[Earth Day has been around for more than 50 years, but it’s more important than ever here in 2026. So for this year’s commemorations I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the folks who helped create & popularize the holiday, leading up to a special weekend tribute to the work of two of our most impressive young environmental activists!]
On two ways to contextualize the ad man who came up with “Earth Day.”
According to an email that yesterday’s subject Denis Hayes sent to journalist and podcaster Sarah Koenig after her father Julian’s death in 2014 (the email is quoted in that hyperlinked New York Times obituary), Julian was the sole creator of the name “Earth Day” for that first 1970 celebration. The event was initially going to be known by the far clunkier title “Environmental Teach-In,” but Koenig, perhaps the biggest name in advertising at the time (and for at least a decade before as I’ll detail below), reached out to offer his services. “Give me a few days,” he told Hayes, and, as Hayes tells it, “A few days later we received a set of tear sheets for a full-page newspaper ad to announce the campaign. He offered a bunch of possible names—Earth Day, Ecology Day, Environment Day, E Day—but he made it quite clear that we would be idiots if we didn’t choose Earth Day.” Fortunately Hayes and his colleagues agreed, and it seems undeniable that the catchy name played a role in making this occasion as prominent and enduring as it was and remains.
It’s important to make sure that Koenig gets that full credit, not only because it’s generally an industry in which ideas can be copied or borrowed or stolen, but also because he specifically had a lifelong fight with a former partner about that partner’s alleged thefts. That hyperlinked podcast episode in which his daughter Sarah details the complex contexts behind that feud is entitled “Mad Man,” and I think that’s a very telling title. For one thing, Koenig was one of the biggest ad copywriters in America throughout the 1960s, and we now have a famous and influential cultural character and text that represent that role and world (if, in ways that I trace in that post, I find somewhat historically and culturally frustrating). And for another thing, two of the most consistent themes in Mad Men (at least those that deal with the community as a whole, rather than Don Draper individually) are getting credit for great ideas (something that Elizabeth Moss’s Peggy Olson particularly struggles with) and the fraught rivalries between both individuals and companies. Given those issues, in the profession and in Koenig’s personal story, it’s especially striking that Koenig apparently offered his services to Hayes et al freely and, y’know, freely.
But at the same time, maybe it’s not that striking, but Koenig was an ad man with a knack for the personal and intimate touch. His “Think Small” ad and corresponding campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle in 1959 (co-created with his colleague at the time Helmut Krone) was revolutionary for many reasons, but I would argue it was especially significant as an early example of the kinds of counter-cultural perspectives and narratives that would come to dominate the next decade, offering a small but powerful moment of resistance to dominant 1950s visions of cars, ads, and America alike. Given that it was that seemingly small ad which made Koenig the towering figure in the industry that he would be throughout the 1960s, it adds a wonderful layer to his work for Earth Day when we learn that the celebration was scheduled for Koenig’s birthday (April 22) and that he thought of the phrase in part because it rhymes with “birthday.”
Next Earth Day figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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