The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  And in the mid 1950s an art director at Benton & Bowles asked the name of the hopeful blonde female illustrator who’d just shown her folio to a colleague in the office next to his. ‘That wasn’t a chick,’ he laughed, ‘I’ve got his name somewhere… er… Andy Warhol.’

  In the Village book shops and coffee houses, jazz/poetry fusions were achingly hip. Jack Kerouac appeared with a jazz group at the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue in 1958 and recorded readings of his prose and poetry with the saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. Free-form impromptu poetry readings – one notably earnest performance was a reading of the Manhattan telephone directory – were a regular, if often meretricious, stimulus for impressionable young minds.

  From the early 1950s, Washington Square had been the focus for the emerging folk scene, with groups and individual folk singers gathering for impromptu open-air sessions. Thriving, it spread to specific clubs and by 24 January 1961, fresh from the Midwest, the 19-year-old Bob Dylan knew enough to head for the Café Wha? at 115 MacDougall Street. He blew in, snow on his coat, and asked to perform a few Woody Guthrie songs. It was his first appearance in the city.

  A party at Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory (231 East 47th Street), New York, August 1965

  At the Gaslight Club, a ‘basket house’ (so-named because the artists’ remuneration was the cash in the basket passed round amongst the patrons), Allen Ginsberg recited ‘Howl’, his terrifyingly powerful evisceration of everything he felt America had become. Earlier, in the same club, Jack Kerouac had read from On the Road.

  Cinemas were showing Rebel Without a Cause and On the Waterfront, dramatising youthful angst and alienation, while The Seventh Seal and Seven Samurai intrigued audiences with a growing appetite for foreign directors with a completely different feel for film. At the theatre, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman all penetrated themes embedded deep within society – and all won Pulitzer prizes.

  As for literature, you took your pick from books, essays or poems from William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Ayn Rand, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Richard Yates, John Cheever, Isaac Asimov, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike… the list goes on.

  This was the background to the formative years of this new generation of creative people. Whether they immersed themselves in all, part or none of it is not really the point; the fact is that this was their seedbed, seeping osmotically into all creative endeavour. It couldn’t but help inform and illuminate their work.

  BY 1960, JWT had doubled their 1950 billing to $250 million, retaining the number one spot. Their growth neatly reflected the decade’s overall doubling of national advertising spend, up from $5.7 billion to $11.96 billion, evidence of the boom in business accelerated by the growth of TV advertising. But DDB had spectacularly outstripped the market with a hundredfold increase, taking them from $500,000 in 1949 to $46.3 million ten years later. A creditable client list of all product types and sizes (although they still lacked a major packaged goods client), from Coffee of Colombia to Rheingold Breweries, Philip Morris Alpine Cigarettes to Max Factor, Chemstrand to Clairol, defined an agency that was now firmly grounded. And a succession of campaigns began to demand that their competitors take them seriously.

  For Polaroid, the first camera to produce a print within 60 seconds of the picture being taken, DDB produced several campaigns, each as radical as any advertising the public had ever seen. The previous agency, BBDO, had completely missed the point and produced messy, uninspiring work based on a mishmash of propositions, including price, which served only to make the product look a cheap gimmick.

  On taking over the account in 1954, DDB zeroed in on the product benefit with a ‘live’ TV campaign that appeared on Steve Allen’s The Tonight Show. During the transmission Allen would take a picture on stage, maybe walking into the stalls to snap a member of the audience, and then talk about the camera while the picture developed. Showing the print to the audience was like the climax and reveal of a conjuring trick, always eliciting applause. How simple, direct and desirable, to have an unsolicited live TV audience applaud your product on national TV.

  Then, in 1957, Polaroid introduced a highly sensitive black and white film, and again dramatic simplicity did the trick. The art director, Helmut Krone, hired fashion photographer Bert Stern to take tight close-up pictures of characterful faces, some known and some anonymous. In full-page ads, these dominated the page: every pore, every line, every shadow clear and faithful. Simple copy by Bill Casey told you all you needed to know with the minimum of fuss. There’s seldom been a better example of letting a good product sell itself.

  ANOTHER TREND in DDB’s work started to become noticeable. In contrast to the rigid laws on the use of space laid down by Ogilvy, DDB art directors were quite prepared to play with the imagery, with the page itself, to make the point visually. If advertising had always been regarded as sales talk in print, DDB was frequently doing demonstration in print.

  To dramatise Flexalum dirt-resistant window blinds, Bernbach suggested a picture of a tennis ball bouncing off the slats. In another campaign, Helmut Krone showed a photo of a gift-wrapped package in a thin vertical space up the side of a page of Life magazine. When the reader held the page up to the light, as invited ‘for an X-ray peek at a great gift’, they saw a bottle of Ancient Age (‘If you can find a better bourbon, buy it’), apparently on the inside. It was illustrated on the reverse side of the page and showed through in the light.

  1958 DDB ads for Polaroid, featuring Salvador Dalí and Louis Armstrong. Instant picture, instant success.

  You got the point at one glance in one of DDB’s greatest-ever ads, opposite, when Bill Taubin tore a strip off a picture of the sea to advertise a new faster service from New York to Tel Aviv for El Al Airlines. The way the ad worked on the eye was the demonstration itself. El Al’s budget was relatively small, a fraction of that of even most domestic airlines and DDB could have imitated the approach of all other carriers, using little more than flight schedules printed on the page, with no attempt at any personality. But with El Al, they went further than just new visual ideas – there was a new verbal excursion as well.

  El Al was one of Bernbach’s many Jewish accounts. While it wasn’t remarkable that they should have so many, what was remarkable was the way they handled their Jewishness. Far from hiding it, as Whitey Rubin of Levy’s had been inclined to do, DDB celebrated it, and wrote their ads in Borscht Belt idiom. A full page advert with a picture of Noah’s Ark made the point: ‘We’ve been in the travel business a long time’, a terrific example of how words can take off from the picture to make a further point.

  While the Italians were infiltrating the art department, it’s difficult to overemphasise the role the Jewish writer and Jewish idiom played in the Creative Revolution. If you look at the roster of the artists, architects, designers, musicians and particularly writers who were illuminating the fifties, you’ll see an extraordinary percentage of Jews. It had its effect; the Yiddish vernacular and Jewish humour were creeping into the New Yorkers’ daily language. Few advertising agencies, dominated as they were by pallid WASP values or an incipient Anglophilia, had seemed to notice it, but as DDB’s doors were open to the immigrant and the Jew, the people who lived and breathed these things, it was only natural that it would end up in their work.

  SO ON THE VERY VERGE of the 1960s, from many and varied directions, apparently unrelated circumstances converge. We can connect them. In the world’s greatest modern city, a massive economic expansion creates a huge need for the raw product of the advertising business, the ads themselves. The audience for this outburst is a demographically younger, newly wealthy and curious American, on the edge of a consumer boom – and thoroughly tired of the advertising it’s been fed. A brand new medium is sweeping the country and revolutionising advertising practice, bringing with it opportunity and the chance to exper
iment.

  Understanding the market and the idioms, the El Al Airlines ad campaign, from 1958 to 1970, was among DDB’s very best work.

  The doors of a few agencies are being opened to a completely new breed of creative person, one who sees no value in looking back, and who demands to do things in a radically new way. The images and references that will influence their work crackle around in their heads, fizzing from one of the greatest cultural eruptions the world has seen.

  In one agency, DDB, those same people are given greater autonomy and prestige, and a new way of working together, which not only overturns the nature of their output but doubles their influence within the business. This financially successful, creatively-led agency is no unproven flash in the pan; for ten years now it has been proving that research does not know everything and, as Bernbach recognised publicly, cannot be used to come up with ideas. That, as his agency had slowly been proving, is the job of these new creative people.

  As these circumstances converged, intertwined, coalesced and reformed, it was time for those creative people to take control.

  5Thinking Small

  “They did one last year, the same kind of smirk. Remember, Think Small. It was a half-page ad on a full-page buy. You could barely see the product.”

  HARRY CRANE MAD MEN

  The most famous part of the most famous campaign was born out of accident and confusion. At least half of the creative team who conceived it had doubts—and if it hadn’t been for the intervention of the client, one of the greatest ads ever written would never have been created.

  The task was utterly daunting; to sell a small, basic, ugly, economical, foreign car to a market enthralled with huge, chrome-finned, gadget-stuffed, home-built gas guzzlers. Initially, a number of the people who worked on the Volkswagen (VW) account had misgivings. With the revelations of the full horrors of the Holocaust little more than a decade old, Bernbach, although clearly not bothered himself, had to make considerable effort to persuade his agency to take the account in the first place. As George Lois said, “We have to sell a Nazi car in a Jewish town.” Lois’ parents had emigrated to the US from central Greece before the war, and he was implacable in his opposition; tales of Axis behavior in Greece hadn’t endeared him to any idea of cooperation.

  Additionally, the business was at DDB only as a sprat to catch a mackerel; one of Bernbach’s attempts at talking Lois around was to tell him, “We’ll take it for just a year and use it to get GM.” It’s probable he meant it too; it seems a perfectly reasonable business decision, if a little cynical. And it worked later in a different category—their much lauded campaign for El Al netted American Airlines in 1962.

  Lois remained unpersuaded, but international events took a hand. He was sitting in his office one day: “It had those fogged glass windows and I could see Bill lurking outside. Then he opened the door a crack and stuck his head round the corner, like in The Shining—’Heeeere’s Johnny!’—and said, ‘Look at this’. Then he shoved a newspaper through the gap and held it up so I could read the headline; ‘Germany sells fighter jets to Israel’. He said ‘It’s alright, see?’ So eventually I agreed.”

  Discontent rumbled on though. Lois remembers one prank when he made a small “flip” book with a VW logo on the bottom of the first right-hand page. As you flipped the pages, the legs and arms of the VW symbol quickly and neatly rearranged themselves—into a swastika.

  He was showing it to a bunch of creative people when Bernbach walked by. “Hey Bill, Bill, hey, come here, have a look at this.”

  Bernbach watched the little dance of digits, expressionless.

  “Very funny George—now burn it.”

  Lois went to work on the station wagon, the even less glamorous variant and only alternative to the basic “saloon.” “Basic” is the operative word for the then very alien VW.

  THE BEETLE—although not referred to as such by VW until the late sixties—already had a toehold in the United States, thanks to US servicemen returning from Europe. It was originally designed by Ferdinand Porsche as the KdFWagen (Kraft durch Freude Wagen, literally “Strength through Joy Car”) in 1933, under the patronage of no less than Adolf Hitler. By September 1939 mass production had still not started, and then with the outbreak of hostilities across Europe, the VW Wolfsburg factory was converted to wartime vehicle production. It wasn’t until the war was over that the first models started to leave the plant, when the factory was restored to car manufacture under the management of two British army officers, Colonel Charles Radclyffe and Major Ivan Hirst, producing cars for the transportation of the occupying forces.

  As a concept, it was a good one. The objective was a car designed to be uncomplicated, reliable, and inexpensive. It was to be within the reach of every German family, to enjoy the new freedom of the burgeoning autobahns of the 1930s. The engine was air-cooled, as simple as a contemporary motorcycle engine. Mounting it in the back avoided the need for a transmission and the hump of a transmission tunnel on the floor between the rear seats, which made the car even simpler. It also created more room inside a comparatively small cabin. The floor pan, chassis, and suspension were equally uncomplicated.

  It was this idea—a cheap utilitarian European car conceived for the 1930s working man and then built to carry servicemen around a war-blitzed country—that had to be sold to a nation used to soft suspension, plush upholstery, and powerful engines. Glamorous it wasn’t. The potential for its success can be gauged from the reaction of Ford Motors, after it was offered the VW factory for free: “What we’re being offered here isn’t worth a damn!” Or British car executives, who could also have had the plant and designs for nothing: “The vehicle does not meet the fundamental technical requirement of a motorcar… it is quite unattractive to the average buyer.”

  DDB had won the account from JM Mathes in 1958. VW’s modest sales throughout the fifties were perhaps partly still generated by word of mouth, by the personnel returning from Germany, where the United States Army remained a visible presence. And there was a nascent market for smaller, imported European cars; there were a few enlightened motorists who were beginning to see through the smoke and mirrors of Detroit’s annual model changes and built-in style obsolescence. In response, in 1959, Ford, Chrysler, and GM all decided to produce their own “compacts.” This burgeoning change in attitude, and the fact that most European cars performed poorly on America’s highways and freeways, built as they were for smaller roads and shorter distances, meant that VW’s market was now coming under threat.

  So that year, Carl Hahn, who was in charge of VW in the United States, started to look for an advertising agency. He and Arthur Stanton, the New York area VW dealer, trawled up and down Madison Avenue, going to all the big agencies currently without a car account. Though the business was comparatively small, there was plenty of eager attention from the competing agencies.

  Hahn hated the presentations, uniformly. Today he says, “It was the only disappointment I had about Americans… going up and down Madison Avenue. The content of the proposed ads was always the same, a beautiful house, very happy people in front, beautifully dressed—and a glamorous car. Even that in most cases was not photographed but illustrated… with a stupid caption. But [they] didn’t have [any] life. I had more and more presentations. I was desperate, I told Arthur this is just impossible, we need an agency that fits our product.”

  It’s unclear why DDB were not on Stanton’s original pitch list as he was a fan of Ohrbach’s advertising and was already using the agency for his dealership advertisements. But eventually he suggested a visit and Hahn agreed. He gives a fascinating insight into the difference between the conventional agency presentations of the time and the infinitely more laid back and candid DDB approach. Other agencies, and some clients, regarded DDB’s refusal to prepare speculative work for a pitch as arrogant; DDB insisted it was honest. Until you really got to work on a client’s business, how could you possibly know enough to do the right work?

  “I went to th
ese primitive offices, no big conference room or hall, no ten vice presidents in blue suits with neckties and white shirts, and executive vice presidents and senior vice presidents; there was just a man sitting on his desk in a windowless room, called Bill Bernbach by name, and he showed me work he’d done for El Al and more.… I decided what to do: offered for the first six months an advertising budget of half a million or so, which he accepted.”

  BERNBACH CHOSE HELMUT KRONE as art director and Julian Koenig as writer. Krone was a second generation German American who had once briefly owned a VW. Born in 1925, he is now enormously respected as one of the most influential art directors in US history, even though for thirty years—almost his entire working life—he worked only at DDB. He was fastidious and exacting in his work; he went to Germany several times to extract as much information as he could about the car. He believed that design in the service of a product should be indivisible from that product; the look and feel of the page, the attitude and body language of the artwork should reflect the attitude and body language of the product.

  He also believed that including logos in ads was unimportant, a turn-off in fact, because as soon as a logo hits the retina it signals “advertisement” and thus becomes an invitation to turn the page. But that doesn’t mean he was undisciplined or careless with his clients’ problems; because of his belief in the indivisibility of “look” and “message” he would create for any client on whose account he worked a page layout that was instantly recognizable from twenty paces as uniquely theirs—even without their logo. It would also be a look that was universally applicable and workable; VW ads today, fifty years and literally millions of worldwide executions later, are still a recognizable reflection of his original template.