Adman Philip Dusenberry dies

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: Philip B Dusenberry, the advertising executive who oversaw the 1980s Pepsi commercial in which Michael Jackson’s hair was accidentally set on fire, died at his home in Manhattan. He was 71.

The cause of his death was lung cancer, for which he had received treatment for a year, according to Roy Elvove, a spokesman for the advertising firm BBDO.

Dusenberry oversaw the teams at BBDO, an ad agency in the Omnicom Group, that coined famous taglines like The choice of a new generation for Pepsi, We bring good things to life for GE and It’s everywhere you want to be for Visa. Throughout his career, Dusenberry emphasised entertainment in TV ad spots, believing that human stories were more attention-grabbing than product details.

“I’m always going to be searching for emotion,” Dusenberry said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. “In an age when most products aren’t very different, the difference is often in the way people feel about the product.”

In one Pepsi commercial that attracted national attention in 1985, Geraldine A Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic nominee for vice-president, sat with her two daughters and talked about life.

He rose to prominence at BBDO in the 1980s, when he was executive creative director. The advertising industry began a wave of consolidations during those years, and many executives were afraid that the trend might hurt creativity. Dusenberry, on the other hand, supported the idea of mergers. “Bigness is not an enemy,” he told The Times in 1986.

Dusenberry was an early advocate of using cinematic techniques and special effects in TV spots, and he often cast celebrities in ads.

Dusenberry’s focus on advertising as entertainment was prescient of future shifts in advertising. Today, many advertising agencies promote advertainment, commercials that are entertaining in their own right and are sought out by consumers rather than avoided.

Dusenberry is survived by his wife, Susan; a stepson, Ben Procter; a daughter-in-law, Ilana Sparrow; a brother, Harry, and his wife, Marcy; a brother, Joseph; a sister, Jean Driscoll, and her husband, Jack.