The Real Mad Men (12 page)

As a concept, it was a good one. The objective was a car designed to be uncomplicated, reliable, and inexpensive. It was to be within the reach of
every German family, to enjoy the new freedom of the burgeoning
autobahns
of the 1930s. The engine was air-cooled, as simple as a contemporary motorcycle engine. Mounting it in the back avoided the need for a transmission and the hump of a transmission tunnel on the floor between the rear seats, which made the car even simpler. It also created more room inside a comparatively small cabin. The floor pan, chassis, and suspension were equally uncomplicated.

It was this idea—a cheap utilitarian European car conceived for the 1930s working man and then built to carry servicemen around a war-blitzed country—that had to be sold to a nation used to soft suspension, plush upholstery, and powerful engines. Glamorous it wasn't. The potential for its success can be gauged from the reaction of Ford Motors, after it was offered the VW factory for free: “What we're being offered here isn't worth a damn!” Or British car executives, who could also have had the plant and designs for nothing: “The vehicle does not meet the fundamental technical requirement of a motorcar… it is quite unattractive to the average buyer.”

DDB had won the account from JM Mathes in 1958. VW's modest sales throughout the fifties were perhaps partly still generated by word of mouth, by the personnel returning from Germany, where the United States Army remained a visible presence. And there was a nascent market for smaller, imported European cars; there were a few enlightened motorists who were beginning to see through the smoke and mirrors of Detroit's annual model changes and built-in style obsolescence. In response, in 1959, Ford, Chrysler, and GM all decided to produce their own “compacts.” This burgeoning change in attitude, and the fact that most European cars performed poorly on America's highways and freeways, built as they were for smaller roads and shorter distances, meant that VW's market was now coming under threat.

So that year, Carl Hahn, who was in charge of VW in the United States, started to look for an advertising agency. He and Arthur Stanton, the New York area VW dealer, trawled up and down Madison Avenue, going to all the big agencies currently without a car account. Though the business was comparatively small, there was plenty of eager attention from the competing agencies.

Hahn hated the presentations, uniformly. Today he says, “It was the only disappointment I had about Americans… going up and down
Madison Avenue. The content of the proposed ads was always the same, a beautiful house, very happy people in front, beautifully dressed—and a glamorous car. Even that in most cases was not photographed but illustrated… with a stupid caption. But [they] didn't have [any] life. I had more and more presentations. I was desperate, I told Arthur this is just impossible, we need an agency that fits our product.”

It's unclear why DDB were not on Stanton's original pitch list as he was a fan of Ohrbach's advertising and was already using the agency for his dealership advertisements. But eventually he suggested a visit and Hahn agreed. He gives a fascinating insight into the difference between the conventional agency presentations of the time and the infinitely more laid back and candid DDB approach. Other agencies, and some clients, regarded DDB's refusal to prepare speculative work for a pitch as arrogant; DDB insisted it was honest. Until you really got to work on a client's business, how could you possibly know enough to do the right work?

“I went to these primitive offices, no big conference room or hall, no ten vice presidents in blue suits with neckties and white shirts, and executive vice presidents and senior vice presidents; there was just a man sitting on his desk in a windowless room, called Bill Bernbach by name, and he showed me work he'd done for El Al and more.… I decided what to do: offered for the first six months an advertising budget of half a million or so, which he accepted.”

BERNBACH CHOSE HELMUT KRONE
as art director and Julian Koenig as writer. Krone was a second generation German American who had once briefly owned a VW. Born in 1925, he is now enormously respected as one of the most influential art directors in US history, even though for thirty years—almost his entire working life—he worked only at DDB. He was fastidious and exacting in his work; he went to Germany several times to extract as much information as he could about the car. He believed that design in the service of a product should be indivisible from that product; the look and feel of the page, the attitude and body language of the artwork should reflect the attitude and body language of the product.

He also believed that including logos in ads was unimportant, a turn-off in fact, because as soon as a logo hits the retina it signals “advertisement” and thus becomes an invitation to turn the page. But that doesn't mean he was undisciplined or careless with his clients' problems; because of his belief in the indivisibility of “look” and “message” he would create for any client on whose account he worked a page layout that was instantly recognizable from twenty paces as uniquely theirs—even without their logo. It would also be a look that was universally applicable and workable; VW ads today, fifty years and literally millions of worldwide executions later, are still a recognizable reflection of his original template.

The layout for the VW campaign wasn't particularly original, but it does perfectly exemplify Krone's philosophy. In using a squared-up halftone photograph, a centered headline, and three columns of type, he was only sequestering what was then sarcastically known at DDB as the “Old JWT No. 1” or “The Ogilvy Layout,” referring to a lazily used hand-me-down layout found at agencies that were seen by DDB as creatively inferior. But the fact that it was well worn didn't deter Krone; the car was simple and uncluttered, and its pitch to the customer was direct and honest. Look at the ads on the following pages, right down to the choice of typeface—how else to describe their appearance other than uncluttered and honest?

WHERE KRONE DEPARTED
dramatically from the JWT/Ogilvy template was by taking this stripped down approach through to the photography. It was unheard of back then for almost any product, let alone a car, to appear naked of props, be they crunchy gravel settings in front of Connecticut country houses or doormen at plush Upper East Side apartments helping elegant women laden down with hat boxes. But the VW image was direct simplicity—so the ads also had to look simple and direct.

Krone was quiet, methodical, and unemotional. Some people found him difficult and moody. In Jack Dillon's novel
The Advertising Man
, written while Dillon was still working at DDB as a copywriter, he describes the first morning for his central character, copywriter Jim Bower. He's at his new “hot” agency, working with Brook Parker, the fictional Head of Art. After enduring a tense silence that goes on for nearly an hour while Parker sits stock-still, Bower tentatively suggests an idea for the ad they're supposed to be working on. For several seconds there's absolutely no reaction from Parker. Then, without shifting his gaze, he speaks: “We don't do ads like that here.”

Helmut Krone; “a brooding kind of genius.”

Very Helmut Krone. As was Krone's taciturn response to the novel, even though he hadn't been positively identified: “I would never have called myself Brook Parker.” Krone had a fanatical attention to detail and shared Gage's obsession with doing the original. Carl Fischer, a photographer Krone liked to work with, remembers a particular Polaroid shoot:

“On the first day the ad had to have ten children in it and we had carefully worked out all the ideas for the ten children. So we're out on a beach somewhere near LA with a whole bunch of account people, a bunch of copy people, a bunch of clients… and ten children and ten mothers (and ten teachers which is required in California) and the food people in these catering trucks—it was a major operation. And we all knew what we were supposed to do… but Helmut decided it's okay—but it should be better! So we stopped the shoot and sat down on the beach talking about how it could be better, as if all these people weren't standing around waiting. Really it was a disaster but finally we came up with something and the client was happy. But the point is that Helmut suffered through everything he did. It had to be better, it had to be perfect, it had to be original, it had to be done the way nobody had ever done it before and that's hard to do.”

Fischer liked him: “A lot of people said he was cold and remote and difficult to work with. I found him very easy… we got along very well.” Ted Shaine, a DDB art director describes him as “a brooding kind of genius, not very personable.” People put his remoteness down to a very tough childhood, apparently with a furiously strict father and, as he told Fischer, a mother who was a Nazi sympathizer.

“But he did have a sense of humor,” Fischer says, “it's just it needed to be discovered. I first met him at a cocktail party. In those days I had a trapdoor above my studio and I used to take a lot of pictures from high up, looking down either at 45 degrees or straight down. And Helmut and I were introduced and he looked me up and down and said, ‘I expected you to be a lot taller.'”

JULIAN KOENIG
, the writer, was the maverick type that often attracted Bernbach. Of comfortable birth into a family of lawyers, he nevertheless lived the life of the Bohemian nonconformist, at one time being part owner of a semiprofessional baseball team who played at a field in suburban Yonkers.

“This is just as TV was coming in to cover baseball and just as the color-line was fading in baseball because Jackie Robinson became the first black ball player back then—so we had a dream enterprise. It was semi-pro. We played good teams, a lot of whose players went to the majors. We had a big turnout on our first night, around six thousand people, but the city was viciously corrupt… never fulfilled their part of the bargain, which was to install toilet facilities. So you have the visions of women going under bushes and lifting their dresses. And once they do that they are never going to return.”

He became a copywriter in 1946 “for lack of anything else. I had written half a novel… which I sent to the Little Brown company, which was the firm that Norman Mailer had succeeded with. He had tried twenty-nine publishers, the thirtieth was Little Brown and they accepted
The Naked and the Dead
, so I figured I would skip the twenty-nine and go straight to Mailer's publisher, and I was rejected. I became a copywriter out of lack of any other opportunity. I'd been at law school prior to all that and I wasn't going back.”

Koenig's first agency was tiny, with small accounts. “I was a junior copywriter or an apprentice copywriter. My office was in the file room… and you learn that if you can work there, you can work anywhere. It was good discipline. I was hired for $20.50 a week, which was less than the $25 I had been promised. So we organized the agency's union, which I ended up leading. Then I left.”

By 1950 he was working and doing well at a bigger agency, Hirshon Garfield, but, in typical beatnik fashion, he suddenly gave it all up and traveled to Europe with his wife. It was an interesting time for a Jew to be in Germany. He remembers being at the beer festival in Munich, asking directions, and recalls with irony, “Nobody had ever heard of Dachau, which was ten minutes outside the city.”

They stayed for six months “until our money ran out… then I returned to Hirshon Garfield and was made copy chief and given a 50 percent
increase in salary.” However, he had had very little work published so he took a leave of absence to work on a book. The “book” wasn't of the literary type, it was for gambling on the horses. “I perfected my betting abilities. So I supported my wife and two children betting on the races. I had a horror of becoming the world's oldest working copywriter. I could have continued at the track because I would have made more money than I would have working in advertising—but I got offered a job at the one agency I wanted to work at, which was Doyle Dane Bernbach.”

Koenig's main claim to fame until then as a writer was a much-applauded campaign for Timex watches: “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” Amongst other “torture tests,” a Timex watch was immersed in the Dead Sea, put through a washing machine's spin cycle, and even hosted by the digestive tract of a family pet. But this wasn't the campaign that got him into DDB. He'd had a tip from Rita Seldon, a DDB writer he'd worked with previously, about a job going there. Bernbach looked through his book and, in the now regular pattern, hired him on the strength of an ad for a root beer that had been rejected by a previous client.