Gene Case

Eugene Lawrence "Gene" Case (December 6, 1937 – September 9, 2010) was an American advertising executive who developed campaigns for Mennen Skin Bracer and Tums, and developed ads for political campaigns for Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential election campaign, as well as for Nelson Rockefeller and Robert F. Wagner. Case was a founder of the firm Jordan McGrath Case & Partners. Case was born on December 6, 1937, in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The success his father had in the New Deal helped shape Case's liberal philosophy, saying "I saw government lift [my home] region out of Appalachian-style poverty". He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, where he majored in architecture and was a member of the Quill and Dagger society. He entered the advertising field in 1961, when he took a position as a copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson agency.While with Doyle Dane Bernbach, Case worked with Tony Schwartz as part of the team that developed the "Daisy ad" for Johnson's 1964 campaign. Depicting a girl counting petals plucked from a daisy, the voiceover changes to a countdown that ends with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Case wrote the copy for another Johnson ad in which a man who says he had always been a Republican speaks to the camera for four minutes about his fear of Barry Goldwater being elected. Case worked for Nelson Rockefeller's successful bid for a third term as Governor of New York in the 1966 elections where he produced ads on pollution control, and he later worked on New York City mayoral bids by Robert F. Wagner and Bella Abzug.Case founded Jordan McGrath Case & Partners with Helmut Krone in 1969, operating out of a suite at the Plaza Hotel, with Pat McGrath joining shortly thereafter. A $500,000 campaign they nabbed that year for Angostura bitters was the agency's first commercial account. There he developed the "Thanks. I needed that." campaign for Mennen's Skin Bracer