Bill Bernach changed the way advertising works, by what it countains, the people working in it and how they work:
Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics and verbal gymnastics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every word he puts down, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes make more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original theme or product advantage he has decided he must convey. ~ Bill Bernach.
Bill Bernbach’s name is synonymous with the revolution in advertising creativity that took place in the 1960s.
While ads played by accepted rules, those who created them were recruited from a rather closed fraternity of men who had been educated in Ivy League and other elite schools. Nearly all had white Anglo-Saxon establishment backgrounds. Few women held positions of importance in advertising at that time. Most were secretaries and administrative assistants. There were virtually no Jews, Italians, African Americans, or other “minorities.”
The Creative Revolution changed not only the ground rules for making advertising, but also the kinds of people who were recruited into the business. The kingpin of the revolution was Bill Bernbach, originally an advertising copywriter, who became one of the most charismatic and revered figures of 20th-century advertising. In retrospect, he may have been the single most important figure in 20th-century American advertising. Bernbach also opened recruitment policies of his agency (Doyle, Dane, Bernbach) to the most qualified people he could find, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. By the 1970s, other agencies began adopting his approach and policies.
[ William m o’barr. 2007. Creativity in Advertising. . Project Muse. [Online]. [4 October 2017]. Available from: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/227198]
Before the Creative revolution, the advertising industry was a very selective sector. Composed mostly of white men from prestigious school? Women would be either working as secretaries or in the administration and other minorities wouldn’t even have a chance to work in that field. William Bernbach and his agency (DDB) would look to people for their qualifications more than they gender and ethnic.
I think that a more diversified creative team makes it easier to develop different point of view and that way touch a broader audience.
It must have had a positive impact on the campaigns he worked for as Bernbach got the other agencies to follow his lead.
Bernbach’s genius lay in placing creativity before research. He abhorred rules and turned away from programmatic approaches to advertising. He believed that advertising needed to respect the public’s intelligence and communicate through simple, clear, and precise images and words. His work was often as witty as it was sophisticated. The ads he created for Volkswagen in the 1960s are typically cited as the most famous advertising campaign of the 20th century, and they are credited with transforming a German-made “people’s car” into an American icon. His stark black-and-white photographs of the car against white backgrounds broke all the conventional rules. His well chosen words, “Think Small” and “Lemon,” communicated forcefully.
Instead of simply presenting the product benefit, Bernbach’s advertising developed the product’s image. He positioned the Volkswagen as the anti-establishment, economic alternative to the gas guzzling cars Detroit was producing.
[ William m o’barr. 2007. Creativity in Advertising. . Project Muse. [Online]. [4 October 2017]. Available from: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/227198]
Bernbach changed the rules of advertising. While, at that time, advertising mainly consisted on putting as much information about the product as possible, Bernbach put more importance into the visual by mainly using a simple black and white picture and a witty catch sentence, leaving more white space and making it more minimalistic.
Advertising is in constant need to evolve, consumerism is making it so that more and more products are on the market and it became essential to be different and stand out. Stating the characteristics of a product doesn’t work anymore. We can see that nowadays, it isn’t the product itself that make it sell but the idea behind the product.
In another campaign for Levy’s Jewish Rye, he proposed what would today be called an inclusive approach. His ads for Levy’s communicated the simple message that “Jewish” rye bread could be enjoyed by people of all sorts. Today, this campaign would resonate with contemporary issues concerning diversity, but at the time it was revolutionary in that ethnicity was brought into advertising and spoken of in positive, inclusive language.
Bernbach articulated his philosophy of the preeminence of creativity over formulaic advertising in a memorandum to his company, “It is our belief that every other activity in our business is a prelude to the final performance, which is the ad.” The effect of this statement was to place creativity before the other services of an advertising agency — market research, media analysis, and other support functions.
[ William m o’barr. 2007. Creativity in Advertising. . Project Muse. [Online]. [4 October 2017]. Available from: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/227198]
As said before, advertising agencies were nearly exclusively composed of white male. Bernbach, being more open to the gender and ethnic background of his artistic team, imposed more diversity in his campaigns. And if nowadays it seems logical and ads are judged if not inclusive, in the 60’s it was unheard of.
It’s the idea that counts. As we can still see today, an advertising need to be creative and original to touch the public and the consumers. Finding THE idea is the main job in advertising. While before you could just put a drawing of a wheel, its price and where to buy it, nowadays you need a concept behind the product.
Bernach’s philosophy that the consumer is clever enough to understand that honest copy leads to an avoidance of puffery, clichés and heavy repetition. His creative approach is direct — he has pointed out that “you must be as simple, swift and as penetrating as possible”.The advertisement should be visually different and should stand out from others. Bernach asks the question “What is the use of sating all the right things in the world if nobody is going to read them? Nobody is going to read them if they are not saud with freshness, originality and imagination… if they are not, if you will, different”. A good example of DDB’s phylosophy is the Avis campaign. The “We try harder” campain admitted that Avis was number two to Hertz, but turned this factinto a big advantage for Avis by indicating that Avis would try harder because they were number two. A further advantage was that all Avis departments employees and services now had an objective, something to strive for: We try harder.
[ Koekemoer, L.K et al (2004). Marketing communications. South Africa: Juta Academic.]
Bernbach already understood how advertising works today. A strong visual and headline and only a minimal type body. Especially if the add ends up in the street, people don’t have time to read it and need to be able to recognise it quickly. Also, the consumer won’t remember what you wrote if it doesn’t have an impact. Here the we try harder is a strong baseline that is also recurrent in all the campaign. Marking the consumer in a long term.
Also they could turn they “bad” situation into a humorous one, provocation emotion in the consumer and making even more of an impact. A bit like making fun of the Beetle VW’s insect look by calling it a bug.
Bill Bernach established DDB (Doyle, Dane, Bernacht) in 1949, and the agency has been extremely successful. Traditionally it was accepted that a successful advertisement communicated a persuasive message. David Ogilvy’s first rule for copywriters was “what you say is more important than how you say it”. Bill Bernach, however, believes that execution is vital and that it can be just as important as what you say. Therefore, in the Bernacht style the execution dominates.
[ Koekemoer, L.K et al (2004). Marketing communications. South Africa: Juta Academic.]
In the 60’s, two main advertising philosophies were opposed. Bernach’s execution style and David Ogilvy’s idea that the content is more important than how it’s said.
In fact, we can see that Ogilvy’s adds contains a lot more text and all informational. The speed of the car, what was changed and when, the investment price and even how to use it. We all know that Bernach’s style is the one that survived today. Even at the time he understood that people weren’t buying the product only by how performant it is but that the first step was to get the public interested in the add. After all when more and more adds start appearing, the consumer doesn’t have time to read them all anymore. Advertising now consist on getting the future consumer intrigued into looking further into the product.
Unlike Featherstone, who implies a blanket embrace of new values by cultural intermediaries, Frank’s study argues that innovation occured in the minds of a few young creatives, who were particularly sensitive tot eh sentiments of their generation. One of these was Bill Bernbach of Doyle Dane Bernbach agency (DDB), who introduced designs that placed an emphasis on creativity, individuality, irreverence, and humor. The new style can be seen in his Volkswagen ads of the period. So powerful was the new format that it transformed a quintessential mass-produced vehicule into a product coveted as unique by those who otherwise loathed mass society. Such is the power of advertising to transform the “sign” and “referent”. Bernbach broke tried and true rules in order to create more anthentic advertising:
What made the VW ads seem ‘honest’ are the curious admissions of (what appear to be) errors with wich the ads are peppered. TYhe sedan is “ugly” and “looks like a beetle”; the VW station wagon is “a monster” that “looked like a shoe box” with “a flat face and square shape”…. To make such admissions, even counterbalanced as they were with humor (“Could it be that ours aren’t the funny looking cars, after all?”) was a violation of fundamental principles of salesmanship. (Frank 1997)
[ Leiss, W.L et al (2005). Social Communication in advertising: consumption in the mediated marketplace. (3rd ed.). New York: Routladge Taylor and Francis Group.]
William Bernbach understood that in advertising the most important is to be different and create ads that make you stand out. That more than the product, consumers are interested on the idea behind the product. In the VW ad, he played on the look of the car, so different from the cars in the US at that time. He accentuated that difference to make it stand out even more. You shouldn’t follow fashion and trend but make your product the new trend. People actually ended buying an ugly , bug-like,car and it was his major selling characteristic.
This is the beginning of the end of conventionnal advertising.[…] Dispensing the traditional art system, Bernbach teamed art director with copywriters and put them on equal terms. What Bernbach did is he said “Hey, graphic guy, do you want to support the copywriter?”. And that changed everything.
[ Selling the sixties. 2011. BBC Four. 23 November, 20:00]
Bernbach changed the way advertising was created by imagining the concept of creative team. By putting art directors and copywriters in teams of two, in equal terms, he augmented the creative aspect of their ads. The AD and copy would exchange ideas on create a link between the body copy and the visual. When before the visual would just be one of a car, to show the product, that way it could make as much a point if not more as the body. Bernbach made a big impact since that system is still the one used today in advertising agencies.
The true test of a great piece of advertising, for David&Goliath founder and chairman David Angelo, is something that’s timeless and resonates with people long after it’s been released into the world.
For Angelo, the perfect example is Avis’ “We Try Harder” campaign.
It debuted in 1962 when Avis was struggling to keep up with the №1 brand in the car rental category, Hertz. Avis turned to Doyle Dane Bernbach for help. The agency created a campaign that allowed Avis to not compete with its competitor, but embrace its second-place status.
Angelo, who chose “We Try Harder” as one of his three favorite campaigns ever, believes it was “one of the first real challenger brand campaigns out there, next to Volkswagen, of course.”
“If brands just had the courage to be authentic and own up to who they are and show their sort of shortcomings, I think people would be a lot more forgiving and would definitely, definitely step up and be ambassadors for the brand because of their honesty,” Angelo said.
[Katie Richards. 2017. How Avis Brilliantly Pioneered Underdog Advertising With ‘We Try Harder’. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.adweek.com/creativity/how-avis-brilliantly-pioneered-underdog-advertising-with-we-try-harder/]
Like the VW advertising with the bug-looking cars, in the Avis’ ad, Bernbach used the negative points of the product to make it stand out and make it a positive thing. Why lie? We all know that our car is ugly and that Avis is only second in car rental. And so what? That’s what make us different or try harder. That way they didn’t have to struggle against the styled cars and the people in first place anymore. I think it would have been more of a problem for them to finally get first place when their slogan worked so well.
Before Bernbach, copy-writer and artists didn’t even see each other. Their jobs were done separately and the copy didn’t have to take the creative part into accounts when writing the body copy that would however be part of the same finale work. When Bernbach put artists and writer together, he broke the rules of how advertising worked. By working that way, the ads became more creative and more cohesive. The two members of the team would exchange ideas and push their ideas even further. Moreover the working environment must have been more positive and more dynamic than when working by yourself, and it might be harder to get new ideas if you’re not exchanging with someone and get another point of view.
Sometime simplicity is more powerful in advertising than a very big and complex visual. When some art directors were still trying to keep ads complicated, Bernbach was encouraging creative teams in their more minimalist ideas and those are the ads that really had an impact at the time and won awards. Like for the Public Library ad, where the visual consist of only the alphabet in a simple type.
Bernbach was also really implicated in the work of the people working for him. He would come himself to their office and see what they were doing and gave advices if needed.
Daisy and the other ads were made by Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), an eclectic group of ad men at a medium-sized Madison Avenue firm with a stellar reputation for groundbreaking campaigns for Volkswagen and Avis. They didn’t set out to revolutionize political advertising; what they wanted to do was to break the established rules of political ads — then dominated by stodgy 30-minute speeches mixed with shorter policy-focused spots — by injecting creativity and emotion.
Bill Bernbach, the firm’s principal founder, had long maintained advertising was an art, not a science. He favored intuition. He often reminded his employees, “Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world, because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have an impact.”
Famously dismissive of advertising driven purely by research, Bernbach had written a revolutionary memo in 1947 that laid out the philosophy that would eventually characterize his firm’s work. “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art,” he brashly told his then-employer, Grey Advertising. “It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.”
[1- Robert Mann. 2016. How the “Daisy” Ad Changed Everything About Political Advertising. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-daisy-ad-changed-everything-about-political-advertising-180958741/]
Even in ads for serious matters like politics, Bernbach understood that advertising was an art and not only research. While political ads at that time were 30-minute long speech, he decided once again to break those self-imposed rules and create something short and based on emotion not observed fact. Bernbach didn’t see advertising as a science, where you’d take facts and write them down on a paper for people maybe read in the middle of other ads all the same. In advertising, you need to produce emotions be it fun like the Avis and VW ads or chock in the Daisy ad.
“I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.” — Bill Bernbach
After Bill Bernbach’s death in October 1982, Harper’s told its readers he “probably had a greater impact on American culture than any of the distinguished writers and artists who have appeared in the pages of Harper’s during the past 133 years.” Sixteen years later, Bernbach’s impact continues undiminished. And today he emerges as №1 on Advertising Age’s 20th century honor roll of advertising’s most influential people.
Was it only yesterday that a “new” Volkswagen Beetle campaign appeared, one that proudly recalls its Bernbach lineage? Talked to advertising’s creative stars lately? Or their mentors? It is still, “Bernbach, Bernbach, Bernbach.” His influence is alive and well and ready to help lead the industry through the 21st century.
“Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.” — Bill Bernbach
As the single most influential creative force in advertising’s history, Bernbach served as an inspiring father figure to some of advertising’s most brilliant talents. His copywriters and art directors lived for his approval, competed to make his blue eyes sparkle, to produce work that would earn a Bernbachian smile. “What did Bill think?” was the question his Doyle Dane Bernbach people and clients would ask when new work was shown. Bernbach ruled.
From June 1949, when DDB opened its doors, until leukemia claimed him, Bernbach “edited” with inspired assurance, with arrogance (“You can’t do this job if you’re not arrogant,” he said), with an open door, but without tantrum spikes. He had devised his art-copy team concept at Grey Advertising and brought to DDB a low-key, focused and dedicated management style that produced, along with pride, brilliant campaigns. The work endeared itself without resorting to advertising’s cutesy-poo gimmickry or cuddly icons.
[Ad Age. 1999. WILLIAM BERNBACH. [ONLINE] Available at: http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/william-bernbach/140180/]
Bernbach influenced many of nowadays creatives, not only during his life. He is the one that started pushing the limits and rules of advertising and that declared that to get recognised, and ad had to stand out. You need to be arrogant.
He was the first to pair up copy writers and art directors in team of two and was appliqued in the job they did which, while creating award-winning and successful campaigns, most importantly earned him the respect and the pride of the person he worked with.
Today still the creative teams work in duo to create innovative campaigns.
Bernbach’s revolutionary ideas about creativity and his keen insights into human nature gave birth to modern advertising. Before Bernbach, the high priests of advertising believed in rules. They tried to turn advertising into a science: They were of the same mind as Sidney Greenstreet in the 1947 classic film about advertising The Hucksters, when he said that the best way to sell soap was to “irritate, irritate, irritate” — the idea was to hammer the viewer into submission with commercials that irritated the consumer with overblown promises of “fast, fast, fast relief.”
But Bernbach said, “I warn you against believing advertising is a science.” And instead of hammering away, he won people over with humanity and good humor with spots like the famous “Mama Mia” Alka Seltzer one of the actor risking big time stomach upset by doing take after take of a spicy meatball commercial. In its time, it was revolutionary. Instead of lecturing, Bernbach engaged the viewer with a story everyone could identify with.
There were other great commercials including the famous “Funeral Cortege” commercial for Volkswagen narrated by the voice of the deceased reading his will and leaving very little to his wife and friends, and a significant fortune to his nephew, who was smart enough to drive a Volkswagen.
[https://www.ddb.com/blog/creativity/how-bernbach-changed-everythin/]
It isn’t enough to hammer an idea to a consumer until he buys a product like what advertising did. Emotions are much more powerful. And while repetition is still a big part in a campaign, the content need to be interesting and grab the prospect’s attention first, to touch them. Storytelling is one good example of it, you can transfer it into different medias and still grab people’s attention, make them interested. That what Bernbach did in “Mamma Mia” where the story brought the product in a context, by making people laugh and wonder for most of the video what the product could be.
“In the beginning,” adman pundit Jerry Della Femina has written, “there was Volkswagen. That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born.”
In an industry that is by its very nature contentious, there is hardly a soul who would disagree. “Lemon.” “Think Small.” The TV spot called “Funeral.” They weren’t the earliest salvos of the revolution, but they were — in their assiduously quiet way — the loudest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqcCqjrJ9HE
“Let us prove to the world,” wrote William Bernbach in his 1949 manifesto for the “creative revolution,” “that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.”
Did he ever, and the Beetle is Exhibit A. The air-cooled engine and the 34 miles per gallon were all well and good, but the droll, conversational, self-deprecating style of the copy was as important a feature as anything engineered in Wolfsburg.
To be amused by Koenig’s copy was to be flattered by it. The car that presented itself as the antidote to conspicuous consumption was itself the badge product for those who fancied themselves a cut above, or at least invulnerable to, the tacky blandishments of the hidden persuaders. “Think small” was thinking quite big, actually. The rounded fenders were, in effect, the biggest tail fins of all, for what Volkswagen sold with its seductive, disarming candor was nothing more lofty than conspicuously inconspicuous consumption. Beetle ownership allowed you to show off that you didn’t need to show off.
So, no, contrary to all existing thought on the subject, Mr. Bernbach’s creative revolution was not the overturning of ‘50s-era “motivational” manipulation. It was simply the most agreeable and effective expression of it.
[1- Bob Garfield. 1999. AD AGE ADVERTISING CENTURY: THE TOP 100 CAMPAIGNS. [ONLINE] Available at: http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/ad-age-advertising-century-top-100-campaigns/140918/]
Bernbach made a point that advertising was an art, and in no way a science. As such he accorded as much importance to the type and the art part of a campaign.
In the US in the 60’s, very much like nowadays, there was a style imposed. You had to have THAT type of car or look ridicule. And Bernbach had to sell just the opposite so he took it in front and said, “that car is ridicule and we know it well” and that’s actually what sold it. Because people got an opportunity to do different and not have to follow that model of perfection that some felt trapped in.
And then came Volkswagen, and the campaign Advertising Age named the best of the 20th century — the beginning of the change in how advertising was done.
What was so revolutionary about the ads for the Volkswagen Beetle? Some say it was the fact that Bernbach gave an everyman personality to a German car — a combination of a schlemiel and a mensch, as one writer put it. Be that as it may, all agree that the Beetle was given a disarmingly winning and loveable personality, almost human. It was the personality of the scrappy underdog that loves to take on the establishment with wit and self-deprecating humor–“Think Small” and “Lemon.” That personality, established more than fifty years ago, carried through well into the 21st century.
Bill Bernbach once said that “word of mouth is the best medium of all.” He and his early band of revolutionaries made advertising people talked about. And people are talking about it still. It was, indeed, the advertising that changed advertising.
[1- KEITH REINHARD. 2011. How Bernbach changed everything. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.ddb.com/blog/creativity/how-bernbach-changed-everythin/]
Bernbach took a simple car, ugly for the American standard, and made it something more. He made it a bug, alive in a certain way. He gave it a kind of personality, with its good sides and imperfections but always funny and true. Is it ugly? True. But is it compact and practical? True too. It made it charming, that weird little car. He made it so that people couldn’t help but notice it, find it different, be it good or bad. And when people notice, they talk about it. And for Bernbach that was one of the more successful form of advertising.