Thinking Small (56 page)

So Helmut gave Julian his “dour, Buster Keaton face” and went to work on a graphic for Julian’s idea, opening up the space on the paper so the whole ad was practically a blank space. He put a very small Volkswagen Beetle in the upper left side of a sea-sized white paper. He used the most basic sans serif typeface to fit Koenig’s words. He made paragraphs out of single sentences. He used full stops. He left a lot of empty blocks and
widows.

David Ogilvy had written thirteen rules of what an ad should be in terms of composition and layout. Helmut took those rules and did just the opposite. As he later said, “I [did] my damnedest to break as many of these rules as possible. When Ogilvy said that the text always should be put in an antique typography, I put it in a grotesque one. When he said that the logo always
should be clearly exposed, I’d hidden
it … I think I managed to break seven of his rules.” Actually, it was nine. Helmut had just created a layout that would revolutionize advertising.

Later Helmut revealed that he’d wanted the ad to be “Gertrude Steiny,” meaning he wanted it to resonate almost as an error would, going about it in a way that didn’t make sense, just like Bill and Doyle and Dane had done by choosing their punctuationless name. When George saw the ad, he told Helmut he needed to fix the widows and get rid of all those jumbled visual stops and starts.
You’re probably right,
Helmut said,
It’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever done.
“He always told everyone in the office that he hated it,” George said. But even so, Helmut didn’t change a thing; though he did think that his whole career was going to be ruined once it came out. He was so miserable, in fact, that when he heard the ad was going to appear in
Life,
he
departed for St. Thomas so that he would be far away from New York City when it
hit.

But what about the headline? Julian had wanted it to be “Think Small,” picking up on the two words from the copy. Helmut, however, could not be convinced of such a thing; it was too strange, too contrary to the climate of the culture, too much. Since the art director always had final say on the headline, Julian had to give in. The two finally decided on the rather snide
Wilkommen
(Welcome). There are some ideas, however, that seem to keep rising
to the surface no matter how many times they get rejected: When the ad was taken into a meeting with the German reps from VW to get it approved, the German man working on the account read the text and honed in on those same two words: Think Small. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the header!”
⁸
Helmut reluctantly admitted it to Julian:
“Stick with me, Helmut, and you’re going to be famous,” Julian joked. Still, even in their wildest imaginations, they could not have predicted what would happen next.

When Think Small hit
the pages of
Life
magazine in February 1960, it was as if Julian and Helmut had written a bestseller. The contrast between it and other automobile ads of the time was so striking that it left an indelible imprint. Some people carried the ad around with them, showed it to friends over lunch, passed it around like a good book, even cut the ad out and hung it on their walls. They bought
that issue of
Life
just to see (and own) the one Volkswagen ad. For the first time in a long time, there was an ad that truly got people’s attention, rousing their imaginations and their spirit. And it held their attention, day after day after day. It was as if the ad had been the switch to turn on a collective lightbulb in people’s minds:
We don’t have to think
big,
people realized. “We were describing a small
car,” Julian later said about the Think Small copy, “[In that context], the ad wasn’t earth shattering …” But it was. It expressed a sentiment that many people were feeling but didn’t know how to say.

The people who didn’t hesitate were the young; it garnered a sort of cult following in the way an indie rock band does before it goes mainstream. It was the college kids who first understood the VW ad campaign, tacking the ads to their dorm walls. And their love for it makes sense. This was, after all, the generation that had grown up in the 1950s, watching their parents playing the “pretend everything is OK” game. It felt good to be spoken to
clearly and honestly for a change.

The Think Small ad was a tangible symbol of a new spirit, but it was only the most revolutionary (and thus the most remembered) ad of what was in reality a very large campaign. Another of the more resonant ads of that campaign was one that Julian and Helmut created in April 1960, the Lemon ad. In it, with the help of another DDB copywriter named Rita Selden, Julian used another lesson he’d learned in Wolfsburg: No car made it out the door without having been
inspected, and then inspected again. Wolfsburg inspectors were certainly interested in noticing the details. The Lemon ad showed a perfectly fine looking VW, polished and shiny, but the copy read: “This little car missed the boat.
¹
The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn’t have noticed
it.…” The ad goes on to say that there are more inspectors at Volkswagen than there are cars produced daily: It’s all about that German Quality Work.

The VW campaign would eventually spread to television as well, with equally famous spots like “Funeral” and “Snowplough,” all of which are now popular videos on YouTube. Every ad in the DDB Volkswagen campaign stuck to Julian’s tone—bluntly honest and witty—and Helmut’s simple, clean design. It was the first time an ad campaign had become a topic that everyone in the country was talking about.

DDB’s Volkswagen campaign is considered to this day to be
the best ad campaign ever conceived. At the end of the 1990s,
Advertising Age
listed it as number one in the Century’s Top 100 advertising campaigns. And as Jerry Della Femina, “the pundit of advertising,” once said, “In the beginning,
there was Volkswagen.
²
That’s the first campaign that everyone can trace back and say ‘That is where the changeover began.’ That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born.”

The reaction on Madison Avenue was slightly different. The other advertisers noticed the campaign, to be sure, but they hesitated about it. They weren’t sure about the design, the text, or the ads’ simplicity. Think Small hit national magazines in 1960, but the ad itself had been created nearly a year before, just after George and Julian had come back from Wolfsburg. It had run in a small local paper at the time, but had received little professional
notice. And when the 1959 annual advertising awards rolled around, it was another agency’s advertising for Renault that won: that ad showed a car with balloons flying out of the open sunroof. “This was voted the best car advertising from my peers,” says Julian. “So much for my peers.” But at the Art Directors Club, DDB did win some awards. Much to Helmut Krone’s dismay, George Lois won
three
of them: one for the Matzo ad that
he’d hung out a Brooklyn window to get approved; another for a campaign for men’s ties; and the third for, well, the Volkswagen bus.

George’s Volkswagen ad, one of his first for the company, showed a large family sitting very comfortably on an all-white background, positioned as though in a car. On the next page, readers saw that same family, and the same layout, except, the viewer realized, the people were not floating in white space, but they were sitting inside the VW Bus.

It wasn’t long before Madison Avenue took notice of Lemon and Think small. The public, led by the young, had embraced the VW campaign, so they had to embrace it too. The effect was profound at DDB. Their budget, and their reputation, grew extensively in a matter of months. Soon they were known as one of the best ad agencies in New York. After Think small, anyone
who was spending money on advertising was begging whatever agency they were at to
come up with the next Volkswagen campaign. DDB rose to the coveted top ten list of profitable advertising agencies, and would stay there for over a decade, dominating the awards for art and copy in that decade, and often voted Best Agency in the industry’s polls.

The impact left everyone at DDB clinging to their desks, for fear they might float away in all the enthusiasm they were generating. This was before “Where’s the beef?” and before “Got Milk?” No ad had caught the public’s imagination in such a way.

Julian had been joking when he’d told Helmut, Stick with me and you’ll be famous, but now it had come to pass. Those who knew Helmut would later remark that the success of that campaign—the risk he took with it, and the fact that it was a German car that he’d traveled “home” to meet—had a profound impact on him. He relaxed into himself a bit. “Bud” was fully Helmut now.
³
And Julian? Well, Julian tried to shrug it all off. “I’m just a writer of short sentences,”
⁴
he later said.

With the success of the Volkswagen advertising, so too came a giant wave of success for the little car itself. When the big Detroit automotive companies began doing research about what it was about the VW that had made it so popular so fast, the words they came up with were the very same words Bill had used to prompt his team in making their ads: The car was “sophisticated, witty, truthful, and to the point.”

The VW truly was the People’s Car. According to Ford biographer Douglas Brinkley, the Volkswagen was a “modern version of the Model T” because it “helped to open car ownership to people who might not have been able to afford a new car otherwise,”
⁵
by giving them the opportunity of owning a new car for the same price that most
American manufacturers sold used ones. It also made owning a new car an option for the young: Kids going away to college could work summer jobs and save up enough money to buy and maintain a Bug.