Neil Drossman, ad writer famous for his wit and wordplay, dies at 83
In one famous campaign for Teacher’s scotch, the Brooklyn-born copywriter channeled the voices of Groucho Marx, Zero Mostel and Mel Brooks
Neil Drossman created a series of ads for Teacher’s scotch featuring ghost-written testimonials by celebrities, including Groucho Marx, left. (Photo courtesy of Robert Dranor)
By Andrew Silow-Carroll December 11, 2023
(JTA) — Neil Drossman, who began his career in copywriting at the tail end of the “Mad Men” era and went on to create some of the most admired tag lines and campaigns in the history of the advertising business, died Nov. 25 at age 83. The cause was cancer, family members said.
The Brooklyn-born Drossman was known for witty catchphrases that stuck with consumers, advertising products such as Meow Mix cat food, Einstein Moomjy Carpets, Airwick air freshener and Chemical Bank.
When Purina introduced Meow Mix in 1974, Drossman wrote the tag line, “The Cat Food Cats Ask For By Name.” For Emery Air Freight, an air cargo carrier, he wrote an ad featuring a photo of globe-trotting Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with the headline, “Emery flies to more places than he does.”
One of Drossman’s most memorable campaigns was for Teacher’s scotch, which featured ghost-written testimonials by various celebrity drinkers, including the Jewish entertainers Groucho Marx, Zero Mostel and Mel Brooks.
The Mel Brooks ad featured the creator of the “2,000 Year Old Man” dressed as a caveman holding a glass of scotch while sitting on a pile of boulders. “2,000 years ago when you had a scotch on the rocks, you really had a scotch on the rocks,” the headline reads.
The family still has a autograph from Brooks addressed to Drossman, reading, “You do me better than I do me.”
“Seeing his work transformed my views of what advertising could be,” the advertising executive Lee Garfinkel wrote in a tribute last month in the trade journal Ad Age. “Each headline was smart, funny, insightful, unexpected and thought-provoking. I didn’t know that advertising could be so clever and feel so fresh.”
Drossman, born on Feb. 26, 1940, grew up in Brooklyn and was a devoted Brooklyn Dodgers fan until the team decamped to Los Angeles in 1958. His father Edward started a jewelry business on Manhattan’s Canal Street. When the elder Drossman died of a heart attack in his early 60s, his widow, Anne Drossman, took over the business, which survives to this day, co-owned and operated by Neil’s wife, Ellen Drossman, and Neil’s sister, Phyllis Bulhack.
The basketball-loving Drossman attended Alfred University in upstate New York and after college got a job working at CBS News. He got his first job in the advertising business in the 1970s and worked on and off for 50 years with the legendary ad man and restaurateur Jerry Della Femina, who ran a series of agencies.
“When it came down to day-in-day-out Joe Lunchpail writing, with the kind of amazing talent that got everyone’s attention, whether he was first pounding a typewriter or later composing on a computer,” Della Famina wrote in a tribute on Facebook, “Neil Drossman was the best copywriter there ever was.”
Grossman also served as chairman and co-creative director at Needleman Drossman & Partners and was co-founder of Ryan Drossman/MARC USA.
The witty Drossman could also turn serious or sentimental when the occasion demanded it, as he did when Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey needed an image makeover. Drossman came up with the slogan, “When you feel good, we feel good.”
Other copywriters admired his ad for Goodwill Industries, which showed a man in a wheelchair fixing a TV set. The headline reads, “What you see here is a TV set repairing a man.”
He also created the slogan and logo that appears on the doors of NYPD patrol cars, reading “Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect.”
Drossman retired on Jan. 31, 2023. A New York Knicks fan, Drosssman was a regular player in a year-round weekly pickup basketball game in Greenwich Village before he was sidelined by hip surgery. The Knicks player and future coach Phil Jackson would sometimes take part in those games, and he nicknamed Drossman “the Glove” for his skills at defense.
His survivors include his wife, Ellen Drossman; his son Edward, his daughter Jill, and three grandchildren.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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