In the beginning, there was Volkswagen. That’s the first campaign which everyone can trace back and say, ‘This is where the changeover began.’ That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born, and it all started with Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. They began as an agency around 1949 and they were known in the business as a good agency, but no one really got to see what they were doing until Volkswagen came around.
Volkswagen was being handled in the United States by Fuller & Smith & Ross. Doyle, Dane took the account over around 1959. One of the first ads to come out for Volkswagen was the first ad that anyone can remember when the new agency style really came through with an entirely different look. That ad simply said, ‘Lemon.’ The copy for ‘Lemon’ said once in a while we turn out a car that’s a lemon, in which case we get rid of it. We don’t sell them. And we are careful as hell with our cars, we test them before we sell them, so the chances are you’ll never get one of our lemons.
For the first time in history an advertiser said that he was capable, on rare occasions, of turning out an inferior product. An advertiser was saying that all wasn’t sweetness in life, that everything wasn’t fantastic in the world of business, and people took to it immediately. Volkswagen became a successful campaign, and an overwhelmingly successful product.
No one had ever called his product a lemon before. By today’s standards, of course, this is pretty ordinary stuff. It was the first time anyone really took a realistic approach to advertising. It was the first time the advertiser ever talked to the consumer as though he was a grownup instead of a baby.
Before ‘Lemon,’ they ran an ad that said, ‘Think Small.’ Now the average American car buyer, who has been raised on chrome and plastic and tailfins all his life, looks at that ad and starts to think small. The Detroit reaction to all this was: It will never do. What is this, calling your product a lemon? It was the equivalent of a politician saying, ‘I’m not going to keep all my promises. I’m going to lie on occasion.’ It was the first time anyone ever told the truth in print. And the reaction was immediate – people started talking about Volkswagen advertising.
The Volkswagen ads didn’t make a big fetish of the company’s name. They kept their name down in a very small logotype at the bottom of the ad. It was handled in such a way that somebody was talking directly to the consumer in a language which the consumer was dying to hear. It was a tremendous success. ‘Lemon,’ ‘Think Small,’ all of them not only built up Volkswagen but led directly to the advertising we have today.
Detroit, of course, not only ignored the advertising – they ignored the message of the small car, too. After Volkswagen came Renault and Volvo and Peugeot and dozens of others. Detroit figured what this country still needs is a large boat that you can’t park and falls apart in three years. First Detroit brought out the compacts, like the Corvair and the Falcon. These really weren’t small cars and the public realized it by not buying them in droves. The compacts were cheap imitations of what the foreign small cars were all about. In 1964 Detroit finally admitted there might be something to this small-car stuff, and Ford produced the Mustang. Mustang was still selling very strong in 1969. Only fifteen years after Volkswagen.
Advertising still downgrades the consumer’s intelligence because the people who are doing the ads are often as stupid as the people they think they’re talking to. The advertising industry is full of thickheaded guys. Just recently a creative director of an old-line agency was quoted in one of the trade papers as saying that this direct method of talking to people won’t work. This guy says that Doyle, Dane, Bernbach is a passing fad; it’s going to go away and quit bothering him someday.
Some passing fad! They passed his agency five years ago. His agency was doing about $125 million a year ago. Who knows what Doyle, Dane are doing? They pick up business so fast you can’t even keep up with it. They’re billing maybe $255 million and they’re booming. They just don’t stop.
Anything Doyle, Dane touches turns to gold – with the exception of beer. They did a great job with the Polaroid Land Camera. If you want to say that anyone could have done a terrific job with Polaroid, because the product is so unique, O.K., let’s not waste time on Polaroid. Take Levy’s Rye Bread. They get Levy’s bread and maybe an ad budget of $100,000 and all of a sudden pictures of Indians are appearing all over town saying, ‘You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Enjoy Levy’s Rye.’ As far as I’m concerned, all rye bread tastes the same, but look what Doyle, Dane did for it. What happens is a guy at General Foods looks at all those Indians and Chinese and pictures of Godfrey Cambridge pushing Levy’s and he says, ‘What the hell are we doing with the agency we have? Look at what these guys are doing for $100,000.’ The next thing you know, Doyle, Dane gets a piece of General Foods. They start doing great work for General Foods and the guy over at Kraft says, ‘Look at this. For years we’ve been hanging around doing nothing. Let’s get somebody like these guys and quit getting killed by General Foods.’ The cry is going out all over town, ‘Give me a Doyle, Dane agency, give me a Doyle, Dane ad.’
Good advertising gets exposure. People talk about it, notice it, think about it. The client is standing up there waiting at the train station for the New Haven to take him into New York and he’s dying to be stopped by his buddies. He is dying for them to compliment him on his new campaign. Everyone wants to be praised. ‘Boy, you’ve got a hell of an ad there.’ That’s what the client wants to hear. Plus the cash register. He loves it when his friends say, ‘You people are really doing a job.’ He wants that desperately. There’s a myth that the client is not interested in awards. Nonsense. Clients love awards because they love recognition just as much as agencies do. They want their accounts to win as many awards as possible.
Doyle, Dane’s advertising has that feeling that the consumer is bright enough to understand what the advertising is saying, that the consumer isn’t a lunkhead who has to be treated like a twelve-year-old. People are more sophisticated today. It’s not just because of television, although that’s part of it. It’s a matter that I’m brighter than my father, and my son is going to be brighter than I am. I don’t understand what the new math is, but my kids will; they’re going to be way ahead of me. They’re much sharper, they know exactly what’s going on in the world. The average consumer, you know, doesn’t buy the junky advertising any more. He doesn’t buy a line like Luckies tasting milder. He doesn’t believe the male model decked out in a fruity sailor suit claiming that the cigarette he’s smoking has that ‘lusty’ taste. It’s archaic. Guys who do this sort of advertising may be twenty years behind their time. In a sense, even Doyle, Dane may be behind its time. We still haven’t really learned to communicate with the consumer to a point where he can understand us all of the time. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I sometimes don’t understand why we can’t talk in commercials and ads the way we really talk – well, there are Government agencies that stop us from talking the way we really talk so I suppose that ends that.
There’s a magazine out right now called Screw and if you can pick up a copy at your local newsstand without getting arrested, it’s worth a look. Quite honestly, they may be overboard on one side, and yet they’re talking closer to the way people talk and think and feel than the Saturday Evening Post did when it folded. Screw has more of an appeal; it’s closer to what the people are.
Doyle, Dane is as close as you can get to what people really are and what people really think. When you run an ad in New York City for El Al Airlines with a headline that says, ‘My Son, the Pilot,’ you are talking the language of the people. It’s a beautifully written ad, supposedly done by a woman who is talking about her son, a pilot for El Al, and her son is going to really take care of you on the flight. In fact, he’s even going to take care of your heartburn from all the horseradish.
I love the El Al ads. Once, when I was at Fuller & Smith & Ross, those ads got me into a bit of trouble. We had just picked up one of the Arab airlines as an account. All I know is that there were a lot of guys wearing funny white things on their heads. I was instructed by the people at Fuller & Smith to take down all the ads tacked up on the walls of my office and keep the place absolutely spotless for the big meeting. I took this as a personal insult. I called up a friend of mine