The Real Mad Men (9 page)

The sheer vivacity and freshness in the work they started to produce reflected the childlike euphoria in the first few years of the agency. Phyllis Robinson later said, ‘We all had, including Bill, the feeling that we were let out of school – you know, no more teachers, no more books… a tremendous feeling of freedom, just for starters.'

Behind every famous campaign there's usually an open-minded client, deserving recognition at least for judgment, taste and, quite often, bravery. The easy, comfortable solution is to do what you've done before, what everyone else is doing; the far-sighted client knows this is the worst solution. Nathan Ohrbach was one such client.

Encouraging and applauding his advertising teams to come up with fresh and original thinking, it showed in his choice of agency; he'd employed Weintraub in the mid forties, then moved the account to Grey when Bernbach started doing interesting work there. Finally, like a commercial Medici, he encouraged and backed the breakaway. It paid off. His business grew, enabling expansion into suburban New York, Newark, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

OHRBACH'S ADVERTISING
already had some fame around town as one of the more noticeable and radical pieces of retail work, and this was boosted early in the agency's life by the ad that one could argue marked the start of the Creative Revolution. To today's sensibilities it may seem patronising and condescending, but those were different times and it gained attention through its very playfulness.

Ohrbach's advertising created by DDB in the late 1950s.

A man is carrying a grinning woman under his arm, flat like a cardboard cutout, with the headline ‘Liberal Trade-in. Bring in your wife and just a few dollars… and we'll give you a new woman'.

The idea was Bernbach's – described by Gage as ‘the most visual copywriter I ever worked with' – but the copy was left to Phyllis Robinson to write. (Bill was now mostly concerned with ideas and headlines, others could do the ‘wiggly bits', the actual body copy.)

The message of the ad is loud and clear: new fashionable clothes a complete makeover at bargain prices. But the novelty was in the way it was said, a key DDB attribute, playing with the
notion
of advertising by borrowing language from elsewhere – auto sales for example – and applying it here to your wife. Intriguing and entertaining the reader, but all the while selling.

In the same year, 1952, the headline ‘If you are over or under 35… you need SNIAGRAB (spell it backwards)', over a picture of a white-coated man pointing straight at you, spoofed another style of advertising, this time pharmaceutical. But the idea was not so much satirising other ads as having fun with the whole notion of buying and selling and advertising, a conspiratorial wink between seller and buyer.

A few years later, in 1959, they produced another startling ad, in which a cat wearing a fashionable hat and smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder makes catty remarks about a friend behind her back, revealing that she isn't as wealthy as she seems – she achieves the illusion by, shocking to reveal, shopping at Ohrbach's!

Ohrbach's was like a client magnet for DDB. Other New York businesses looking for an agency would ask around to find who did the advertising and then approach DDB to handle their account. In fact, in the following decade DDB rarely, if ever, made a formal new business presentation, as often as not being approached by clients rather than the other way round.

ONE INTERESTED ENQUIRY
came from Whitey Rubin, put in charge of a small Jewish bakery in Brooklyn by its bank in a last-ditch attempt to turn the business around and keep it from bankruptcy.
For 30 years they had traded successfully selling bagels, onion rolls and challahs to an almost exclusively Jewish clientele. The problem arose when the company extended its range to a variety of breads baked to appeal to a wider market. The Jews didn't like it and the gentiles didn't know about it. Quoted in Robert Glatzer's
The New Advertising
, on his first sampling of the new breads Bernbach said, ‘Mr Rubin, no Jew would eat your bread. If you want more business, we have to advertise to the
goyim
[non-Jews].'

So the initial original thought by DDB for Levy's was a media idea, concentrating exclusively on a specific market. Next, they contradicted the received wisdom that good bread must be soft, and they began to promote the nourishing values of Levy's Oven Krust White Bread with a series of intelligently but simply-argued ads. One asked ‘Are you buying a bread or a bed' and another, against a drawing of a fat child contrasting with an athletic child, ‘Is his bread a filler-upper or a builder-upper?' This was good hard-working stuff, and a slow improvement in sales followed.

Then Phyllis Robinson wrote a radio campaign around a small boy whose mother continually tried to correct his faulty pronunciation of ‘Wevy's Cimmimum Waisin Bwead'. His pay-off line, ‘I wuv Wevy's', became a catchphrase, boosting Levy's name recognition and fame. But the taste of things to come was an ambitious claim, with a simple layout graphically illustrating the thought: over three pictures of the same piece of rye bread, quickly disappearing as bites are taken out of it, were the words ‘New York… is eating… it up!'

New York certainly started nibbling. It was advertised as ‘Levy's real Jewish Rye', itself a little contrived as there's nothing particularly Jewish about rye bread. And Rubin, anxious about anti-Semitism, couldn't initially understand why its Jewish provenance needed to be flagged up at all. ‘For God's sake', countered Bernbach, ‘your name is Levy's. They're not going to mistake you for a High Episcopalian.'

In the increasingly worldly and sophisticated market that New York had become, maybe that touch of exoticism was exactly what the brand needed. What came next, created by writer Judy Protas and Bill Taubin, generally reckoned to be one of the very best of DDB's earlier art directors, reinforced and amplified that exoticism. In one large picture and one
simple line they linked one minority – the Jews – to all the other emerging minorities making their presence felt.

Subway passengers became aware of posters with large, engaging pictures of the people you'd least expect chewing through a hunk of Levy's. And if they looked authentic, that's because they were authentic. Howard Zieff, the photographer, who went on to direct some of the very best commercials of the sixties before starting a new career as a Hollywood director recalls, ‘We wanted normal-looking people, not blonde, perfectly proportioned models. I saw the Indian on the street; he was an engineer for the New York Central. The Chinese guy worked in a restaurant near my midtown Manhattan office. And the kid we found in Harlem. They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces.'

It would be easy now to dismiss the whole campaign as stereotypical, even condescending, but not then – far from it. These ads were startling for the simple reason that such people weren't usually seen starring in advertising. New Yorkers revelled in it, demanding copies of the Levy's posters as well as the bread. It reflected and celebrated their contemporary multi-culturalism, and for the immigrants it helped ‘normalise' their status simply by making them seem an accepted, normal part of society.

It is a wonderfully simple idea, little more than the strategy, photographed. Yet within it you can find all the unique hallmarks of a DDB campaign: wit, surprise, freshness, fun, simplicity, directness, a credible promise – and again that knowing but friendly nod and wink towards the consumer.

THIS, IN ESSENCE
, was what was so different about DDB. The new graphics, the design, the choice of typefaces, the style of copy – all are fascinating in their own right, but in the end they're not the answer, just part of the means to the end. What these ads were doing was signalling a changed relationship between those who would sell and those who would buy. A relationship based not just on respect for the people's taste but for their intelligence and ability to discern what really mattered in their lives from the purely transitory.

To a client, his product is life and death, something that if only the wilful public would try, they'd realise would change the course of their lives; but to a busy housewife or commuter, it's often no more than an irksome purchase on the way to something else. DDB had the honesty to recognise this, and the candour and skill to communicate that recognition, making the potential buyer an ally rather than a target. ‘The artist rules the audience by turning them into accomplices', as Arthur Koestler put it.

1964–5, DDB's ‘You don't have to be Jewish…' campaign for Levy's, a huge commercial and cultural success.

Bill Bernbach's people, without impudence but based on self-respect and a belief in their ability to communicate properly with the public, ended the slavish deference towards the client and the product. Bernbach recalled a conversation with a new business prospect: ‘“What would you say, Bill, if you were told exactly where to put the logo and what size it would be [on the advertisement]?” I had $10 million riding on my answer and I said, “I would say we're the wrong agency for you”.'

It wasn't a question of either Reeves' hard sell or Ogilvy's respectful but rule-based formulaic sell. It took the best of both and shucked off the remains. As Bob Gage had observed, no DDB ad would ever be created without a rigid consumer proposition at its centre, the philosophy at the heart of Reeves' USP idea. And no DDB ad would ever be created without deep respect, not just for the consumer's intelligence, but also the consumer's true priorities. Bill Bernbach stopped selling dreams and started selling the truth – wrapped in wit.