Obituary: Darrell Winfield

OVER the years, all sorts were tried. One was a navy football coach; one ran a fencing company. One was a jobbing actor in police dramas; one lived in the New York Athletic Club, and had never smoked in his life. Several were models. One was so terrified of horses that he had to be hauled up with a rope and plonked into the saddle, every time.Of all these Marlboro Men, used by the Philip Morris company after 1954 to bring masculine vigour to a “Mild as May” slow-selling filter cigarette, only one, according to a spokesman, was real. That was Darrell Winfield, the principal Man from 1968 to 1989. He was also the most successful. It was in his time, in 1972, that Marlboro became (as it remains) the world’s bestselling brand, and it was mostly his lean, moustached face, squinting into a western sun, that broodily symbolised America on billboards from Lima to Latvia to Lagos.Serendipity led to his discovery. In 1968 the men from the Leo Burnett advertising agency, uneasy Chicagoans let loose in the wild West, were out looking for authenticity on Philip Morris’s behalf. They had decided more than a decade before that cowboys best epitomised masculinity. But merely to...



from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1z5Mm2H