Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  Immediately, his closest associates assured me that he would never agree to inviting former DDB art directors and copywriters. What? Why not? Eyes rolled incredulously at my density. Surely I was aware of Bernbach’s unforgivingness towards those of his people who had taken jobs with competitors, or started their own agencies. I had better leave it alone, they warned. I couldn’t, so strongly did I feel about my proposal. I took it to Bernbach, who unhesitatingly approved—though he crossed a few names off the list I’d drawn up. The resulting event, a triumphant celebration, deserves a place of its own in this story, illuminating an unexpected passage in the fathers-and-sons saga of Bernbach’s life.

  The experience taught me that his closest associates had no more idea than I had of Bernbach’s “off-limits.” Yet that didn’t stop them from trying to protect him. From . . . what?

  * * *

  Much later, I pondered the words of an old DDB copywriter, recalling the early years, musing that “Bill was very, very sensitive, and you never knew when you were going to step on a sensitivity. Not meaning to. You watched your words. Not with Ned, and Ned doesn’t watch them with you. But with Bill, you weren’t sure at what point he might become upset, so that made it less easy.”

  By then, I had learned a great deal more about the roots of Bernbach’s sensitivities, and their entanglements with the image he had so carefully tended.

  As the agency’s fortunes changed, Bernbach had cause to worry about their effect on his own legend. The trial of his physical pain was made worse by concern about what would survive of what he had wrought. Yet he kept his private self sealed off. To hospital visitors in his final days, he would talk only about the agency and ads in production. Not a word about his leukemia. Not even to his sons.

  He’d managed to get clear through life without giving away any more of himself than he’d intended. Why not let it be?

  * * *

  Perhaps because those who are legendary do not get the last word on their lives. They try. The Hemingways and Sartres and Hellmans, the Warhols and Frank Lloyd Wrights and Man Rays and Langston Hugheses, re-create themselves in the images they desire, and hope the best parts stick when biographers start the job of untangling truth from fiction.

  And as Bernbach himself often told clients about advertising their products, “Nobody’s perfect, and nobody’s going to believe you if you claim to be.” Still, the prospect roiled my insides.

  I copied out another paragraph, this one from a New York Times Sunday Book Review article on Michael Holroyd’s long-awaited biography of George Bernard Shaw. “To Shaw—who rewrote portions of the biographies that appeared about him during his life—this new work would seem a betrayal. ‘When someone like Shaw is alive, he needs all possible protections,’ Mr. Holroyd said. ‘He needs sentimentality, prevarications, half-truths—which are necessary for all living people to get through all right. But when somebody dies, if we value them, we can then tell the truth about them insofar as that truth can be recaptured . . . If we have only lies and sentimentality as our picture of our heroes, we will be terribly misled as to what the facts of real life are, and being misled, I think we will become miserable.’”

  * * *

  And so, this is a story about images and reality, and how they affected the fate of the most celebrated agency in the Golden Age of Advertising, not so very long ago.

  1

  Bernbach’s Way

  “I doubt whether there is a single agency of any consequence which is not the lengthened shadow of one man.”—David Ogilvy

  Bill Bernbach—5’7" tops, shirtsleeves rolled up, smoking—walked through the art bullpen, his extraordinary blue eyes scanning the promise and deficiencies of the ads-in-progress pinned on the cluttered walls, his raspy Bronx-tinged voice shouting out to the art directors whose offices opened onto the bullpen.

  To one: “Can you get the picture bigger?”

  At other agencies, they always asked, “Can you make the picture smaller?” No visual was ever too big for Bernbach.

  And he’d call out to the writer.

  “Can you make this line a little shorter?”

  Or: “Throw out the whole first paragraph—why do you have to go through all that to get to the point? There’s your point.”

  As he edited, the work in progress began to shape into another one of those Doyle Dane Bernbach ads that were setting Madison Avenue on its ear. The creative team watched the transformation in a state halfway between awe for Bernbach’s editing genius, and resignation that the now-brilliant ad would, along its way to the outside world, become Bernbach’s possession.

  * * *

  That was part of the bargain, said an old agency hand, years later. He deserved it, said another, he made it possible.

  He opened their eyes and minds to new ways of looking at advertising. He introduced them to the integration of art and copy. He nurtured their idiosyncratic talents. And then—the final miracle—he took their work to the client and, with passion and conviction—sold it.

  In the environment he created, they produced ads that were a strong fresh wind—open, sweeping, funny, involving. The rest of Madison Avenue was still stuck in the past, writing ads in “advertisingese.” Product after product trumpeted as Amazing! or Most Amazing! or The Finest! Headlines proclaiming The Greatest!, The Most Fabulous Discovery Ever Made!, World’s Favorite!, Best!, Most!, and the omnipresent So New!, So Different!

  The illustrations that accompanied these puffing generalities often depicted users in one stage or another of “deep-down satisfaction,” women sensuously stroking their fluffier towels, dreamily reclining on their cleaner floors, rapturously showering with their gentle-yet-more-effective soap.

  That was advertising. In the words of one critic: “a too perfect marriage of the insignificant with the unbelievable.”

  Women, who had gone out into the world of factories and offices and the services during World War II, were streaming to the suburbs and a decade of trying to care about kitchen floors and fluffy towels. Very few actually felt the raptures expressed in the ads of that time.

  * * *

  Advertising became a big business around the turn of the century, with the rise of national magazines. Alert manufacturers foresaw that national advertising could vastly increase distribution and sales of their products. But the process took special skills and services. It required a writer to create a selling message. An artist to render the message in eye-catching fashion. Professional type-setting and illustration. A buyer to negotiate the purchase of space in each publication. On-time delivery of ad materials to meet publication deadlines. Thorough checking of how the ad reproduced, and insistence on make-goods where the quality was below-standard.

  Inevitably, all these operations coalesced into advertising agencies. The agencies grew with American businesses.

  Radio advertising, taking off in the late 1920s, greatly expanded the role of the agency. Copywriters could learn to write for the ear, and buyers of space in publications could learn time-buying. Then agencies entered the realm of programming, creating and producing shows on which clients with deep pockets advertised: the daytime soap operas and the nighttime favorites—among them the Maxwell House Showboat, the Kraft Music Hall, Lucky Strike Hit Parade, Jack Benny for Jell-O, Fred Allen for Sal Hepatica.

  The post-war years brought the explosion of television, and new fields of expertise at agencies. Quickly, the agencies that created the big radio shows geared up to produce what America would watch—the Texaco Star Theater, the Goodyear Television Playhouse, the U.S. Steel Hour, the Kraft Television Theater. The big agencies got bigger.

  When Doyle Dane Bernbach came onto the scene in 1949, the largest agency was J. Walter Thompson, handling a then-astonishing total of $130,000,000 in client billings. Young & Rubicam, second-largest, billed $92,000,000. BBDO, third with $87,000,000, was followed by N.W. Ayer with $79,000,000. Among the top ten, the smallest was Kenyon & Eckhardt, with $38,000,000. DDB’s first-year billings of $500,
000 barely made a blip in that league.

  To break into the top ten, an agency needed top names on its client list. A big three soap company (Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever). A great tobacco company (R.J.Reynolds, Philip Morris, American Tobacco, Lorillard). A major food producer (General Foods, General Mills, Quaker, Pillsbury). A big three car maker (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler). These were the big spenders, in print and broadcast, their slogans and jingles repetitiously drumming into the psyches of consumers.

  Doyle Dane Bernbach’s earliest clients were local retailers (Ohrbach’s, Hess Department Stores), clothing manufacturers (Wear-Right Gloves, BVD underwear), and ethnic food products (Levy’s bread, Hygrade all-beef kosher frankfurters). In Madison Avenue lingo, an agency with such clients was “Seventh Avenue,” i.e.Jewish.

  Such clients also meant that most of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s earliest work appeared in newspapers and on bus and subway posters in just a few large cities—most importantly for the future of advertising, in New York, where most of the industry’s writers and art directors worked, and watched, and took hope.

  * * *

  One day in 1949, a provocative ad caught the eye of New York Times readers.”LIBERAL TRADE –IN,” the ad, for Ohrbach’s stores, announced. “Bring in your wife and just a few dollars . . . and we will give you a new woman.” The artwork was big and bold. It showed a bouncy young man striding across and off the page, carrying (presumably out of Ohrbach’s) a well-tailored young woman under his arm, the way you would lug an elongated gift box. Like the man, she was smiling. Unlike the man, she was stiff as cardboard. In fact, she was cardboard, a cutout.

  Thirty years later, women’s groups might have blasted the ad. But in 1949 it was ground-breaking—fresh and funny and different, and more than only advertising people were showing it to one another.

  The look was new—the dominance of the photograph, and the way the man’s stride burst through the page. The feel was new—the way the words and pictures worked together, each making the other funnier. The sound was new—words that real people used, colloquial English.

  If it amused and entertained, it also sold, and hard. Its wit, after all, dressed up a very large promise: for a few dollars, you can look like a new woman. Rendered in humor and free of bombast, the claim seemed engaging, even credible.

  The ad, and others in a similar vein for Ohrbach’s, turned readers into friends, and friends into customers.

  Copy by Bernbach, art direction by Bob Gage, the man some said to be “the unrecognized piece of Bill Bernbach.”

  * * *

  You couldn’t live in New York and be unaware of the delightful new ads popping up around the town. The bus poster with an elegantly-gloved hand pulling the stop-requested cord, and the words, “Stop the bus with your Wear-Right Gloves.” Another poster for the same client, a standard “No Smoking” bus sign superimposed with a gloved hand fastidiously extinguishing a cigaret. The simple beauty of a brown paper bag of groceries against a white background, in a subway poster for Levy’s bread.

  Each was different from any commercial messages seen before, yet all bore marks of a shared heritage. Their source and their spirit were the teachings of William Bernbach.

  Make your ad big, bold, simple. Only one really important central image or visual to an ad. If the reader has to stop and think what is meant, the ad is not effective. Size and beauty give you impact. Clutter on a page is inelegant, and distracts. Taste matters. A page gives off a “feel” the moment the reader turns to it. The page can say “quality” or it can say “schlock.” Remember that the feel rubs off on the product. Everything on the page should say quality: the photograph, the type, the paper, the words.

  The most powerful element in selling is an insight into human nature, knowing the compulsions that drive a person. An ad must touch those emotions. Hit ’em in the heart, in the gut, in the funnybone, but hit ’em somewhere. You won’t touch them anywhere with a straightforward statement of your selling proposition. Knowing “the right thing” to say is only the take-off point. It’s how you say the right thing that counts. Only artistry and imagery can bring your message to memorable life. The plots that served Shakespeare were old hat when he appropriated them as armature for his own work. His poetry and insights into human nature gave his plays everlasting life.

  An ad should interrupt, startle, even shock the reader, else it will be lost in the torrent of messages and violent events of our times. It will sink into a morass unless you “do it different.” Not just once in a while, but every time, in every ad, on every product.

  If you do great work, we’ll sell it. Don’t worry about whether the client will accept it. If it’s really great, we’ll sell it. And Bernbach usually did, in the years remembered now as the Golden Age of Advertising.

  * * *

  Doyle Dane Bernbach opened its doors on June 1, 1949, exuberantly, joyously. “There was a spirit of high adventure,” remembered Phyllis Robinson, who left Grey Advertising with Bernbach, Ned Doyle and Bob Gage, to become copy chief of the new agency. “We were out, and free, and no one was telling us how to make ads.”

  “We wanted it to be the kind of place where we would like to work,” Doyle recalled. “An agency whose principles we could believe in. To be perfectly honest with the client. To give him the work we think he should have, provided it fit his goal. To be the experts in how to present the product to the public. Not to wonder what the client’s wife is going to say about the advertising.”

  That, at the time, was uncommon. In post-war America, advertising was seen as a business fit only for the shallow and unscrupulous. The image had its roots in the 1930s, when books and articles began to expose worthless, wasteful—even dangerous—products, and the half-truths and outright deceptions used to advertise such products. Frederic Wakeman’s best-selling novel, The Hucksters, only confirmed the public’s most cynical view of the advertising business, and gave it a name.

  To be sure, few clients were as tyrannical as the novel’s Evan L.Evans, and not every agency ate dirt. But every agency and every client knew who had the power. Clients played on agencies’ fear of losing business to make all kinds of demands, including, on occasion, women for the evening. Where one side holds the power, the other becomes adept at pandering and manipulation.

  Doyle Dane Bernbach came onto the scene with a fresh vision. Talent to do great advertising is as rare as any other artistic talent. When an agency has such talent, the power balance shifts. Fear diminishes; the atmospherics change. And so does the moral climate.

  Bernbach attracted and inspired and nurtured the talent. The readiness to dump troublesome clients was strictly Doyle’s. Together, they formed the image of Doyle Dane Bernbach. The great work, and the guts! It was an image that would bring worldwide admiration. In time, many would charge that it was tainted with arrogance. Some saw it as an image that lingered long after the reality had changed.

  * * *

  The lights burned late in the 1800 square feet of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s space at 350 Madison Avenue, a flight-and-a-half above the last elevator stop. The original three creatives (Bernbach, Robinson on copy, Gage on art), and the new hires that soon came on board, were breaking the old rules, knocking the stuffiness out of advertising. Nobody wanted to go home.

  “We were in love with our own brilliance,” remembered Robinson, a woman of radiant intelligence. “We just loved to work. We thought we were so wonderful and clever; we would do three ads when one would do. In many cases, it made good advertising sense, refreshing the message. But often when it didn’t make sense, when one ad could have run and run and run, we would make more and more because we loved to do them.

  “We loved to feel the juices flowing and to come up with yet another clever idea. We were dazzled by ourselves, and I think that’s part of what people came to think of as the arrogance of the agency. It wasn’t arrogance. We were supremely confident. Cocky is about as strong a word as you could put on it. But supremely confident
and enthusiastic and excited about our work, and I guess that was very new.”

  Bernbach showed the new hires how to work in copy/art teams. In other agencies, the copywriter wrote up all the words for an ad, then slipped the copy, with a sketch of a suggested layout, under the art director’s door. That’s how agencies wound up with ads that crowed “Most Fabulous Discovery Ever Made!” and illustrations of housewives mooning over their floors.

  But when copywriter and art director began an assignment together, the room crackled with ideas. Copywriters suggested visuals. Art directors dreamed up headlines. Words and pictures worked together to make a third, bigger, thing.

  Only after the client approved a sketch of the ad—headline, picture, and a grid of lines to show where the “body copy” would be—would body copy be written. “If an ad hasn’t got enough stopping power without all the little words,” said Bernbach, “no amount of talk is going to make people read it.”

  His creative people knew that Bernbach had no patience for writing “all the little words.” Outsiders assumed he wrote many of the words, big and little. That misconception played a role in the image vs. reality story of DDB.