthinkable today: two giant dams flooding the Grand Canyon to create a reservoir. David Brower, the first director of the Sierra Club, came to Mr. Mander to help issue a series of dire warnings about the plan in what became his signature style.
One ad lampooned the Bureau of Reclamation’s assertion that if the canyon were a reservoir, visitors would be able to use boats to see the canyon’s walls up close. “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” Mr. Mander’s ad asked in stark capital letters. Below it, a chart illustrated the unfathomable age of the Grand Canyon’s features compared to the appearance of the first dinosaurs, the first redwoods and finally, the first humans. The dam project’s advocates in the Interior Department and the House of Representatives soon withdrew their support, pointing to the ad campaign and the ensuing avalanche of written protest.
As Mr. Mander’s commitment to the environment grew, consumerism became anathema to him. He dissolved the firm that had become Freeman, Mander & Gossage. But instead of renouncing advertising altogether, he began a new venture that would eventually become the Public Media Center, the first-ever nonprofit ad agency.
With P.M.C., Mr. Mander mounted many more successful campaigns, and “70 Ads” traces the achievements of the important progressive players in the Bay Area and across the world who worked with him. Mr. Mander partnered with Alvin Duskin, an entrepreneurial dress designer and activist, to take out ads opposing the proliferation of skyscrapers in downtown San Francisco and the sale of Alcatraz Island to a Texas millionaire. His Earth Island Institute ads raised awareness of the destructive effects of tuna fishing on dolphin populations. Along with the coat hanger ad for NARAL, he created a series of iconic Planned Parenthood ads defending abortion rights that ran in the New York Times in the 1980s.
Mr. Mander also worked extensively with Indigenous groups on campaigns to save their ancestral lands from powerful interests. An ad he produced on behalf of the Alaska Native Gwich’in people helped block a move to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil speculation, though the Trump administration revived the idea in 2017. Another ad put an end to Dutch air force practice flights over Innu lands in Labrador. In 1988, Mr. Mander created an ad for the Pele Defense Fund, a movement of Native Hawaiians who wanted to halt geothermal drilling in the Big Island’s Puna Rainforest. The project was stopped, and later, the forest was preserved by the Trust for Public Land.
“The ad gave us, the little people, an opportunity to speak to the world,” Palikapu Dedman, a Native Hawaiian activist and president of the Pele Defense Fund, said at last week’s event.
Later, Mr. Mander’s work offered sophisticated critiques of more abstract political and economic forces. A growing movement in the 1990s viewed globalization as a kind of neocolonialism that was exerting corporate control over small nations, Indigenous societies and environmental decisions. A series of 25 New York Times ads for Doug Tompkins’s Turning Point Project at the turn of the millennium expounded on the perils of techno-utopianism, growing privacy and surveillance issues arising from the internet, and the World Trade Organization’s control over environmental laws.
Mr. Mander’s eight previous books distilled his views and went deeper than his ads could. The 1977 “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” his best-known book, presaged the critiques of capitalism and technology that would take shape in his later ads and books, which included “Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization” and “The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System.”
Since 1977, Mr. Mander has lived on the Big Mesa in Bolinas. He is married to Koohan Paik-Mander, a Hawaii-based writer and filmmaker with whom he co-authored “The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii’s Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism and the Desecration of the Earth.”
You can buy “70 Ads to Save the World” through Point Reyes Books or at www.synergeticpress.com.