Once in a while, someone challenges the status quo and changes an entire industry forever. Steve Jobs. The Beatles. Ali. They arrive with new ideas, energy and a fresh take on the way things are done. They become iconic.
Bill Bernbach was one of those people. Advertising Age listed him as Advertising’s most influential person of the 20th Century. After his death in 1982, Harper’s said that he “probably had a greater impact on American culture than any of the other distinguished writers and artists who had appeared in the pages of Harper’s during the past 133 years.”
Bernbach co-founded his agency exactly 70 years ago this week. In 1949 he left Grey Advertising, where he was the creative director, with 13 people and one account, the Ohrbach department store, to launch Doyle Dane Bernbach.
In the 1950s and 60s, there were two school of thoughts about advertising. David Ogilvy, who started his agency a year before Bernbach, believed that advertising is a science that relies on formula. For Bernbach, on the other hand, advertising was an art.
Some of his notable campaigns were “We Try Harder” for Avis; “Mikey” for Life Cereal; and “You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s,” for Levy’s Rye Bread.
But, more than any other ad, the 1959 “Think Small” ad for the Volkswagen Beetle transformed Advertising forever. Advertising Age named it the greatest campaign of the 20th century. The ad was created just as the 60’s counterculture, with its rejection of the establishment and abundant consumerism, started emerging. The Beetle became a symbol of that time.
In the 1950s and 60s cars were seen as fashion statements and testosterone boosters. They were built to be fast, big, stylish and the ultimate way to earn bragging points. The Volkswagen Beetle was a small, slow, ugly, foreign car but Doyle Dane turned it into an iconic piece of American pride. Amazingly, it wasn’t just any foreign car either. This was a post-WWII German vehicle.
The “Think Small” ad was created by writer Julian Koenig and art director Helmut Krone, but it was the Volkswagen advertising manager Helmut Schmitz who came up with the headline. He noticed a body copy line that read, “maybe we got so big because we thought small” and preferred it to the agency’s recommendation, “Willkommen.”
The text of the ad was minimalist, presenting the facts simply, but with an intelligent sense of humor that made readers feel like they were in on the joke. The art direction broke all the rules, from the idiosyncratic sans serif font, to placing a full stop at the end of the headline, and thus, forcing the reader to stop and think about what they had just read.
Krone hated using logos in his ads, and some of his other well-known campaigns such as those for Avis didn’t even have a logo. In this ad the logo was set in an unexpected place, between the columns, so it too reinforced the image that it’s not an ordinary ad. The car was shot in black and white and it created a stark and striking effect when it appeared among the colorful pages of Life Magazine.
Not only does “Think Small” continue to inspire Volkswagen advertising to this day, it ushered in a creative revolution in advertising that changed the world of marketing forever. Following the success of “Think Small,” an ad titled “Lemon” left a lasting legacy in America—the word “lemon” became a synonym for poor quality cars. The “Lemon” campaign introduced a famous tagline, “We pluck the lemons, you get the plums.”
Before Bernbach, Madison Avenue – and the advertising it produced – was Ivy League and WASP. He promoted greater diversity not just in the ads, but also with the people he hired – Jews, Italians, Irish, Greeks, everyone. Doyle Dane became defined by ethnicity. And, he mentored many women in his agency, notably Phyllis Robinson, who was the first copy chief of the agency, Paula Green, Diane Rothschild and, Mary Wells. I think he’d be very pleased to know that his agency is today headed by a woman, Wendy Clark.
In a 1949 manifesto for his new agency he wrote, “Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.” It is an important lesson to remember in an age when marketers and agencies are immersed in data and analytics. Advertising is still a business of great ideas. Or as Bernbach put it, “It may well be that creativity is the last unfair advantage we’re legally allowed to take over our competitors.”
