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  Joel Raphaelson says, ‘David did little to correct the misconception that he was overly scientific about advertising. He simply didn’t like advertising that sold the creative more than it sold the product. He thought the things that some of the younger guys were doing were a little nutty. He knew the history of advertising and he understood what worked most of the time – and he felt that any professional should know that.’

  Rather than trying to turn advertising into an art form, Ogilvy strived to raise its professional status: ‘I think he failed in that effort, but it is one of the reasons he remains an honoured figure in the industry, even if others had a greater influence on the development of advertising.’

  Ogilvy played on his gentlemanly appearance – something his upscale clients liked. Yet he remained a salesman at heart, constantly promoting his agency in speeches, in books, and socially. Although he disliked cocktail parties, he forced himself to go to them, because he claimed he could ‘smell billings’. In the 75th-birthday interview with Viewpoint (the agency’s internal magazine) he recalled, ‘I once went to a… thing called the Scottish Council. They had a lunch in New York… And from that lunch I eventually got Shell, because Max Burns, then president of Shell, was at the lunch.’

  In fact it took another lunch, this time in London – where Ogilvy had flown to doorstep Burns after hearing that he’d sacked his existing agency – to secure the account. But the story does justice to the Ogilvy charm: and he claimed he got three other clients from the same event.

  Practically from day one, Ogilvy was approached by rival agencies with offers to buy him out. Over the years he fended off overtures from almost every big name in the business: Interpublic, J Walter Thompson, BBDO, Leo Burnett… ‘I guess the real fundamental reason was a rather personal one,’ he told Viewpoint. ‘I liked Ogilvy & Mather. I thought it was in the process of becoming the best damn agency in the history of the world. And I didn’t want to muddle it up with any other agency.’

  When WPP finally acquired the agency in 1989, Ogilvy took it as a personal affront. Yet he calmed down enough to accept the post of non-executive chairman, still unable to let go. He died in 1999, an advertising legend who began his career when he was almost 40.

  The science of selling

  In the process of establishing his agency, Ogilvy often spoke of the need to ‘reform’ advertising, well aware that people were as repelled by the business as they were fascinated by it. This was hardly surprising, given that thanks to TV they were being bombarded by more advertising messages than ever before.

  It also explained the success of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, which became a bestseller when it exposed the ‘motivational research’ techniques agencies were using to probe the minds of consumers. ‘Large-scale efforts are being made’, Packard warned, ‘to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes…’ He claimed that scientists were furnishing advertising agencies with ‘awesome tools’, with the result that ‘many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives’.

  One can almost hear the eerie wail of the Theremin on the soundtrack. Indeed, in retrospect the book makes amusing reading – rather like one of those paranoid 1950s B-movies in which white-coated scientists do battle with unconvincing aliens. (‘It was clearly all crap,’ chuckles John Hegarty, the British creative and co-founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty. ‘If everything in the book was true, we’d be able to sell anything to anybody.’) Yet The Hidden Persuaders was by no means pure fantasy. The father of motivational research was Ernest Dichter who, in the late 1930s, pioneered the use of ‘depth interviews’ to explore consumers’ attitudes to products. (Dichter’s work is said to have directly inspired a slogan for Ivory Soap, ‘Wash your troubles away’. Dirt, guilt, anxiety… you get the idea.) By the 1950s a number of agencies – McCann Erickson, Foote, Cone & Belding and Leo Burnett among them – were using motivational research techniques to hone their campaigns.

  McCann Erickson is thought to have been the first to hire psychological research staff. The agency developed a reputation for data-driven efficiency rather than creative flair under its post-war boss, Marion Harper Jr. This somewhat straight-laced man (don’t be fooled by the ‘Marion’) had joined the agency in 1939 as an office boy and worked his way up to head of research in just six years. Two years later, at the age of 32, he was placed at the helm of the agency by its founder, Harrison King McCann, who became chairman.

  McCann had started the agency – then called HK McCann – in 1911 when Standard Oil broke itself up at the behest of the US government, thus robbing him of his position as the company’s ad manager. His agency was effectively Standard Oil’s spun-off advertising department. Servicing companies formed from the scattered units of Standard, as well as important new clients like General Motors and Coca-Cola, McCann was able to expand rapidly into overseas markets, soon rivalling J Walter Thompson for global reach.

  McCann proclaimed himself a believer in ‘total marketing’, moving the agency into disciplines such as public relations and sales promotion. In 1930, the Depression pushed him to merge with the AW Erickson agency. Albert Erickson had gone into business in 1902 after leaving his job in the advertising office of a department store. Although his agency was a limited success, he made a fortune investing in other concerns – including the company that invented Technicolor film. Erickson died four years after the merger (The Advertising Century: adage.com/century/people).

  With McCann now in a largely symbolic role, Marion Harper could get stuck in to his mission to turn the agency into a super-efficient selling machine. He is said to have hung a Mexican painting of a cockfight in his office as a metaphor for the advertising business. He pushed for a greater emphasis on consumer psychology and buying motives, as well as carefully studying the effect of media placements on sales. As quoted by Stephen Fox in The Mirror Makers, Harper felt that advertising people should base their work on statistics rather than ‘skipping around the Maypole of creativity’. ‘Advertisers are not spending billions to decorate media,’ he said. ‘Their messages are not meant as ornaments.’

  This viewpoint gave Harper something in common with another notable 1950’s ad man – Rosser Reeves, David Ogilvy’s former mentor, now working at the Ted Bates agency. But Reeves had little time for motivational research or any other highfalutin’ theories about consumer behaviour. His overriding concern was getting his brands noticed amid the deluge of advertising that now swamped consumers. A strong proponent of Claude Hopkins’ theory that advertising was merely an embodiment of the hard sell, he developed the Unique Selling Proposition (USP): the single claim that separated a brand from its competitors. His ads were stripped down to this one message, with no creative frills, and repeated again and again. Indeed, he described elements that distracted the audience from the key message of an ad as ‘vampires’. At the end of each campaign, he would audit thousands of consumers across the country to see if they remembered the claim. More often than not, they did.

  In this manner, Reeves drove the success of the Ted Bates agency, which had been established in 1940 by the quietly spoken account executive whose name was on the door. They ran the agency together, but nobody was in any doubt about who possessed the most energy and charisma. Reeves published his theories in 1961 in a book called Reality in Advertising, which was the anti-Hidden Persuaders, crammed with common sense. ‘Advertising began as an art, and many advertising men want it to remain that way,’ he wrote, ‘a never-never land where they can say: this is right, because we feel it’s right.’

  But Reeves’ insistence on using advertising like a blunt instrument was at odds with his hidden, sensitive side. A chess fanatic with a huge library of books and a wide range of hobbies – including sailing and flying – he was another in the long line of copywriters who harboured dreams of writing the Great American Novel. Indeed, when he retired he wrote a book set in bohemian Greenwich Village – a
nd he wrote poetry throughout his life. An acquaintance described this hobby with considerable understatement as ‘surprising’.

  If the history of advertising has one overriding theme, it is this constant tug of war between two schools: the creatives, who believe art inspires consumers to buy; and the pragmatists, who sell based on facts and come armed with reams of research. In the 1950s, the antithesis of Rosser Reeves (and even of the gentlemanly David Ogilvy) was Bill Bernbach. His brash new agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, sparked the creative revolution.

  04

  Creative revolutionaries

  ‘Let us blaze new trails’

  ‘In the late fifties in New York if you talked about “Bill” you meant Bill Bernbach,’ writes Mary Wells Lawrence, recalling her days as a DDB employee before she set up her own agency (A Big Life in Advertising, 2002). Bernbach was a big noise in town because he’d set out to challenge the monolithic pre-war agencies that now dominated Madison Avenue. According to Wells, Bernbach felt that their ads had become ‘dishonest, boring, insulting – even insane’. He argued that the repetitive tactics of people like Rosser Reeves had reduced the industry to ‘one poor tired ad’ and that the giant agencies were ‘turning their creative people into mimeograph machines’. Unless advertising shook up its ideas, he warned, it would become invisible, with zero impact on consumers. And Bernbach wasn’t about to let that happen.

  Bernbach had left Grey Advertising to found his own agency with a clutch of fellow revolutionaries: Ned Doyle (an account man), Maxwell ‘Mac’ Dane (a promotions wizard), Bob Gage (an art director) and Phyllis Robinson (a copywriter). Bernbach himself was essentially a copywriter with a strong visual sense – but above all he was an ideas machine. In 1949, Doyle Dane Bernbach set up shop in the shadow of the big Madison Avenue agencies. It wouldn’t stay there for long.

  Not that Bernbach looked like somebody who was about to light a fire under an entire industry. Mary Wells Lawrence writes that he was ‘shorter than he sounded’ with ‘a wary half-smile, cow’s milk eyes, pale skin [and] soft shoulders’. But she confirms that his appearance was deceptive. ‘He communicated such a powerful inner presence that he mowed everyone around him down and out of sight. There was something volcanic; something unsettling going on… In his peak years many people were afraid of him.’

  Bernbach was born in The Bronx, New York, on 13 August 1911, to Rebecca and Jacob Bernbach. Although he liked to hint that he came from an underprivileged background – saying, for instance, that he had no middle name because his parents couldn’t afford one – in fact his family was solid and respectable. In the 1987 Bill Bernbach’s Book, written by his friend and ace DDB copywriter Bob Levenson, he is quoted as describing his father, a designer of women’s clothing, as ‘austere but elegant’.

  After attending public schools, Bill went to New York University, where he studied an unusual trio of subjects: music, business administration and philosophy. (Advertising is perhaps the only profession in which one might be expected to draw on knowledge of all three.) He also played the piano. Despite being ‘physically unprepossessing’, he was ‘bright, observant, articulate and could reasonably feel that he was a cut above many of the people around him’. This outsized ego – not uncommon among those with impressive minds lodged in inconvenient bodies – never deserted him. An oft-repeated joke about Bernbach has a colleague commenting on the day’s beautiful weather. ‘Thank you,’ says Bernbach.

  Bernbach got a job as a mail boy at the Schenley Distillers Company, where he wrote an impromptu ad for a brand called Schenley’s American Cream Whiskey, and personally delivered it to the firm’s advertising department. The ad ran, and Bernbach ensured that the company’s president, Lewis Rosenstiel, knew who had written it. Young Bernbach was promptly promoted to the advertising department. In 1939, he went to work as a copywriter for the New York World’s Fair. But he was far more influenced by his subsequent job, at the William H Weintraub agency, where he worked as a copywriter alongside the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand.

  Both the Weintraub agency and Rand himself were templates for the Doyle Dane Bernbach method. In 1941, William H Weintraub had created New York’s first ‘ethnic’ agency as an alternative to the overwhelmingly WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) Madison Avenue culture. Its accounts included Dubonnet, Revlon and Schenley Liquors – which probably explains how Bernbach ended up working there. Rand was the agency’s firebrand art director, who’d arrived at the age of 27 demanding (and getting) exclusive control of the art department. Influenced by cubism, constructivism and De Stijl, Rand bought a European sensibility to US graphic design. His images were crisp and uncluttered – in fact, disturbingly spartan by the standards of the day. (Much later he went on to design the IBM logo, among hundreds of other iconic images.) ‘Paul was the creative revolution,’ insists a fellow Weintraub designer in Steven Heller’s (2000) biography, Paul Rand. ‘It’s like Cezanne. After Cezanne came Braque and Picasso and they invented cubism. But everything started with Cezanne.’

  Highly unusually for the day, Bernbach worked in tandem with Rand, his lively copy rendering the art director’s images doubly effective. This was the birth of the ‘creative team’. At the lumbering traditional agencies, copywriters and art directors still worked in separate departments – often on different floors – trying gamely to crunch their words and images together with little or no discussion. But Rand and Bernbach developed concepts together from the beginning. When Bernbach opened his own agency, it was on this basis: copywriters and art directors working side by side.

  Although Bernbach and Rand were close friends at Weintraub, Madison Avenue legend has it that Bernbach’s mentor never forgave him for favouring photography in his ads over illustration. Rand was interested in aesthetics, while Bernbach was after impact.

  In the meantime, Bernbach had left Weintraub for military service. When he returned, he was hired by Grey Advertising, which had a similarly non-WASP, multi-ethnic makeup to that of Weintraub. Here he moved up from copy chief to vice-president and creative director ‘in a matter of months’, according to Bob Levenson, who explains Bernbach’s rise thus: ‘He was a visionary, with a visionary’s zeal. And he was a worrier. It was a killer combination.’

  At Grey he met art director Bob Gage, with whom he enjoyed the same meeting of minds and talents that he had experienced with Paul Rand. Gage felt it too, telling his wife that one day he expected to go into business with Bernbach. That moment came closer in May 1947, when Bernbach wrote a famous letter to his bosses at Grey: ‘I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness,’ he warned, ‘that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance… There are a lot of great technicians in advertising… But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art… Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.’

  As an ideology, it was sound enough. But not sound enough for Bernbach’s bosses, who appear to have ignored the letter. And so Bernbach decided to ‘blaze new trails’ with his own agency. He took with him a founding account – the department store Ohrbach’s – and a colleague, a Grey vice-president and account executive named Ned Doyle, with whom he had formed ‘a mutuality of respect’, in Doyle’s words. Later, Doyle was among the first people the aspiring young copywriter Mary Wells met when she arrived at DDB. She describes him as ‘as Irish as could be… a slender, older man with white-and-grey hair, cool eyes and a carved face’.

  Doyle brought in Maxwell Dane, at that point running a small agency of his own. Mac Dane had started his career as a secretary to the advertising manager of a New York retailer called Stern Brothers. After stints as retail promotion manager of the New York Evening Post and account executive and copywriter at the Dorland International agency, he became advertising and promotion manager of Look magazine, where he met Doyle. He then headed advertising and promotion at the radio station W
MCA (where he introduced the concept of news bulletins every hour on the hour, an innovation at the time), before starting his own agency in 1944. He now joined forces with his old friend without regret, and his cramped, walk-up premises on Madison Avenue became the new agency’s first home.

  And so Doyle Dane Bernbach was born. The lack of commas was another departure from the norm. ‘Nothing will ever come between us,’ Bernbach explained. ‘Not even punctuation.’

  The agency caught the rhythm of the time – it was more like a hip jazz combo than an advertising agency. Indeed, Bernbach once compared its work to that of the great jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. Calling the tune at the beginning was the department store boss NM Ohrbach: ‘uneducated, insecure and big’, as Bernbach described him. And yet it was Ohrbach, previously a Grey client, who had encouraged Bill to set up his own agency. He also agreed to pay for the store’s first campaigns up front so Doyle Dane Bernbach could cover its overheads. ‘Ohrbach was a brute of an entrepreneur, and Bernbach made Ohrbach’s cash registers ring,’ observes Bob Levenson. But the relationship was not without friction: ‘At least some of the steel in Bill’s blue eyes was hammered in the Ohrbach forge.’

  Nevertheless, Doyle Dane Bernbach turned out a series of arresting images for Ohrbach’s, all serving the store’s brand positioning of high fashion at accessible prices. One of the most famous features was a man carrying a cardboard cut-out of his wife under his arm; ‘Bring in your wife, and for just a few dollars we’ll give you a new woman,’ says the copy. A slam-bang image and witty text in perfect equilibrium – that was the DDB style. It was powered by the snappy writing of Phyllis Robinson and the spacious design of Bob Gage, arguably the first modern art director in advertising.