The Real Mad Men (11 page)

For Polaroid, the first camera to produce a print within 60 seconds of the picture being taken, DDB produced several campaigns, each as radical as any advertising the public had ever seen. The previous agency, BBDO, had completely missed the point and produced messy, uninspiring work based on a mishmash of propositions, including price, which served only to make the product look a cheap gimmick.

On taking over the account in 1954, DDB zeroed in on the product benefit with a ‘live' TV campaign that appeared on Steve Allen's
The Tonight Show
. During the transmission Allen would take a picture on stage, maybe walking into the stalls to snap a member of the audience, and then talk about the camera while the picture developed. Showing the print to the audience was like the climax and reveal of a conjuring trick, always eliciting applause. How simple, direct and desirable, to have an unsolicited live TV audience applaud your product on national TV.

Then, in 1957, Polaroid introduced a highly sensitive black and white film, and again dramatic simplicity did the trick. The art director, Helmut Krone, hired fashion photographer Bert Stern to take tight close-up pictures of characterful faces, some known and some anonymous. In full-page ads, these dominated the page: every pore, every line, every shadow clear and faithful. Simple copy by Bill Casey told you all you needed to know with the minimum of fuss. There's seldom been a better example of letting a good product sell itself.

ANOTHER TREND
in DDB's work started to become noticeable. In contrast to the rigid laws on the use of space laid down by Ogilvy, DDB art directors were quite prepared to play with the imagery, with the page itself, to make the point visually. If advertising had always been regarded as sales talk in print, DDB was frequently doing demonstration in print.

To dramatise Flexalum dirt-resistant window blinds, Bernbach suggested a picture of a tennis ball bouncing off the slats. In another campaign, Helmut Krone showed a photo of a gift-wrapped package in a thin vertical space up the side of a page of
Life
magazine. When the reader held the page up to the light, as invited ‘for an X-ray peek at a great gift', they saw a bottle of Ancient Age (‘If you can find a better bourbon, buy it'), apparently on the inside. It was illustrated on the reverse side of the page and showed through in the light.

1958 DDB ads for Polaroid, featuring Salvador Dalí and Louis Armstrong. Instant picture, instant success.

You got the point at one glance in one of DDB's greatest-ever ads, opposite, when Bill Taubin tore a strip off a picture of the sea to advertise a new faster service from New York to Tel Aviv for El Al Airlines. The way the ad worked on the eye was the demonstration itself. El Al's budget was relatively small, a fraction of that of even most domestic airlines and DDB could have imitated the approach of all other carriers, using little more than flight schedules printed on the page, with no attempt at any personality. But with El Al, they went further than just new visual ideas – there was a new verbal excursion as well.

El Al was one of Bernbach's many Jewish accounts. While it wasn't remarkable that they should have so many, what was remarkable was the way they handled their Jewishness. Far from hiding it, as Whitey Rubin of Levy's had been inclined to do, DDB celebrated it, and wrote their ads in Borscht Belt idiom. A full page advert with a picture of Noah's Ark made the point: ‘We've been in the travel business a long time', a terrific example of how words can take off from the picture to make a further point.

While the Italians were infiltrating the art department, it's difficult to overemphasise the role the Jewish writer and Jewish idiom played in the Creative Revolution. If you look at the roster of the artists, architects, designers, musicians and particularly writers who were illuminating the fifties, you'll see an extraordinary percentage of Jews. It had its effect; the Yiddish vernacular and Jewish humour were creeping into the New Yorkers' daily language. Few advertising agencies, dominated as they were by pallid WASP values or an incipient Anglophilia, had seemed to notice it, but as DDB's doors were open to the immigrant and the Jew, the people who lived and breathed these things, it was only natural that it would end up in their work.

SO ON THE VERY VERGE
of the 1960s, from many and varied directions, apparently unrelated circumstances converge. We can connect them. In the world's greatest modern city, a massive economic expansion creates a huge need for the raw product of the advertising business, the ads themselves. The audience for this outburst is a demographically younger, newly wealthy and curious American, on the edge of a consumer boom – and thoroughly tired of the advertising it's been fed. A brand new medium is sweeping the country and revolutionising advertising practice, bringing with it opportunity and the chance to experiment.

Understanding the market and the idioms, the El Al Airlines ad campaign, from 1958 to 1970, was among DDB's very best work.

The doors of a few agencies are being opened to a completely new breed of creative person, one who sees no value in looking back, and who demands to do things in a radically new way. The images and references that will influence their work crackle around in their heads, fizzing from one of the greatest cultural eruptions the world has seen.

In one agency, DDB, those same people are given greater autonomy and prestige, and a new way of working together, which not only overturns the nature of their output but doubles their influence within the business. This financially successful, creatively-led agency is no unproven flash in the pan; for ten years now it has been proving that research does not know everything and, as Bernbach recognised publicly, cannot be used to come up with ideas. That, as his agency had slowly been proving, is the job of these new creative people.

As these circumstances converged, intertwined, coalesced and reformed, it was time for those creative people to take control.

 

“They did one last year, the same kind of smirk. Remember,
Think Small
. It was a half-page ad on a full-page buy. You could barely see the product.”

HARRY CRANE MAD MEN

T
he most famous part of the most famous campaign was born out of accident and confusion. At least half of the creative team who conceived it had doubts—and if it hadn't been for the intervention of the client, one of the greatest ads ever written would never have been created.

The task was utterly daunting; to sell a small, basic, ugly, economical, foreign car to a market enthralled with huge, chrome-finned, gadget-stuffed, home-built gas guzzlers. Initially, a number of the people who worked on the Volkswagen (VW) account had misgivings. With the revelations of the full horrors of the Holocaust little more than a decade old, Bernbach, although clearly not bothered himself, had to make considerable effort to persuade his agency to take the account in the first place. As George Lois said, “We have to sell a Nazi car in a Jewish town.” Lois' parents had emigrated to the US from central Greece before the war, and he was implacable in his opposition; tales of Axis behavior in Greece hadn't endeared him to any idea of cooperation.

Additionally, the business was at DDB only as a sprat to catch a mackerel; one of Bernbach's attempts at talking Lois around was to tell him, “We'll take it for just a year and use it to get GM.” It's probable he meant it too; it seems a perfectly reasonable business decision, if a little cynical. And it
worked later in a different category—their much lauded campaign for El Al netted American Airlines in 1962.

Lois remained unpersuaded, but international events took a hand. He was sitting in his office one day: “It had those fogged glass windows and I could see Bill lurking outside. Then he opened the door a crack and stuck his head round the corner, like in
The Shining
—'Heeeere's Johnny!'—and said, ‘Look at this'. Then he shoved a newspaper through the gap and held it up so I could read the headline; ‘Germany sells fighter jets to Israel'. He said ‘It's alright, see?' So eventually I agreed.”

Discontent rumbled on though. Lois remembers one prank when he made a small “flip” book with a VW logo on the bottom of the first right-hand page. As you flipped the pages, the legs and arms of the VW symbol quickly and neatly rearranged themselves—into a swastika.

He was showing it to a bunch of creative people when Bernbach walked by. “Hey Bill, Bill, hey, come here, have a look at this.”

Bernbach watched the little dance of digits, expressionless.

“Very funny George—now burn it.”

Lois went to work on the station wagon, the even less glamorous variant and only alternative to the basic “saloon.” “Basic” is the operative word for the then very alien VW.

THE BEETLE
—although not referred to as such by VW until the late sixties—already had a toehold in the United States, thanks to US servicemen returning from Europe. It was originally designed by Ferdinand Porsche as the KdFWagen (
Kraft durch Freude Wagen
, literally “Strength through Joy Car”) in 1933, under the patronage of no less than Adolf Hitler. By September 1939 mass production had still not started, and then with the outbreak of hostilities across Europe, the VW Wolfsburg factory was converted to wartime vehicle production. It wasn't until the war was over that the first models started to leave the plant, when the factory was restored to car manufacture under the management of two British army officers, Colonel Charles Radclyffe and Major Ivan Hirst, producing cars for the transportation of the occupying forces.