Jerry Mander, adman for radical causes; at 86

A version of this obituary ran in a Tuesday edition.

Jerry Mander, whose iconoclastic thinking led him to create advertising campaigns for nonprofits like one for the Sierra Club in 1966 to fight a plan to build two dams in the Grand Canyon and an organization to raise awareness about the dangers of economic globalization, died April 11 at his home in Honokaa, Hawaii. He was 86.

In 1966, Mr. Mander was working at Freeman & Gossage, an advertising agency in San Francisco, when David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, asked for help in framing the conservation group’s opposition to the federal government’s construction of hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River.

The full-page newspaper ads created by the agency grabbed national attention and angered proponents of the project, who denied the Sierra Club’s claims that the dams would flood and desecrate the canyon.

“Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon From Being Flooded … For Profit,” read the headline of one of the ads written by Mr. Mander. It included coupons with messages that readers could clip and send to officials, including President Johnson.

The act of clipping and mailing the coupons “radicalizes the sender at least as much as it impresses the receiver,” Mr. Mander wrote in “70 Ads to Save the World: An Illustrated Memoir of Social Change” (2022). To someone in authority who receives 5,000 coupons, he added, the action “may actually have far greater impact, and bring far more attention, than, for example, thousands of tweets.”

The campaign — and other factors — led the government to drop its plan to build the dams.

As a senior fellow at the Public Media Center, he wrote ads for nonprofit groups such as Public Citizen and Earth Island Institute (which Brower founded).

One of his attention-grabbing ads for a Planned Parenthood abortion rights campaign appeared in newspapers in 1985. It featured photos of two women, accompanied by their accounts of getting illegal abortions; a photograph of a firebombed abortion clinic; a list of nine reasons why abortions are legal; and three coupons with different messages, one addressed to Attorney General Edwin Meese.

“He was a countercultural type who wanted to reset the frame of how people looked at modern life,” Jono Polansky, who was the creative director of the Public Media Center, said.