The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  Encouraging and applauding his advertising teams to come up with fresh and original thinking, it showed in his choice of agency; he’d employed Weintraub in the mid forties, then moved the account to Grey when Bernbach started doing interesting work there. Finally, like a commercial Medici, he encouraged and backed the breakaway. It paid off. His business grew, enabling expansion into suburban New York, Newark, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

  OHRBACH’S ADVERTISING already had some fame around town as one of the more noticeable and radical pieces of retail work, and this was boosted early in the agency’s life by the ad that one could argue marked the start of the Creative Revolution. To today’s sensibilities it may seem patronising and condescending, but those were different times and it gained attention through its very playfulness.

  Ohrbach’s advertising created by DDB in the late 1950s.

  A man is carrying a grinning woman under his arm, flat like a cardboard cutout, with the headline ‘Liberal Trade-in. Bring in your wife and just a few dollars… and we’ll give you a new woman’.

  The idea was Bernbach’s – described by Gage as ‘the most visual copywriter I ever worked with’ – but the copy was left to Phyllis Robinson to write. (Bill was now mostly concerned with ideas and headlines, others could do the ‘wiggly bits’, the actual body copy.)

  The message of the ad is loud and clear: new fashionable clothes a complete makeover at bargain prices. But the novelty was in the way it was said, a key DDB attribute, playing with the notion of advertising by borrowing language from elsewhere – auto sales for example – and applying it here to your wife. Intriguing and entertaining the reader, but all the while selling.

  In the same year, 1952, the headline ‘If you are over or under 35… you need SNIAGRAB (spell it backwards)’, over a picture of a white-coated man pointing straight at you, spoofed another style of advertising, this time pharmaceutical. But the idea was not so much satirising other ads as having fun with the whole notion of buying and selling and advertising, a conspiratorial wink between seller and buyer.

  A few years later, in 1959, they produced another startling ad, in which a cat wearing a fashionable hat and smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder makes catty remarks about a friend behind her back, revealing that she isn’t as wealthy as she seems – she achieves the illusion by, shocking to reveal, shopping at Ohrbach’s!

  Ohrbach’s was like a client magnet for DDB. Other New York businesses looking for an agency would ask around to find who did the advertising and then approach DDB to handle their account. In fact, in the following decade DDB rarely, if ever, made a formal new business presentation, as often as not being approached by clients rather than the other way round.

  ONE INTERESTED ENQUIRY came from Whitey Rubin, put in charge of a small Jewish bakery in Brooklyn by its bank in a last-ditch attempt to turn the business around and keep it from bankruptcy. For 30 years they had traded successfully selling bagels, onion rolls and challahs to an almost exclusively Jewish clientele. The problem arose when the company extended its range to a variety of breads baked to appeal to a wider market. The Jews didn’t like it and the gentiles didn’t know about it. Quoted in Robert Glatzer’s The New Advertising, on his first sampling of the new breads Bernbach said, ‘Mr Rubin, no Jew would eat your bread. If you want more business, we have to advertise to the goyim [non-Jews].’

  So the initial original thought by DDB for Levy’s was a media idea, concentrating exclusively on a specific market. Next, they contradicted the received wisdom that good bread must be soft, and they began to promote the nourishing values of Levy’s Oven Krust White Bread with a series of intelligently but simply-argued ads. One asked ‘Are you buying a bread or a bed’ and another, against a drawing of a fat child contrasting with an athletic child, ‘Is his bread a filler-upper or a builder-upper?’ This was good hard-working stuff, and a slow improvement in sales followed.

  Then Phyllis Robinson wrote a radio campaign around a small boy whose mother continually tried to correct his faulty pronunciation of ‘Wevy’s Cimmimum Waisin Bwead’. His pay-off line, ‘I wuv Wevy’s’, became a catchphrase, boosting Levy’s name recognition and fame. But the taste of things to come was an ambitious claim, with a simple layout graphically illustrating the thought: over three pictures of the same piece of rye bread, quickly disappearing as bites are taken out of it, were the words ‘New York… is eating… it up!’

  New York certainly started nibbling. It was advertised as ‘Levy’s real Jewish Rye’, itself a little contrived as there’s nothing particularly Jewish about rye bread. And Rubin, anxious about anti-Semitism, couldn’t initially understand why its Jewish provenance needed to be flagged up at all. ‘For God’s sake’, countered Bernbach, ‘your name is Levy’s. They’re not going to mistake you for a High Episcopalian.’

  In the increasingly worldly and sophisticated market that New York had become, maybe that touch of exoticism was exactly what the brand needed. What came next, created by writer Judy Protas and Bill Taubin, generally reckoned to be one of the very best of DDB’s earlier art directors, reinforced and amplified that exoticism. In one large picture and one simple line they linked one minority – the Jews – to all the other emerging minorities making their presence felt.

  Subway passengers became aware of posters with large, engaging pictures of the people you’d least expect chewing through a hunk of Levy’s. And if they looked authentic, that’s because they were authentic. Howard Zieff, the photographer, who went on to direct some of the very best commercials of the sixties before starting a new career as a Hollywood director recalls, ‘We wanted normal-looking people, not blonde, perfectly proportioned models. I saw the Indian on the street; he was an engineer for the New York Central. The Chinese guy worked in a restaurant near my midtown Manhattan office. And the kid we found in Harlem. They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces.’

  It would be easy now to dismiss the whole campaign as stereotypical, even condescending, but not then – far from it. These ads were startling for the simple reason that such people weren’t usually seen starring in advertising. New Yorkers revelled in it, demanding copies of the Levy’s posters as well as the bread. It reflected and celebrated their contemporary multi-culturalism, and for the immigrants it helped ‘normalise’ their status simply by making them seem an accepted, normal part of society.

  It is a wonderfully simple idea, little more than the strategy, photographed. Yet within it you can find all the unique hallmarks of a DDB campaign: wit, surprise, freshness, fun, simplicity, directness, a credible promise – and again that knowing but friendly nod and wink towards the consumer.

  THIS, IN ESSENCE, was what was so different about DDB. The new graphics, the design, the choice of typefaces, the style of copy – all are fascinating in their own right, but in the end they’re not the answer, just part of the means to the end. What these ads were doing was signalling a changed relationship between those who would sell and those who would buy. A relationship based not just on respect for the people’s taste but for their intelligence and ability to discern what really mattered in their lives from the purely transitory.

  To a client, his product is life and death, something that if only the wilful public would try, they’d realise would change the course of their lives; but to a busy housewife or commuter, it’s often no more than an irksome purchase on the way to something else. DDB had the honesty to recognise this, and the candour and skill to communicate that recognition, making the potential buyer an ally rather than a target. ‘The artist rules the audience by turning them into accomplices’, as Arthur Koestler put it.

  1964–5, DDB’s ‘You don’t have to be Jewish…’ campaign for Levy’s, a huge commercial and cultural success.

  Bill Bernbach’s people, without impudence but based on self-respect and a belief in their ability to communicate properly with the public, ended the slavish deference towards the client and the product. Bernbach recalled a conversation with a new business p
rospect: ‘“What would you say, Bill, if you were told exactly where to put the logo and what size it would be [on the advertisement]?” I had $10 million riding on my answer and I said, “I would say we’re the wrong agency for you”.’

  It wasn’t a question of either Reeves’ hard sell or Ogilvy’s respectful but rule-based formulaic sell. It took the best of both and shucked off the remains. As Bob Gage had observed, no DDB ad would ever be created without a rigid consumer proposition at its centre, the philosophy at the heart of Reeves’ USP idea. And no DDB ad would ever be created without deep respect, not just for the consumer’s intelligence, but also the consumer’s true priorities. Bill Bernbach stopped selling dreams and started selling the truth – wrapped in wit.

  4Lighting the Touchpaper

  ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ ‘Not on my watch… we’ve got an Italian.’

  ROGER STERLING AND DON DRAPER MAD MEN

  The clients, big and small, national and local, flocked in. All were taken on DDB’s terms, which included a tacit ethical standard; the product must be honest and worthy of the money that the agency would be asking the public to pay for it.

  Jim Raniere, an art director who joined DDB in 1961, contrasts the ethos at DDB with agencies that friends had joined: ‘Never lie, never never say anything about a product that it can’t do’.

  The account for The Book of Knowledge, a children’s encyclopedia, came and then went when a new copywriter found it was too complicated for his eight-year-old daughter. On those grounds he refused to work on it. The rumpus was elevated to Bernbach who took the book home with him. The next morning he pronounced that the product was flawed and the client was told the agency no longer wanted to advertise it.

  High-minded, yes. It wasn’t just posturing, it was in reaction to the generally bad name that advertising had around town. And it was driven by the new breed of people that Bernbach and his managers were employing, people of a completely different stock with a completely different mindset.

  Up until the late 1950s, advertising had been seen by account people mainly as an alternative to Wall Street, with good salaries at a fairly early age and a respectable life dealing with upper levels of client companies in an influential milieu. Copywriters, too, tended to be from comfortably educated backgrounds. You might get the odd Italian as a visualiser but who cared? The client never knew who he was, let alone got to meet him. In the late 1950s, Jerry Della Femina, a young copywriter, was told in an interview at JWT that on the basis of his name alone, Ford Trucks ‘wouldn’t want your kind on their account’.

  But beneath the well-shined Oxfords of the comfortable WASP account executives patrolling the Madison Avenue sidewalks, the world was turning and several elements were beginning to coincide to make the Creative Revolution almost inevitable.

  AS ITALIAN-AMERICANS like Della Femina were demonstrating, there was a growing confidence among the second and third generation ethnics, people born from the mid 1930s onward. Their Ellis Island parents and grandparents, perhaps cowed from the oppressive experiences in the Europe from which they had escaped, were desperate to conform, to assimilate and become American. Deference was their watchword, but as familiarity and security came, so too did self-assurance, and this new generation no longer ‘knew their place’.

  Very few had any reservations about applying for white collar jobs in advertising agencies, an aspiration that probably would never have occurred to their parents. Although there were the occasional setbacks, increasingly foreign names were appearing on doors along the agency corridors, and ethnic origins were a matter of pride.

  George Lois remembers his interview with Lou Dorfsman at CBS Radio in the fifties; Dorfsman, son of Polish Jews, rolled George’s name around his mouth and said, ‘Lois, Lois – is that a Jewish name?’

  ‘I’m not a fucking Jew’, countered Lois, ‘I’m a fucking Greek!’

  A key Bernbach remark, ‘You always have to work in the idiom of the times in which you live’ could be applied to the people most appropriate to produce that advertising. This group of creative people had none of the cultural inheritance of the older guard, the pre-war New York. And they certainly didn’t respect the creative legacy of the existing inhabitants of the agencies; quite the reverse. They felt alienated and appalled by it, responsible as it was for so much of the general antipathy towards advertising. It was neither their language nor their imagery. And one word above all others crops up over and over again, with deep disdain, in the contemporary interviews and records of their views.

  Phony.

  It was the one thing they did not want to be, and the one thing they resented above all others about the current advertising. Commercials with actors playing reassuring doctors; perfectly coiffed housewives trilling about the perfection of their cake mix; and men in white lab coats holding up test tubes and booming in authoritative voices some drivel about ‘ingredient X’.

  IT WASN’T JUST THEIR ORIGINS, it was also their youth. America had just invented the teenager, had begun to give these youths presence and influence, and they were the first to benefit. Rebellion was in the air, with the icons of James Dean and Marlon Brando to emulate. There was even, for the more anguished, Holden Caulfield, JD Salinger’s young, disaffected hero from Catcher in the Rye.

  ‘We came home full of kick-ass energy and the GI Bill to educate us. Tradition, school ties and old boys clubs became relics’, said Jim Durfee, a war veteran. At the time, he was a copywriter at JWT in Detroit, but later he was to co-found Carl Ally Inc, one of the very best agencies of the decade. That energy found a period of literally fantastic artistic expansion and experimentation to feed and fuel it. As George Lois wrote in a 2010 Playboy article, ‘It was an inspiring time to be an art director like me with a rage to communicate, to blaze trails, to create icon rather than con. The times they were a-changin’.

  From the white-tie audiences at Carnegie Hall to the marijuana-clouded coffee shops of the beat poets on Bleeker Street, the black be-bop jazz clubs of Harlem to the cooperative galleries of Tenth Street, nothing stood still.

  With Manhattan’s frenetic building and rebuilding programme, the world’s leading architects added their prestigious signatures to the cityscape. In 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s futuristic Guggenheim Museum was finished one year after Mies van de Rohe’s beautiful Seagram Building, fifty-two sheer stories sheathed in bronze and bronzed glass, the classic functionalist skyscraper. In furniture, European influences from the Bauhaus onwards removed the stuffing and streamlined the design – by the 1960s no agency with any self-respect could have anything other than Charles Eames chairs in their reception area.

  The spread of the 35mm camera, with its changeable lenses and greater portability brought magazines an indispensability and urgency as exciting news vehicles. Until television usurped it in the late 1950s, Life magazine had its purple period, sponsoring not just dramatic photography but superb illustration; its lofty literary content included the first publication of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

  IN MUSIC, ART AND LITERATURE a dazzling explosion of imagination and energy fired a million incandescent ideas across the decade, some false and quickly sputtering, others arcing with a brilliance into the next century. But it was ignited against a social background that was far from settled.

  Jazz writer Jeff Fitzgerald describes jazz in the 1950s as taking on ‘a restlessness, reflecting an undercurrent of trepidation lying just beneath the surface. Jazz became more cerebral, more introspective… the music of a generation in transition, searching for its identity in a world populated by increasingly invisible, intangible perils. In a world living under the shadow of the atomic bomb and the creeping menace of Communism and an increasingly automated society feeling the control of its own daily existence slipping away with the push of every button, it is perfectly logical that the music should reflect that nameless angst’.

  He could have added the tension caused by the rapidly growing awareness of racial injustice, and it was th
e black population that was the driving force behind jazz. Musicians like Art Blakey, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk took the music into infinitely more complex forms. Free jazz ‘experiments’ were taking place at the Five Spot on Cooper Square, organised by musicians like Ornette Colman.

  More accessible were the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck and Lester Young. But perhaps the best evocation of the jazz of the era, hypnotising the hip crowd at Birdland and the Village Vanguard, was the poignant foggy moan from the trumpet of Miles Davis, the man Kenneth Tynan called ‘a musical lonely hearts club’.

  It could hardly have been in greater contrast to that other massive trend in music; in 1954 Bill Haley and the Comets released ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and the dance hall, the record player and the juke box would never be the same again.

  The visual and performing arts were even more explosive. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and friends in the New York School threw paint around in an excitable way never seen before, creating the genre known as Action Painting. Meanwhile, for a very different audience, Mark Rothko was commissioned to paint a set of murals for the opulent new Four Seasons restaurant.

  Between Tenth and Twelfth Street, in reaction to the stultifying and exclusive establishments of Fifty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue, artist-owned galleries gave an outlet to every experimental idea. Artists like Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg were collaborating with poets and musicians such as John Cale in the phenomena of the Happening, a partially free-form, audience-participation performance art (which gave rise to a misplaced lingerie ad of the time, a woman floating in space with the headline ‘I dreamt I was at a Happening in my Maidenform bra’).