Ha Ha Ha: He Laughs Best Who Laughs Last^217
Lou DorfsmanThe Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS) was the
foremost American television
network from the 1950 s to the
1980 s. No other network had
such intelligent news and
entertainment programming,
nor had earned such public
confidence. During its golden
years, the “CBS eye” was a
proud emblem that stood for a
reputation of service and
quality built by William Paley, founder and former CEO, and later, Frank
Stanton, former chief of the broadcast division. Yet even inherently great
programming required an equally great corporate image, an identity born of
memorable graphics and compelling advertising. It can be argued that if
not for the originality of its promotion CBS would have had to slug it out
much harder against ABC and NBC, whose advertising rarely reached the
same heights.
CBS management understood the value of a strong graphic
identity, which is why in 1937 Paley hired William Golden, who created the
venerable CBS trademark, and why after Golden’s death in 1959 Paley and
Stanton named Lou Dorfsman (b. 1918 ), then the promotion art director
of the radio division, to take his place. Dorfsman earned the job through
inspired trade advertising designed to sell advertisers on the viability of
radio at a time when television was decidedly the more compelling market.
Dorfsman was the engine that drove the company’s most
successful advertising campaigns, and ultimately its entire graphic design
program. He wrote much of his own copy and practiced the art of visual
persuasion with rare wit. What his ads lacked in typical hyperbole was
made up for in uncommon intelligence. He never lowered himself or his
company to hard-sell tactics. He was a master of the Big Idea, a conceptual
strategy characterized by understatement, self-mockery, and irony, and
noted for clean design and strident copywriting wed to intelligent
illustration and photography. In the more than forty years that Dorfsman
managed CBS’s visual identity there is not a single example where he used