General
Charlie Moss, Whose Ads Spread Love for New York, Dies at 85
As a pioneer of Madison Avenue’s creative revolution, he collaborated on campaigns for Alka-Seltzer and other products. But his tourism pitches were a game changer.
Charlie Moss, the visionary advertising executive credited with producing the stunningly successful “I ♥ NY” tourism campaign in the mid-1970s — a time when garbage, graffiti, crime, racial strife and a serial killer made America’s cultural capital anything but lovable — died on Aug. 5 at his home in Wainscott, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 85.
Susan Calhoun Moss, his wife, said the cause was a heart attack.
Mr. Moss also conceived Alka-Seltzer’s popular “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” jingle and the “Flick your Bic” slogan for Bic lighters; helped Braniff International Airways bring about “the end of the plain plane”; and declared Tic Tac “the original mouth whack.”
The “I ♥ NY” campaign had many parents. John S. Dyson, the New York State commerce commissioner; his deputy, William S. Doyle; and Mr. Moss and his collaborators at Wells Rich Greene, the advertising agency run by Mary Wells Lawrence and hired for the project, all helped set in motion what Mr. Dyson described as a collective “eureka moment.”
“Charlie was indispensable to the whole project,” Mr. Dyson said in an interview.
The campaign — complete with a heart icon doodled on the back of an envelope with a crayon by Milton Glaser, the graphic designer, and a jingle written by Steve Karmen — began in 1977, when New York City was staving off a devastating fiscal crisis. The city, derided by many as “the rotten apple,” was being shunned by visitors at home and abroad.
By 1983, Mr. Doyle wrote in The New York Times, $3 billion in spending by tourists was directly attributed to the “I ♥ NY” campaign.
