The Real Mad Men (17 page)

 

‘We're all here because of you. Everything we do is to please you.'

PEGGY OLSEN TO DON DRAPER MAD MEN

W
ithin the overall discipline that all advertising exists only to sell and everything else was secondary, the creative people at DDB were given complete freedom of the lay-out pad. During a 1965 interview on life at DDB, copywriter Ron Rosenfeld likened the agency to Summerhill, a leading progressive school in England. It was a touching analogy. Summerhill was almost free of rules, with a philosophy that allowed children to experience their full range of feelings. The school accepted that the freedom the children were given to make their own decisions always involved risk, and so allowed for mistakes to be made.

This was eerily reflective of Bernbach's attitude at DDB, and the fully-grown and otherwise hard-bitten creative people were almost dizzy with adulation of their teacher.

‘We were working for the approval of one person – Bill Bernbach,' says art director Bob Kuperman. ‘To get your ad pinned up on his “Best of the Month” board, they wanted that more than anything, more than any awards. They were only juries. But this was Bernbach.'

‘We did it to see Bill's eyes light up', said Bob Gage.

This near self-abasement had its material consequences. DDB were dreadful paymasters, knowing that people would take a cut in salary to work there. Kuperman turned down an offer from Delehanty, Kurnit &
Geller that would have trebled his salary. Later in the sixties, when the size borne of its very success became the seed of its own slow decline and DDB lost some of its passion, the creative people were surprised by how far they'd fallen behind in the salaries they could command.

But for the time being they didn't care. In return for their cultish submission within the Church of Bernbach they were granted holy status without. If you worked for DDB you moved in rarefied air, and you knew it. Jim Raniere, an art director, remembered the parties that production companies would throw around Christmas and holidays: ‘You go into this huge room with all the advertising people in New York going to dance and eat and Doyle Dane used to stand to one side, not mixing. I think we were, at that time, a little self-involved. Well, we were doing the work so we felt we were different from the way they were doing it.'

The work continued to dazzle. Coffee of Colombia was sold with bonhomie through a good-natured fictitious coffee grower, Juan Valdez. A campaign was created for the Jamaica Tourist Board that was as literary and elegant as anything Ogilvy had ever written for the British Tourist Authority. Some of the sly wit of Orbach's and VW showed through in a Chivas Regal campaign of such clever conviction that it turned an ordinary whisky into, in its own unashamed words, the ‘Chivas Regal of Whiskies'.

THE NEXT CAMPAIGN
to attract the same attention and admiration as Volkswagen was Avis. Robert ‘Bob' Townsend, a former American Express executive, had been appointed by banker Lazard Freres in a last ditch attempt to save the ailing car hire firm, which had been leaching money for eleven consecutive years. His approach was about as unconventional as his eventual advertising.

As Clive Challis reports in
Helmut Krone. The Book
, ‘Townsend dispensed with a secretary, fired the Avis public relations department, insisted that management undergo the same training as the field staff, cut meeting times by insisting that everybody stand up throughout them and later wrote the bestseller
Up the Organisation
. [It] went into several reprints and became something of a handbook for an alternative management style.'

When he called Bernbach to outline his problem and asked how they would work together, the answer he got was so extraordinary that Townsend wrote it down.

‘What you do is let us have 90 days to learn your business, and then you run every ad where we tell you to put it and just as we write it. You don't change a thing.' He then urged Townsend to call all DDB's existing clients for a recommendation and that was it – The Presentation. Take it or leave it. Townsend couldn't resist.

The writer assigned to the business was Paula Green. Born in California in 1927, she'd come to New York and got a job as secretary to the promotions manager of
True
, a men's magazine. He involved her in every aspect of magazine production, including writing. When he left she took his job but then went on to join the promotions department of Grey advertising, where she could write full time.

By 1956, DDB was already becoming an interesting agency and as she'd met Ned Doyle at Grey she gave him a call. He arranged for her to come in to meet Phyllis Robinson, after which she was hired. She was teamed up with Helmut Krone with whom she'd never been paired before. The relationship was not always harmonious – Green at one time threatened to resign over Krone's attempt at ‘improving' her copy – but between them they produced a campaign every bit as radical and successful as Krone and Koenig's VW work.

It was not dissimilar – candour was its heart, its impact and its leverage. The opening layouts were a direct reversal of the VW layout: big headlines and copy, small picture. There was one radical advertising departure – there was no logo. Krone predicted that the consistency of the distinctive look would bring brand recognition, and he was right.

As with the VW campaign, the agency capitalised on Avis's immediate apparent disadvantages. Far from hiding the fact that they were a distant second to Hertz in size, the team turned it into a potential benefit to the user. In the very first ad they asked the question, ‘Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us?' The answer was the campaign theme: ‘We try harder'.

To conventional contemporary advertising eyes ‘We're No. 2' was a shocking misjudgement, a page one error. Indeed, it failed research tests – 50 per cent of respondents said they didn't want to be associated with anything except number one. But Bernbach said it should run anyway; he argued that while ‘We're No. 2' had the more immediate impact, the irrefutable follow up logic of ‘We try harder' would soon become convincing.

Bottled sophistication; the Chivas Regal campaign by DDB ran from 1963 to 1970.

The Avis campaign by DDB (1962 to 1966), created by art director Helmut Krone, and with copywriters such as Paula Green and David Herzbrun.

The impact was undeniable. Fred Danzig, then a reporter on
Ad Age
, recalls that the opening ad came into the office on a Friday ‘and broke as a Last Minute News item in that Monday's issue. I remember how we gathered around the ad and simply went nuts… the audacity, the originality, the freshness, the life, the sassy spirit… It forever changed the way Madison Avenue – and the rest of us – communicated to the world.'

With short succinct copy, a succession of ads made the same point. As an idea, it was more than an advertising promise. By publicly claiming, and committing to, ‘We try harder', the service staff at Avis had to follow up. The organisation was dragged, almost shamed, into higher service levels by its advertising. In 1963, when the campaign started, Avis revenues were $35 million. The next year they were $44 million. To Townsend's credit, a $3.2 million loss was turned into a $3 million profit in a single year.

For DDB, honesty was clearly proving the best policy and at times the candour was absolute, as on the occasion when David Herzbrun and Helmut Krone sampled the Avis offering for a trip out to the company's Garden City headquarters. They were less than impressed with the car they were given and in two days produced the ad shown on the next page:

‘The writer of this ad rented an Avis car recently. Here's what I found:'

Townsend hated it. According to Herzbrun, ‘It went against everything he believed about how to do advertising. It was negative. It kept on being negative. “Right”, we said. “And we want to run it”.'

A compromise was reached. They could run it as long as they told him exactly where and when it was going to appear, so he could make sure he never saw it again.

Townsend himself took the trying harder promise to its limit. One ad headlined his real phone number for anyone with a complaint to ring him personally. In the history of service business it's difficult to imagine an example of a CEO demonstrating his commitment in a more direct way.

With Hertz publicly targeted in all but name there was bound to be an impact on the Number 1, but that was not necessarily Avis's aim. They
were just as happy to sweep up the custom from their competitors in third, fourth and fifth place, increasing their market share as number two. But it was hurting Hertz enough that by 1966 they felt they had to do something about it.

They called Carl Ally Inc.

CARL ALLY OPENED
for business in Manhattan on 25 June 1962. He was an account man, but not as anyone knew them, then or since. Amil Gargano, Ally's business partner for the best part of 30 years, describes the account people of the era as ‘… the Captains. They were the brass of the agency business and that's how they conducted themselves. They never took their jackets off, their sleeves were never rolled up, their ties were always straight. They were incredibly boring – and then in comes one with his shirt tails out, his fly open, his tie loose, his hair mussed up… An English major from Michigan who would quote Shakespeare and swear like a longshoreman in the same sentence… An incredibly colourful person – and people were captivated.'

Five foot seven, stockily built and pugnacious, Carl Ally (or the Terrible Turk as he liked to call himself) was born in Detroit in 1924 to an Italian-American mother and a Turkish father. A fighter pilot in Europe in World War II and in Korea, winning both a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Presidential Citation, he never quite left the barrack room behind, despite his searing articulacy and intellect. Erwin Ephron, a media department head, remembers Ally's short but devastating analysis to Hugh Hefner after a long and high-minded presentation on the quality of
Playboy
magazine's original fiction: ‘Fine Hef – but take the tits out and see what happens'. A young copywriter, proudly showing the first cut of a commercial with an elaborate narrative obscuring the sales message, was urged to re-edit with the terse critique ‘too much foreplay and not enough fucking'.

After Korea he went into advertising in a small Detroit agency before moving to Campbell Ewald, a bigger outfit made grand by its tenure of the General Motors account. But it wasn't long before he had one eye on the bigger opportunities for both him and the agency in their tiny New York office and he short-circuited the process of getting transferred with a startling piece of initiative.