Hal Riney retires to great agency in the sky at 75

A different kind of agency. A different kind of adman.

Ad legend Hal Patrick Riney died from oesophagal cancer March 24 at the age of 75. 

He began his career at BBDO, before moving on to Ogilvy and then founding Hal Riney & Partners in 1985. He has left us memorable campaigns such as Saturns strategy "a different kind of company, a different kind of car" the two old men who were Bartles and Jaymes, and even Reagan's 1984 campaign.

Trvia: In this bear ad you can hear Hal Riney's own raspy voice - because he did the voiceover. 

Jeff Goodby has written a long obit in adweek. 

Ronald Reagan had Riney to thank for setting the positive tone of his 1984 re-election campaign, which ranked No. 43 on Advertising Age’s list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the century. It was Riney’s gravelly voice that could be heard intoning, “It’s morning again in America” in Reagan’s iconic commercial.

Riney went against conventional wisdom in creating the ad. Rather than attacking Reagan’s challenger, Walter Mondale, Riney compiled clips of happy and hopeful Americans moving into new homes, getting married and proudly raising flags.

“I was told at the time that the only kind of political advertising that worked was negative advertising, where you lied about your opponent’s faults,” Riney said in a 2002 presentation at San Francisco’s Academy of Art College. “And I went to Washington, D.C., and I listened to the researchers talk about negative advertising for two days, then came home and sat at the bar here in my office for two hours and wrote what I thought would be a better presidential campaign.”

Hal Riney 1932-2008

Riney won hundreds of advertising awards throughout his career. Advertising Age named Hal Riney & Partners the agency of the year in 1993 and ranked him No. 30 on a list of the top 100 ad figures of the 20th century. In 2002, he was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame.