"Daisy Ad" Co-Creator Tony Schwartz Dies

There's a very notable NY Times obituary today: "Tony Schwartz, a self-taught, sought-after and highly reclusive media consultant who helped create what is generally considered to be the most famous political ad to appear on television, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan."

The ad is the "Daisy Ad," which was produced for Lyndon Baines Johnson's election campaign in 1964. Here's the Wikipedia description, video is above:

The advertisement begins with a little girl (Birgitte Olsen) standing in a meadow with chirping birds, picking the petals of a daisy while counting each petal slowly...When she reaches "nine", an ominous-sounding male voice is then heard counting down a missile launch, and as the girl's eyes turn toward something she sees in the sky, the camera zooms in until her pupil fills the screen, blacking it out. When the countdown reaches zero, the blackness is replaced by the flash and mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

As the firestorm rages, a voiceover from Johnson states, "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." Another voiceover (sportscaster Chris Schenkel) then says, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

Schwartz graduated from Pratt and spent his career in advertising emphasizing the importance of sound while developing visually stimulating ads; he told the Washington Post in 1983, "We can hear four times as fast as we can talk. So the question is, what do you do with the other time?" And the Times points out he also suffered from agoraphobia, rarely leaving his Hell's Kitchen home.