Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle

by Andrea Hiott

  The illustration in this Volkswagen ad makes wonderful use of Detroit’s technique of creating interest in a new, completely changed model by covering it with a piece of cloth. The suspicion, of course, is that Volkswagen is not contemplating a change. But then the first line of copy shatters the easy assumption. “The answer,” it says quite simply and candidly, “is yes.” How can you avoid reading further? When you do, of course, you learn that Volkswagen is constantly making changes—little changes that improve the car without transforming it in appearance … [then it quotes the original ad again] “The Volkswagen has changed completely over the past eleven years but not in its heart or face.”2

  Is Volkswagen contemplating a change? The early Time magazine ad that Julian and Helmut created for Volkswagen. (photo credit 51.1)

  The ad simply stated what Julian had noticed on his trip to Wolfsburg: the car never changed, but was constantly improving. He’d played on that knowledge but had given the writing, as the author above suggests, the feeling of a surprise or a mistake so that one had to read on and solve the puzzle. But he’d also given the plain honest truth. Nothing to boost the reader’s ego, other than the fact that the ad assumed people were smart enough to get the twist. The article in Advertising Age goes on:

  This copy is so simple, believable, straightforward. No excitement. Just sheer, honest communication. It didn’t need research to make it that way. Just one human being interested in making himself clear to other human beings. Too bad most advertising can’t be made as clear and direct. The answer lies in the human beings that write the ads—and pay for them.3

  The piece generated only the smallest of waves, but from it, one can see how different DDB’s approach was, how Julian had absorbed the proceedings at Wolfsburg and used them to create a new voice and tone, one that had never been seen before, even at DDB. What he had done, in retrospect, looks so simple. He even says so himself: “We had conspicuous4 obsolescence going on in every other car model in the world and here was this thing that doesn’t change.” Now, the ad looks somewhat obvious. But Detroit’s “conspicuous obsolescence” was hardly obvious at the time. In any case, this was the first ad to run in Life, but it wasn’t the first ad they’d made. The first ad they’d made would be the ninth Volkswagen ad to appear in Life magazine, but it would go down in history as the DDB shot heard ’round the world.

  It was late spring 1959 and George and Julian had just returned from their trip to Wolfsburg. Julian and Helmut sat down together in Helmut’s office on the twenty-fifth floor of the DDB offices, cigarette smoke drifting out the door and down the halls. Observing New York after Europe, Julian could acutely feel the difference: The culture felt very aggressive. Part of the aggressive feeling came from the mentality of thinking big, a kind of mad and endless grasping for more. What if they stopped thinking the answer was always in more? What if they started noticing the details again, looking at the little things?

  In the first ad, Koenig went against every rule in the DDB book (he evolved a style he’d admired and would later attribute to a rival of Bill’s named David Ogilvy) and wrote some of the longest copy in the history of DDB. He did it in a childlike cadence that no other ad executive would have dared use. It was a simple, honest little story:

  Ten years ago,5 the first Volkswagens were imported into the United States. These strange little cars with their beetle shapes were almost unknown. All they had to recommend them was 32 miles to the gallon (regular gas, regular driving), an aluminum air-cooled rear engine that would go 70 mph all day without strain, sensible size for a family and a sensible price tag too. Beetles multiply; so do Volkswagens … Volkswagens snub nose is now familiar in fifty states of the Union, as American as apple strudel. In fact, your VW6 may well be made with Pittsburgh steel stamped out on Chicago presses (even the power for the Volkswagen plant is supplied by coal from the U.S.A.) … As any VW owner will tell you, Volkswagen service is excellent and it is everywhere. Parts are plentiful, prices low … Today in the U.S.A. and 119 other countries, Volkswagens are sold faster than they can be made. Volkswagen has become the world’s fifth largest automotive manufacturer by thinking small. More and more people are doing the same.

  That was the first copy of the first Volkswagen ad. It was a tone that would be used for decades of advertising to come.

  Helmut cringed when he read it, shaking his head and saying, “I suppose that means you want me to make the image small, like a little beetle?”7 As far as Helmut was concerned, the last thing the American consumer was capable of in the 1950s was “thinking small.” But Julian held firm. He knew Helmut well enough by then to know that his resistance to the idea was not what it seemed: Sometimes, the more Helmut liked copy, the more he’d criticize it. Helmut would later say that he always gave what was wanted, but never what was expected. Working on that account, Helmut explained, they all knew that the biggest sin would be to tell a lie, to say anything that was not true. And the car was small. And simple. These things were true.

  A typical car and a typical ad from 1960. Cars were made as big and wide as possible, and the ads were full of beautiful people enjoying their leisure time. (photo credit 51.2)

  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.

  Think small, the ad that became DDB’s “shot heard ’round the world.” (photo credit 51.3)

  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 bestselle
r. 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.

  It’s ugly but it gets you there—DDB ads often took what seemed to be a product’s weakness and turned it into a strength. (photo credit 52.1)

  Volkswagen could now compete with the Big Three, selling as many as 500,000 cars in a single season. In the year the DDB ad ran, sales of the Volkswagen increased 37 percent while other European carmakers experienced a 27 percent decrease in export sales. One year later the small car represented 46 percent of all automobile imports to the United States and Volkswagen became the third largest automobile manufacturer in the world. By 1961, 5 million VWs had been produced, and Nordhoff and the factory in Wolfsburg were churning out as many as 1 million a year. At the height of production, Volkswagen would be producing one car every four seconds—a huge difference between the one car every 300 hours that had been the case when Nordhoff first came on board. By 1968 the Beetle had become the best-selling vehicle in any country anywhere. Five years later, it would also surpass Henry Ford’s 15 million Model T sales record and be the first car to ever reach the 20 million mark.

  Workers at the factory celebrate as the one millionth Volkswagen comes off the line. Nordhoff stands in front of the car, lit by the spotlight. (photo credit 52.2)

  For Volkswagen and DDB, it was a mutual success. Bill was soon known as the “prophet of Madison Avenue.” Young men and women flocked to join DDB and learn from him. In the world of advertising, the movement that formed around Bill became known as the “Creative Revolution,” and in the rest
of America, the sixties had truly arrived. The wave of “thinking strange” that Bill Bernbach and Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan and others like them had felt building, and had helped to build, was finally breaking. As the tide of the 1960s washed over the country, both Bill and the Beetle became stars. Soon there wasn’t an advertising party in the city that Helmut, George, and Julian could go to without being asked for their “Bernbach stories” or their artistic advice.

  Bill never changed a word of Julian’s Volkswagen copy; even when others in the agency objected to it, Bill stood by him. In an interview, Bill said: “What I try to do with a creative person6 is to take the talent that is his—his, not mine—and then help to sharpen and discipline that natural gift to make it as effective as possible.” But what Bill didn’t expect was that some of those creative people would eventually want to try to make it on their own, and in some cases, that would mean having to leave him. In many ways, however, it would be this very “desertion” that would solidify Bill’s success.

  In the course of the 1960s, the Volkswagen became a symbol of the counterculture. Flowers and peace signs were painted all over it. It was taken to concerts and demonstrations. Along with its little brother, the VW Bus, it was driven to California and back on hundreds of freewheeling road trips. The hippies thought of it as a child, a friend, looking as “alive” as it did with its big headlights, soft curves, and shy profile. As John Muir, a famous Volkswagen mechanic known for his ability to “heal” Beetles, wrote: “While the levels of logic of the human entity are many and varied, your car operates on one simple level and it’s up to you to understand its trip.1… The type of life your car contains differs from yours by time scale, logic level and conceptual anomalies but is ‘Life’ nonetheless.” In that spirit, the garage had become the bedroom where the little car slept. By 1969, the time when Muir wrote those words, the Beetle was well established as an American icon, having grown up alongside its drivers.