Neil Kraft, Visionary Adman Who Sold ‘a Mood and a Lifestyle,’ Dies at 67

Neil Kraft, who oversaw advertising campaigns for Barneys New York, Esprit and Calvin Klein that pushed cultural boundaries — including one in which a young rapper named Marky Mark sported little more than a grin and a pair of Calvin Klein underwear — died on Sept. 6 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 67.

The cause was cancer, his son Marley said.

In the mid-1980s, Barneys was morphing from a high-end men’s store in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — far from the carriage-trade department stores uptown — into a luxury retail emporium. To promote the store’s new image as a fomenter of trends and a destination worth heading downtown for, the Pressmans, the family behind Barneys, created their own advertising agency.

They hired Mr. Kraft to run the shop — a young team that included Paula Greif, an art director who had been making music videos, and her friend Glenn O’Brien, the tart writer, editor and music critic. The work they created was groundbreaking for its time and emblematic of its fizzy 1980s moment.

For one television commercial, Ms. Greif and the photographer and director Peter Kagan, with whom she had made some of those music videos, shot the supermodel Paulina Porizkova dressing and going about her day as if she were in a French New Wave movie. They filmed it with Mr. Kagan’s Super 8 camera and set it to a soundtrack by two of Ms. Greif’s pals, the avant-garde musicians and downtown characters Arto Lindsay and Peter Scherer.

The commercial is grainy and mysterious — the Barneys logo doesn’t appear until the end — and the use of a Super 8 camera might have been a first for a TV ad.

“Neil saw that it would be cool, and it would blow people’s minds,” Ms. Greif said. “Which it did. He was a visionary at a visionary place. He had a great eye, and he was really open to doing things that were more artistic. He allowed people to do things.”

By late 1992 Mr. Kraft was at Calvin Klein, working on a campaign for men’s underwear. He and Mr. Klein had seen the young rapper Marky Mark — years before he became the actor known as Mark Wahlberg — on the cover of Rolling Stone, his black jeans hanging low enough to reveal a pair of Calvin Klein briefs, and they persuaded him to be their model.

In a series of photos and TV spots shot by Herb Ritts, he mugged for the camera, did a bit of ad-libbing — “The best protection against AIDS is to keep your Calvins on,” he said, snapping his waistband — and dallied with the model Kate Moss, both of them bare chested.

The work was sweet, sexy and ubiquitous: For months, the image of Marky Mark, wearing a grin and those underpants, loomed over Times Square from a billboard and was plastered on buses and bus shelters.

Mr. Kraft went on to other agencies before opening his own, KraftWorks NYC, in 2000. Over the years, he continued to work for Mr. Klein, overseeing campaigns like the rollout in 1994 of the unisex perfume CK One. In a series of TV and print ads shot by Steven Meisel, Ms. Moss and a gaggle of androgynous models danced and chatted and slouched about. Mr. Kraft also worked on ads for Obsession, featuring Ms. Moss, and Eternity, starring Christy Turlington and, later, Scarlett Johansson.

In the late 1990s, when Voss, the Norwegian water brand, came calling, Mr. Kraft told them, “You don’t need a campaign, you need a new bottle!” Which he gave them: a sleek glass cylinder with the company’s name, in all capital letters, running from bottom to top. Later, when Glaceau Smartwater approached him, Mr. Kraft kept the company’s bottle design but created a steamy campaign with Jennifer Aniston and Tom Brady (not together; they heated up separate ads).

Mr. Kraft did a lot of what the ad industry called point-of-purchase politics, incorporating social justice messaging into a sales pitch. For Esprit, a fashion company that was often quite political, the company queried thousands of consumers about how they would change the world and filmed the respondents who sent in postcards with their answers for a series of TV and print ads that appeared in 1991.

“I’d reverse the status of celebrities and educators,” one young woman said.

“Keep a woman’s right to choose … unless George Bush is free to babysit,” another replied.

For Planned Parenthood’s 100th anniversary in 2016, Mr. Kraft created Tumblr ads in which volunteers, patients and staff members shared their health care stories, on topics ranging from birth control to cancer screening to abortion. His varied pro bono work included creating the logo for the Coalition for the Homeless, featuring an open door and the organization’s title in lowercase letters — clean and simple.

Neil Franklin Kraft was born on Sept. 16, 1957, in Manhattan. His parents, Jules and Sonya (Cohn) Kraft, were in the garment business. His father, who was born Jules Kupferberg but changed his surname to Kraft when they married, imported handbags; his mother was a fur buyer.

To his father’s distress, Neil chose to study photography and film at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1978. “You’re going to be a wedding photographer,” he recalled his father saying. “You’ll never make any money!”

Mr. Kraft met Scott O’Neil at college, where she was studying ceramics. They moved to New York City after graduation and married in 1985.

In addition to their son Marley, she survives him, along with another son, Morrison; a daughter, Dylan Smith; a grandson, Hendrix Smith; and two siblings, Susan Kraft and Ronald Kraft. (His children were named for musicians Mr. Kraft loved: Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. His daughter has continued the tradition. Ms. O’Neil, as it happens, was named for F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

Mr. Kraft had his quirks. He could be curmudgeonly and opinionated. Extremely blunt. “Grumpy and lovable” is how Ms. Greif put it.

He hated clutter — and houseplants.

When a young art director at KraftWorks was given a small plant as a gift and parked it on her desk, Mr. Kraft phoned her (although it was an open office, and he was only a few desks away), demanding that she remove the offending botanical. And one evening after his staff had gone home, he swept through the office, clearing everyone’s desk of personal items and tchotchkes.

“Oy vey,” he said the next day. “This is a design shop!”