chapter three

ADVERTISING AS CULTURAL CRITICISM: BILL BERNBACH VERSUS THE MASS SOCIETY

tripping from theatre to theatre

living in volkswagen buses

tortured by self doubt

tormented by anxiety

    fleeing in exile from the supermarkets the mortuaries and their factories with seventy high rising smokestacks their bugles their suffocations their immolations of souls who arrive in parking lot turn the key slam the door and surrender hope all who enter here

—JULIAN BECK, 1979

Looking back across forty years, the hyper-rational, science-dazzled Madison Avenue of the 1950s, with its ponderous bureaucracy and its armies of suburban commuters, seems to have been more a bizarre aberration than the advanced and enlightened place of wise consensus its apologists believed it to be. Admen today, although historical judgment is hardly their forte, look back at the rule-bound preachments of Reeves and Ogilvy with a kind of horror: if they study those pronouncements at all, it is to remind them of what they must never do. In other eras, the values and symbols of the industry have usually been the reverse of what they were during the 1940s and 1950s; the business’s heroes a series of brazen rule-breakers in touch with the anarchic power of the carnivalesque, its villains the dead-weight yes-men. Tales of workplace madness have been particularly prominent in industry lore in recent years: a full-page newspaper ad placed in 1995 by the employees of the ultracreative Chiat/Day agency remembers Jay Chiat as a man who would “cut off a client’s tie if he thinks it’s ugly” and who “taught us to squash conventionality like ripe fruit”; Randall Rothenberg’s 1995 account of ultracreative Wieden & Kennedy, makers of Nike advertising, details their office basketball playing, their officially sanctioned eccentricity, and at one point has agency principle Dan Wieden instructing his employees that the agency works like “a slime mold. . . . we don’t do things with what appears to be order.”1 Raymond Rubicam, founder of Young & Rubicam, obtained his first job in advertising by exploding angrily at a rude, pompous boss. The manic 1930s adman J. Sterling Getchell was notorious for his accelerated pace of living, his reckless personal behavior, and his defiance of clients. He mistrusted “science” and, according to one employee, “composure was against the rule” at his agency.2 Admen have long served symbolically as über-entrepreneurs, eulogists of capitalism’s endless cycles of change, its celebration of success, its scorn for failure. Their industry, as nearly every account of it not written during the 1950s agrees, tends to celebrate difference and encourage discontent, not to squelch them.³ After all, the slogan of Young & Rubicam has always been “Resist the Usual.”

But during the 1950s, advertising was marked by what Jackson Lears calls “containment of carnival,” a powerful effort to suppress the industry’s impulse toward difference under a stifling vision of managerial order. In the 1960s, this vision was turned on its head. Advertising narratives suddenly idealized not the repressed account man in gray flannel, but the manic, unrestrained creative person in offbeat clothing. The world of advertising was no longer bureaucratic and placid with scientism; but artistic and dysfunctional, a place of wild passions, broken careers, fear, drunkenness, and occasional violence.

The ads produced by the anarchic figures who led what came to be called the “creative revolution” broke decisively with the stilted, idealized, cliche-ridden style of the 1950s. A clean minimalism replaced complex layouts cluttered with different product claims. Humor, wit, and stylistic elegance returned from the advertising oblivion to which they had been exiled by deadly-serious USP scientism. But the ads of the creative revolution not only differed from those of the gray flannel past: they were openly at war with their predecessors. What distinguished the advertising of the 1960s was its acknowledgment of and even sympathy with the mass society critique. It mocked the empty phrases and meaningless neologisms that characterized the style of the 1950s. It deftly punctured advertising’s too-rosy picture of American life and openly admitted that consuming was not the wonder-world it was cracked up to be. It sympathized with people’s fears about conformity and their revulsion from artificiality and packaged pleasure. It pandered to public distrust of advertising and dislike of admen. Comparing one brand to another and finding it lacking was and is a routine advertising technique; in the sixties, advertising actively compared a new, hip consumerism to an older capitalist ideology and left the latter permanently discredited.

It is a curious quirk of sixties historiography that, when running through the list of seismic shifts (in music, literature, movies, youth culture) that gave the decade its character, annalists never include advertising. And yet, given advertising’s immense presence in American public space, the big change in the attitude and language of advertising must be counted as one of the primary features distinguishing the cultural climate of the sixties from that of the fifties. Read as a whole, the best advertising of the sixties constitutes a kind of mass-culture critique in its own right, a statement of alienation and disgust, of longing for authenticity and for selfhood that ranks with books like Growing Up Absurd and movies like The Graduate. The difference between the advertising critique and the others, though, is the crucial point: for the new Madison Avenue, the solution to the problems of consumer society was—more consuming.

how to do it different

The towering figure of the advertising world of the 1960s—and a man of immense cultural significance generally—was Bill Bernbach, the guiding spirit of the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency (DDB). DDB altered the look, language, and tone of American advertising with its long-running campaign for Volkswagen and dozens of other brands; it altered the managerial style of Madison Avenue when its competitors, stunned by the power of DDB’s ads, rushed to replicate its less ordered corporate structure and its roster of creative talent. Advertising writer Larry Dobrow does not exaggerate when he insists that “among advertising professionals then and now, there is unanimous—often reverent—belief that the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency was the unchallenged leader of the creative revolution of the sixties.”4 Nor does Randall Rothenberg when, discussing the agency’s landmark campaign for Volkswagen, he writes simply that it “changed the culture of advertising.”⁵ Bernbach was at once a hard-headed adman and one of postwar consumerism’s most trenchant critics, Madison Avenue’s answer to Vance Packard. The ads his agency produced had an uncanny ability to cut through the overblown advertising rhetoric of the 1950s, to speak to readers’ and viewers’ skepticism of advertising, to replace obvious puffery with what appeared to be straight talk. Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, of fraud, and of powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. He invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism—perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age—to consumerism itself.

Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency which he founded in the decidedly unrevolutionary year of 1949, was dedicated to what proved to be a unique but sound advertising principle. As the industry’s preeminent leaders and theorists were amassing mountains of research and formulating scientific rules for effective advertising, Bernbach was declaring that rules were to be scrupulously ignored. The advertising business was fundamentally a matter of creating convincing advertisements, he believed, and no amount of formulas could replace the talented creative individual who performed this function. Bernbach’s impulses ran in direct contradiction to the larger trends of the fifties. While writers from Norman Mailer to Theodore Roszak assumed (as many still assume) that the business “establishment” required a rigid, repressive system of order, Bernbach’s philosophy of advertising, which would reign triumphant in the 1960s amid a seemingly endless series of successful and celebrated DDB campaigns, was exactly the opposite—a hostility to rules of any kind; a sort of commercial antinomianism.6

Bill Bernbach was an enemy of technocracy long before the counterculture raised its own voice in protest of conformity and the Organization Man. In 1947, he wrote a letter to the owners of the Grey agency, where he was then employed, which spelled out his opposition to the features of business organization that the mass society theorists would soon identify and attack. “I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness,” he wrote, “that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance. . . .” The crucial problem, Bernbach insisted, was the dominance of rules and science, the priority of statistics and routines, the methods that would soon be heralded by Reeves and others as the hallmarks of an era of certainty.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that [pictures of] people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier and more inviting reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.⁷

Bernbach was an ideologue of disorder, an untiring propagandist for the business value of the principles of modern art. He repeated his mantra in a variety of forms for years: advertising was an art; art could not be produced by a rigid scientific system. A booklet of his memorable sayings compiled by DDB begins with this aphorism: “Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.” “Imitation can be commercial suicide,” runs another. “Research inevitably leads to conformity,” he announced in 1967. “For creative people rules can be prisons,” he said elsewhere.8 Not only were rules deleterious to the creation of good advertising, but the very idea of established techniques had to be resisted. “Even among the scientists, men who are regarded as worshippers of facts,” he wrote in a pamphlet called “Facts Are Not Enough,” intuition is critical to discovery: “the real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.”⁹ Sometimes Bernbach’s hostility to rules even took on a Consciousness III sort of aversion to reason generally. “Logic and overanalysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea,” he said. “It’s like love—the more you analyze it the faster it disappears.”¹⁰

In his 1957 account of Madison Avenue, U.S.A., Martin Mayer treats DDB as a peculiar anomaly among the large agencies he studies since it “deliberately rejects most of the tenets of modern agency operation,” including research along with rules.¹¹ Instead, Bernbach maximized the freedom of creative workers and eliminated much of the hierarchy and bureaucracy that was customary at large agencies in the 1950s, aiming several years before the publication of Douglas McGregor’s book on Theory X and Theory Y to create a less inhibited environment where creative inspiration could be translated more directly into finished advertising. Pointing out in a 1969 interview that excessive supervision was “part and parcel of the big agency curse,” DDB copywriter Bob Levenson noted that the agency “isn’t highly disciplined, supervised, committeed, raked over, mulled over.”¹² Bernbach’s second great organizational innovation was to rationalize the creative operation. Artist and writer would work together on a project rather than somewhere down a chain from top executives. DDB represented a shift in management style that would have vast consequences for the way ads were made, for the way ads appeared, and, ultimately, for the way American capitalism understood itself: Theory X hierarchy came to an end here, and Theory Y management arrived with great financial success.¹³ So great was the contrast between the organizational style of corporate agencies and that of DDB that, in her early days at the agency, star copywriter Phyllis Robinson told a Japanese publication that “we just felt very free, as if we had broken our shackles, had gotten out of jail, and were free to work the way we wanted to work.”¹⁴ In 1968, Robinson recalled how DDB’s less hierarchical organization proceeded to revolutionize the industry:

In the early days of DDB, everybody on the outside was very hot to know how it was on the inside. How did we do it? So we told them. Bill told them. And told them. And told them.

So then they knew. And what happened? Whole agencies introduced their copywriters to their art directors. They’d never met before. The way I understand it, the writers used to put the copy in those pneumatic tubes they used to use in department stores, and it would scoot over to the art director to be “laid out.” So—the agencies introduced them, and left them Alone Together. And they gave them Freedom. They said, make, do, create! Break rules! And you know what? A lot of very fine stuff started to come out. Some not so fine. But a lot that was.15

For Bernbach’s anti-organization to work, though, he had to dramatically alter the traditional relationship between agency and clients in order to convince those who paid for advertising that, even though art had dethroned science in the offices of DDB, his assortment of scribblers was every bit as expert as the “scientists” of Rosser Reeves, and their opinions must be respected. Admen—even of the creative sort—were advertising specialists, he argued. DDB would produce no campaigns like Wakeman’s repetitive “Love That Soap” because it refused to accede to clients’ tastes, however strong-willed they were. As Bernbach told Martin Mayer, “I feel that if the agency makes an ad and the client doesn’t like it, the client ought to run it anyway.” “Factual error and a violation of corporate policy are the only reasons we’ll accept for correction,” added DDB account executive Joe Daly.¹⁶ Charlie Moss, who began his advertising career at DDB before moving on to Wells, Rich, Greene, one of the era’s “hottest” and most successful creative agencies (he ultimately became WRG’s president), tells this story about the seriousness of Bernbach’s attitude toward a client:

Doyle Dane had a major client, a big advertiser. They had been used to having their own way of advertising for years and years, very specialized product category. They had a brand from this client, and they had been trying to come up with a campaign the client would accept for months and months and months, and they kept getting rejected. Every time they’d go to the client, marketing people, advertising people, they’d say, “no, we don’t like that, we want to do it this way, and this and that.” And Doyle Dane, the people were outraged, because this was not the normal for Doyle Dane, they were normally used to getting their way. So they went to Bill Bernbach, and they said, “Look, you’ve got to come to this next meeting, we’re going to have it with the chairman of the client company, . . . you’ve got to convince the chairman to tell his people to let us have our way, we know what we’re doing.” So . . . they all went, they’re sitting across the table in this big board room. Bernbach says to this guy, “you know, we’re working with your people for six months now, we can’t get anything through, you have to tell them that we are advertising experts, we know what we’re doing, and we demand some respect in this area.” And the chairman says to Bernbach, “Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Bernbach, but we’ve been selling our products for years and years and years, and we’ve been extremely successful as you know, we think we know something about how to market them. And I’m sorry, but our people will have to have final say over what the advertising’s going to be.” At which point Bernbach, who was prepared for this, turned to him and said, “well, then in that case, Doyle Dane Bernbach will have to resign your business.” And the chairman of the client company looked at his marketing director and said, “Are they allowed to do that?”17

Even as it was overturning the pseudo-science of Reeves and Ogilvy in favor of the intangibles of aesthetic inspiration, the Creative Revolution greatly advanced those men’s efforts to professionalize advertising. In Wakeman’s day, admen had been glorified “hucksters,” cringing yes-men without independent will or access to any knowledge at all that might contradict the client’s authority, but in the age of Bernbach they were to be creative geniuses, in touch with a spirit of commerce that resided beyond the mundane world of hierarchy and order. The limitations Bernbach placed on his clients’ authority also led directly to the rapidly escalating willingness to violate the conventions of commercial speech that characterized his agency’s—and the coming decade’s—advertising. A number of DDB’s most famous campaigns, like the Volkswagen ads that played on the car’s ugliness and the Avis ads that proclaimed “We’re Number Two,” were extremely distasteful to clients and would surely have been nixed had they not already agreed to defer to the agency’s decision.¹⁸ Charlie Moss believes that “because it operated that way,” DDB vastly increased the latitude within which creative people could operate.

For those talented people, it really gave them the strength of their convictions. It said, “Hey, look, if I really believe this, if I really think this is going to work for that client, I can push it, really, to the point of almost resigning the business.” And what happened was, there were big ideas that would have normally been thrown right out, which prevailed. The Avis campaign was a very good example. It tested terribly, they hated the idea when they first saw it. Everything would have dictated these days that campaign would have been history.¹⁹

The reign of “groupthink” began to end, at least in the advertising industry, in the early 1960s. Freed to do what the agency thought best, DDB’s creative teams would proceed to smash the advertising conventions built up throughout the age of organization.

alienated by the conformity and hypocrisy of mass society? have we got a car for you!

Bernbach’s innovations in agency organization contradicted the prevailing management theories of the 1950s. But if his management style seems to have been designed to avoid the quagmire of “groupthought” and bureaucracy, his approach to advertising itself took mass society on directly, discarding the visual and verbal cliches of Madison Avenue, U.S.A., and saying the unsayable: consumerism has given us a civilization of plastic and conformity, of deceit and shoddiness. Bernbach’s style wasn’t so much promotion as it was cultural criticism, foreshadowing the postmodern meta-advertising of the 1990s discussed by Randall Rothenberg and James B. Twitchell.20 And while DDB’s less-hierarchical structure was copied in office towers across Manhattan, its characteristic advertising style was, by the end of the decade, pervasive across the sponsored surfaces of American public space.

The advertising that DDB began making for Volkswagen in 1959 is one of the most analyzed, discussed, and admired campaigns in the industry’s history, studied in introductory marketing classes and included in advertising retrospectives of all kinds. Not only did it excite critics and incite commentary from every branch of the media, but it is widely believed to have made Volkswagen a competitive brand in America. The campaign’s power derived from its blatant transgression of nearly every convention of auto advertising. And its success validated overnight the Bernbach creative philosophy, set a thousand corporations off in search of similar ads for themselves, and precipitated a revolution in ad-making. Within a few years, it had become a revered classic for an age at war with reverence and classicism. Randall Rothenberg enumerates the varieties of transgression that the campaign would unleash:

It changed the rules. Agencies were now no longer punished but rewarded for arguing with clients, for breaking the guidelines of art direction, for clowning around in the copy, for using ethnic locutions and academic references and a myriad of other once-forbidden formulae. Seemingly overnight, a great wave of originality engulfed the advertising profession, transforming agencies and agency-client relationships and, in turn, the impressions made on millions of Americans.²¹

The history of consumer society is largely the history of the automobile, of the prosperity it brought to blue-collar workers, of the mobility and sexual freedom it permitted, and of the myriad consumer fantasies with which it was associated in the years after World War II. In the 1950s, the advertising of the three big Detroit automakers (which are always among the ten largest advertisers in the country) was the stuff of technocratic fantasy. Cars were designed and advertised to resemble the exciting hardware of the Cold War: streamlined, finned like airplanes, fitted with elaborate-looking controls, decorated with flashing chrome and abstract representations of rockets or airplanes. In ads, cars were posed next to jet fighters and radar dishes; Buick put holes in the side of its hoods to resemble airplane exhausts and named one model “B-58”; Oldsmobile offered “rocket action,” built both an “F-85” and a “Starfire” (the actual name for the Air Force F-94); a 1958 Dodge advertisement invited readers to “take off” in a new model and declared that “the new Swept-Wing look for ’59 is set off by thrusting Jet-Trail Tail Lamps.”22 Cars were markers of managerial efficiency in the worst Organization Man way. While the 1958 Edsel merely “says you’re going places,” ads for the 1961 Buick marked a pinnacle of other-directed boorishness:

What a wonderful sense of well-being just being seen behind its wheel. No showing off. Just that Clean Look of Action which unmistakably tells your success.²³

Auto advertising of the 1950s redounded with empty phrases and meaningless neologisms, announcing cars with “radical new Turbo-Thrust” engines, “Quadra-Power Roadability,” and “Finger-tip TorqueFlite.”²⁴ The cars so trumpeted were always populated with idealized white nuclear families, manly husbands, fawning wives, and playful children. In television commercials, cars were objects of worship mounted on rotating platforms and, in one famous 1963 Chevrolet commercial, perched atop an insurmountable mesa and photographed from an orbiting airplane.²⁵ And every year cars’ designs would change, the new models trumpeted in advertising (“All new all over again!” exclaimed those for the 1959 Chevrolet²⁶) as the epitome of modernity, the old models and all their fine adjectives forgotten and discarded as surely as the cars themselves would be by the time they traveled 100,000 miles.

And each of these aspects of the car culture was, by the early 1960s, a point of considerable popular annoyance and even disaffection. Cars and their advertising, which brought together so many objectionable features of the era, were the aspect of the mass society most vulnerable to criticism, pounded with particular effectiveness in popular books by Vance Packard, John Kenneth Galbraith, and John Keats (The Insolent Chariots). Americans learned that the big three automakers changed styles every year in order to intentionally obsolete their earlier products and that their cars were designed to break down and fall apart after a certain amount of time. The car culture—and perhaps consumer culture in general—was a gigantic fraud. In his 1964 book One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse describes the conflicted thinking of American car buyers of those years:

I ride in a new automobile. I experience its beauty, shininess, power, convenience—but then I become aware of the fact that in a relatively short time it will deteriorate and need repair; that its beauty and surface are cheap, its power unnecessary, its size idiotic; and that I will not find a parking place. I come to think of my car as a product of one of the Big Three automobile corporations. The latter determine the appearance of my car and make its beauty as well as its cheapness, its power as well as its shakiness, its working as well as its obsolescence. In a way, I feel cheated. I believe that the car is not what it could be, that better cars could be made for less money. But the other guy has to live, too. Wages and taxes are too high; turnover is necessary; we have it much better than before. The tension between appearance and reality melts away and both merge in one rather pleasant feeling.27

With the exception of the final three sentences, Marcuse might well have been writing copy for a Volkswagen ad. Although Volkswagen, no doubt, wanted consumers to experience a “rather pleasant feeling,” their ads aimed to push the “tension between appearance and reality” to the point of breaking the bond between Americans and the Big Three, steering consumers toward what they repeatedly described as a “better car . . . made for less money.”

Doyle Dane Bernbach’s debunking campaign for Volkswagen began in 1959, puncturing the mythos of the American automobile in the very year of maximum tailfins on the GM cars. The ads, as a veritable army of advertising writers has noted over the years, defied the auto-advertising conventions of the 1950s in just about every way they could. While the American automakers used photographic tricks to elongate cars,²⁸ DDB photographically foreshortened the Volkswagen. The early ads were in black and white and were startlingly minimalist: the cars appeared on a featureless background without people or passengers; copy was confined to three small columns on the bottom of the page. The ads were always organized around a pun or joke, an extremely rare thing at the time, especially since the pun or joke usually seemed to mock the car’s distinctive shape or its no-tailfin, little-chrome ugliness. Instead of boasting with Technicolor glare, the artwork for the Volkswagen campaign committed such bizarre heresies as including only a tiny picture in the upper left-hand corner of an almost blank page, depicting the car floating in water, drawn onto an egg, drawn onto a graph, dented in an accident, crossed out, crushed by a car-scrapping machine, or absent altogether except for a pair of tracks in the snow.

Aside from the Volkswagen ads’ graphic distinctiveness, the “honesty” of their copy is their most often-remarked feature, and it is certainly the most striking characteristic when viewed in context, alongside conventional advertising from the 1950s. Gone is the empty claptrap Americans had learned to associate with advertising; gone are the usual buzzwords, the heavily retouched photographs, the idealized drawings. In their place is a new tone of plain talk, of unadorned simplicity without fancy color pictures and beautiful typefaces.29 But what really distinguishes the Volkswagen ads is their attitude toward the reader. The advertising style of the 1950s had been profoundly contemptuous of the consumer’s intelligence, and consumers knew it: in the wake of The Hucksters, The Hidden Persuaders, the quiz show scandals, and the various FTC lawsuits against fraudulent advertisers, consumer skepticism toward advertising was at an all-time high. The genius of the Volkswagen campaign—and many of DDB’s other campaigns—is that they took this skepticism into account and made it part of their ads’ discursive apparatus. They spoke to consumers as canny beings capable of seeing through the great heaps of puffery cranked out by Madison Avenue. As Jerry Della Femina admiringly observed, the Volkswagen campaign was “the first time the advertiser ever talked to the consumer as though he was a grownup instead of a baby.”³⁰

What made the Volkswagen ads seem “honest” are the curious admissions of (what appear to be) errors with which the ads are peppered. The sedan is “ugly” and “looks like a beetle”; the Volkswagen station wagon is “a monster” that “looked like a shoe box” with “a flat face and square shape”; an experimental model that never saw production was “something awful. Take our word for it.” To make such admissions, even counterbalanced as they were with humor (“Could it be that ours aren’t the funny looking cars, after all?”) was a violation of fundamental principles of salesmanship. So were the campaign’s occasional admissions that Volkswagen was, like everyone else, a profit-driven corporation: “since we have this burning desire to stay in business,” etc.³¹ This species of commercial “honesty” was a strategy DDB used to great effect in a number of other campaigns as well: Avis forthrightly declaring itself the “Number Two” auto-renter, Lowrey Piano confessing in 1965 that 1923 was “The year to be in the piano business,” or Utica Beer admitting that “Our beer is 50 years behind the times.” Within a few years, the technique was copied widely: creative superstars Wells, Rich, Greene’s Benson & Hedges advertising focused on “The Disadvantages” of long cigarettes; J. Walter Thompson’s ads for Listerine admitted the product’s terrible flavor, exclaiming “I Hate It, But I Love It.”32

But by far the most powerful feature of the Volkswagen ads—and a feature which one can find throughout DDB’s oeuvre—is their awareness of and deep sympathy with the mass society critique. Not only do the authors of these ads seem to have been reading The Hidden Persuaders, The Waste Makers and The Insolent Chariots, they are actively contributing to the discourse, composing cutting jibes against the chrome-plated monsters from Detroit and proffering up Volkswagens as badges of alienation from the ways of a society whose most prominent emblems were the tailfin and the tract home with a two-car garage.

The foolishness of planned obsolescence was a particular target of DDB’s Volkswagen campaign. Ads from the early sixties emphasized the car’s lack of highly visible change and mocked Detroit’s annual restyling sprees. Below one picture of the car, spotlighted as if at an auto show (a favorite Volkswagen target), runs the caption “The ’51 ’52 ’53 ’54 ’55 ’56 ’57 ’58 ’59 ’60 ’61 Volkswagen.” In another, headlined “How to tell the year of a Volkswagen,” close-up photographs point out the minute changes the manufacturer has in fact made over the years (the picture for 1957 is blank: “No visible change”), each of them done not “to make it look different” but “only to make it work better.” The ads appealed, as did the works of popular criticism which informed them, to a preconsumerist thriftiness and a suspicion of ornament and fashion. The Volkswagen boasted “no fancy gadgets, run by push buttons”; instead, ads spoke of the car’s reliability, its solid construction, its ease of repair, and its efficiency.³³

Later ads extended the attack to other aspects of the car culture. A 1964 ad took on the questionable and tasteless practices of car dealers, dressing up the anti-car in ludicrous sale decorations, wondering “why they run clearance sales on brand new cars,” and faux-confessing, “Maybe it’s because we don’t quite understand the system.” A 1966 ad assailed the vanity of cars as status symbols, comparing the efficiency of the “ugly little bug” to the fleeting looks of “a big beautiful chariot, drawn by 300 horses!” and quietly reversing the old Edsel slogan: “If you want to show you’ve gotten somewhere, get a big beautiful chariot. But if you simply want to get somewhere, get a bug.” Another 1966 ad heaped scorn on “frivolous” automotive faddishness by asking, “Has the Volkswagen fad died out?” and confessing that, since it is so “completely sensible,” “as a fad, the car was a flop.”34

On occasion, DDB even encouraged readers to demystify the techniques of admaking. Volkswagen advertisements called attention to themselves as advertisements, and to the admaking philosophy that informed them. As one from 1964 put it rather disingenuously, “Just because we sell cars doesn’t put selling at the top of our agenda.” Another asked, “How much longer can we hand you this line?” (the “line” being the car’s peculiar silhouette). So similar in format were the various Volkswagen print ads, and so familiar to readers, that in 1963 the company ran an ad with no picture, no headline, three blank columns, and instructions on “How to do a Volkswagen ad.” But the ad’s Volkswagen message was overshadowed by its pitch for DDB and the new style of advertising that acknowledged the audience’s intelligence:

4. Call a spade a spade. And a suspension a suspension. Not something like “orbital cushioning.”

5. Speak to the reader. Don’t shout. He can hear you. Especially if you talk sense.³⁵

The ad knocks Detroit’s standard puffery in a way that Detroit could not possibly refute given its standard admaking style of the 1950s. In pretending to teach the reader to read ads critically, it naturally overlooks the new style invented by DDB: advertisers are liars, except, of course, this one. Conventional ad campaigns were incapable of responding in kind, since their appeal rested not on empowered readers but the fraudulent appeal of retouched photographs, dream-world imagery, and empty celebrity testimonials. For one of the Big Three’s ads to admit to its ad-ness would be to undermine the various tricks that gave them whatever appeal they still had.

The Volkswagen critique was easily extended to the other objectionable features of consumer society. Even though it varied only little over the years, DDB cast it as a car for people who thought for themselves and were worried about conformity. A 1965 print ad confronts the issue directly, incorporating one of the standard icons of postwar order: a suburban street lined with look-alike houses, no trees, and tiny shrubs. But parked in the driveway of each house is a Volkswagen station wagon. “If the world looked like this, and you wanted to buy a car that sticks out a little,” the copy advised,

you probably wouldn’t buy a Volkswagen Station Wagon.

But in case you haven’t noticed, the world doesn’t look like this.

So if you’ve wanted to buy a car that sticks out a little, you know just what to do.36

Volkswagen’s television commercials went out of their way to lampoon various sacred rituals of the consumer culture. A 1967 spot mocks game shows, the glittering dream factories of daytime television whose charm has been undermined by a congressional investigation ten years before. “Gino Milano,” a “little shoemaker” in awkward-looking glasses and bushy hair, answers questions about cars on a parody program called “The Big Plateau” while an audience of dowdy-looking women in pearls and cats-eye glasses watches anxiously. This quintessential middle American is eventually “done in by [questions about] the 1968 Volkswagen,” failing to appreciate the nuances of the company’s anti-obsolescence policy.³⁷

Volkswagen’s most incisive critique of American consumer frivolity came in a 1969 television commercial that lampooned the “1949 Auto Show,” one of the great promotional fairs held in the year Volkswagen was introduced to America. Filmed in black and white to establish the setting, the spot focuses on the elaborate displays and misguided decorative designs of several defunct automakers. The Hudson display features three women singing, in the style of the Andrews Sisters, a little ditty that features the line, “Longer, lower, wider.” A spokeswoman for Studebaker compares her car’s peculiar styling to “Long skirts,” which she assured her audience to “be the next look on the fashion scene.” A DeSoto dazzles from a revolving platform. And a man in a white smock gestures toward his model (a Buick, although its brand name is not given) with a pointer and says, “So there’s no doubt about it. Next year, every car in America will have [pause] holes in its side.” Meanwhile, in an unadorned corner, without benefit of microphone, revolving pedestal, or audience, the Volkswagen spokesman delivers his simple talk about “constantly . . . changing, improving, and refining this car. Not necessarily to keep it in style with the times, but to make a better car.” Not only is the industry’s puffery transparently ridiculous in retrospect, but a number of its practitioners have actually gone out of business.

“1949 Auto Show” was a celebration of victory in two distinct ways. First, it trumpeted Volkswagen’s spectacular sales success since 1949, the year in which, according to a 1960 ad, it had sold only two cars in America. Second, it signaled the victory of the Creative Revolution, of the DDB techniques over the empty puffery of the recent past. As the camera pans over the “1949 Auto Show,” many of the standard postwar advertising cliches are represented: the glamorous singing girls, the Reevesian authority figure in spectacles and white smock, the handsome pitchman with a microphone, the car on the revolving platform. As a result of DDB’s campaigns for Volkswagen, which first brought national attention to the new creativity, all of these selling methods are as obsolete as the tailfins, chrome, and portholes for which they were once employed. By 1969, none of the major automakers would dare to use such techniques: in just a few years, the DDB approach had made them stilted and old-fashioned, awkward emblems of a laughably outmoded past, so ancient that they had to be filmed in black and white to be properly distanced from the present.38

from nazi car to love bug

The Volkswagen campaign also marks a strange episode in the history of co-optation. Accounts of the counterculture generally agree on the Volkswagen (either “bug” or “microbus”) as the auto of choice among the dropped-out. For many countercultural participants, the Volkswagen seemed an antithesis to the tailfinned monsters from Detroit, a symbolic rebuke of the product that had become a symbol both of the mass society’s triumph and of its grotesque excesses. The Volkswagen was the anti-car, the automotive signifier of the uprising against the cultural establishment.

But “anti-car” was hardly a natural or normal signifier for the brand. In fact, at one time Volkswagen bore the ugly stigma of the mass society to an extent that American cars could never touch: in the fifties, the Volkswagen was known as nothing less than a Nazi product. George Lois, who worked on the Volkswagen account when it first went to Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1959, recalled some years later that

It was hard to forget that Hitler himself was directly involved in designing the Volkswagen. Even though the Fuehrer was helped along by the Austrian car engineer Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, the cute Volkswagen in 1959 reminded lots of people about the ovens. Julian [Koenig, who wrote the first round of copy for the campaign] was Jewish and wouldn’t forget it.³⁹

Bernbach himself was Jewish as well, and it is one of the great ironies of the decade that his agency, which also produced celebrated advertising for El Al airlines and Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread, was responsible for humanizing what Lois calls “the Nazi car.”

That by the end of the decade the Volkswagen had acquired an image that was more hip than Nazi must be regarded as one of the great triumphs of American marketing. The irony that several of the creators of this image were Jewish was trumped by the irony implicit in that Volkswagen’s hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass society against which hip had declared itself most vehemently at odds. The Volkswagen story, in other words, is the co-optation theory turned upside down, a clear and simple example of a product marketed as an emblem of good-humored alienation and largely accepted as such by the alienated.

DDB’s ads for Volkswagen simultaneously attacked obsolescence in the world of automobiles and contributed to it mightily in the world of advertising, rendering ancient overnight the Madison Avenue dreams of the fifties. As a form of anti-advertising that worked by distancing a product from consumerism, the Volkswagen ads introduced Americans to a new aesthetic of consuming. No longer would advertising labor to construct an idealized but self-evidently false vision of consumer perfection: instead it would offer itself as an antidote to the patent absurdities of affluence. This, then, was the great innovation of the Creative Revolution, the principle to which Bernbach referred when he spoke so enthusiastically of “difference”: the magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it itself had produced. Hip was indeed the solution to the problems of the mass society, although not in the way its ideologues had intended. What distinguishes the advertising of the Creative Revolution is that, following Volkswagen’s lead, it takes into account—and offers to solve—the problems that consumerism had created. In the hands of a newly enlightened man in gray flannel, hip would become the dynamic principle of the 1960s, a cultural perpetual motion machine transforming disgust with consumerism into fuel for the ever-accelerating consumer society.40

Thanks to the agency’s signature visual style (simple photographs, minimalist layout, large, clever headlines), DDB advertising of the early sixties is generally easy to distinguish from the other ads in the glossy magazines where it appeared. Even more remarkable, though, is the consistency with which the agency referred to the mass society critique. Remarks about the fraudulence of consumerism and expressions of disgust with the system’s masters run as a sort of guiding theme through virtually everything DDB did. Disgust with the consumer society was both the agency’s aesthetic forte and its best product pitch, applicable to virtually anything: Buy this to escape consumerism.

The DDB critique is visible in such out-of-the-way places as a 1961 ad for “The remarkable Parker 61” fountain pen, which declares that “In this age of mass production and slickness (and sometimes, shoddiness), it’s good to look upon a truly fine thing.”41 Or it can be seen, more openly, in a 1967 ad for El Al that cast the Israeli airline as a place free of the affected manners of the technocracy. Above a rather alarming photograph of a stewardess with a clownlike smile painted on her face is the declaration, “Maybe You Don’t Want to Look at a Painted-on Smile All the Way to Europe.” People are not robots or laboratory animals, and El Al knows it: “we feel our engines should turn on and off with a flick of a switch; not our stewardesses.”⁴²

Ads for American Tourister mocked, in typically self-effacing DDB style, virtually any aspect of the consumer culture that could be brought into contact with suitcases. Since the point was to demonstrate the product’s resistance to clumsiness, accidents, and malicious misbehavior, the campaign provided ample opportunity for more “realistic” renderings of consumer life. People foolishly run over American Touristers in cars; they drop American Touristers from airplanes. American Touristers (like Volkswagens) are too durable to serve as status symbols: “The trouble with an American Tourister is nobody knows you’ve been around,” a 1968 ad faux-confessed.⁴³ Even the jolly menials of the consumer world who were always romanticized in older advertising (the admiring butler, the compliant porter, the beloved Philip Morris bellboy) are lampooned in one 1970 American Tourister television commercial: a suitcase is tossed into a zoo cage, snatched up by a particularly violent ape who snorts and growls and smashes it about. Meanwhile, a placid announcer speaks of “savage baggagemasters,” “clumsy bellboys,” “brutal cab drivers,” and “all butter-fingered luggage handlers all over the world.” While in earlier spots such humble figures would have been rendered in friendly terms, here they are compared to apes.⁴⁴

The most mockable institution of the consumer society was, of course, the deeply mistrusted practice of the advertising industry, and DDB took to the task with gusto. Many of their ads commented on previous advertising and knocked the deceptive legs out from under the older style. DDB played on the reader’s cognizance of clutter, his boredom and disgust with advertising discourse. Before the 1960s, most ads approached the reader as a neutral element of the “editorial” text that surrounds it: its intent to sell is rarely mentioned openly, the assumptions and processes by which it is created remain concealed. But the works of DDB would occasionally admit themselves to be and even discuss themselves as ads, aware of the medium by which they are presented and of the discourse into which they have been inserted. A 1964 ad for Chivas Regal whiskey typifies the agency’s pseudo-hostility toward advertising: under the headline, “Don’t bother to read this ad,” the full page of copy below is crossed out.45

The agency’s ads for Calvert Whiskey, which it dubbed “The Soft Whiskey,” made a point of mocking more conventional whiskey advertising. After having come up with what may well be the most slickly meaningless product claim for a whiskey of all time (“soft” whiskey was supposed to be somehow “easier to swallow,” a double-entendre of which the ads made much), the agency proceeded to denounce liquor advertising in general for its slick meaninglessness. “Is it just another slogan?” asked one of the campaign’s 1966 headlines. Of course not: It required far more than “some sharp talk on Madison Avenue” to make the brand so popular.⁴⁶

DDB’s Calvert ads contained a streak of consumer populism as profound as those for Volkswagen. “It just so happens, you can’t fool all the people all the time,” one insisted, in the course of explaining why the advertising industry’s tricks would be insufficient to sell the stuff. “One sip and you can write your own Soft Whiskey ad,” proclaimed another, over a layout of product photos and blank lines. One 1964 installment actually depicted a consumer defacing one of the brand’s special Christmas decanters by removing its label under running water, encouraging this anti-consumer practice on the grounds that “The people who drink it will know it’s Soft Whiskey anyhow.”⁴⁷

Sometimes the DDB strategy of identifying products with public suspicion of advertising was more overt than others. As a 1966 print ad in the Avis rent-a-car campaign put it,

People in this country don’t believe anything they read in ads anymore.

And with good reason.

Most advertising these days is long on the big promise—a promise that the product doesn’t always deliver.⁴⁸

As a rule, advertising never acknowledges authorship or any other factors which would make clear its status as artifice; yet an Avis ad from 1965 openly proclaims itself to have been fabricated by a professional adman. “I write Avis ads for a living,” the copy maintains. “But that doesn’t make me a paid liar.” The writer goes on to complain about an Avis car he rented which did not meet one of Avis’s minor promises. Again the sponsor admits to a minor shortcoming, and again the end result is not the destruction of Avis’s reputation, but its burnishing. Avis confesses—it’s human, too—and its credibility is thus increased, as it is when the company forthrightly admits itself to be “Number Two.” The anonymous ad writer even declares his professional reputation (that quality mocked by Victor Norman in The Hucksters) to have been threatened so severely by Avis’s tiny oversight that it must never be allowed to happen again: “So if I’m going to continue writing these ads, Avis had better live up to them. Or they can get themselves a new boy.” The ad concludes with a trick that seems to “prove” Avis’s honesty by challenging them to “confess” their wrongdoing, “They’ll probably never run this ad.” And yet there it is, being run!49

The familiar spokesman models of the fifties, in their suits or lab coats, were a particular target of the DDB critique. In the Rosser Reeves era, the product pitchman had been a pretty predictable figure: a deep-voiced male whose authority was often augmented by spectacles and books, smiling when appropriate and always speaking earnestly and glibly of the product in question. Boring and respectable, he was a stock image of postwar order, an obvious symptom of the corporate world’s problems with creativity and bureaucracy. And he was the target of several humiliating Doyle Dane Bernbach commercials. In a 1965 television spot for Campbell’s Pork and Beans, the product’s flavorfulness is demonstrated by a male spokesman, accompanied by his female assistant, who tastes the product while seated in a convertible with the top down and headed into a car wash. The spokesman carries on gamely through the soap and brushes, talking up the beans even as he is thoroughly soaked; his assistant insists, in the best product-demonstrator fashion, that despite the deluge “You can still taste the sauce!” At the spot’s conclusion the car is filled to the brim with water, and the discomfited male is now unable to start the motor. “D’you think it’s flooded?” asks his assistant, laughing uncontrollably. A famous 1968 commercial demonstrated the nonsagging qualities of Burlington Mid-Length Socks by showing them in action on the legs of a balding businessman in horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, and narrow tie sitting in a minimalist modern chair. Everything about him is respectable, even distinguished-looking, except for the fact that he wears no trousers, only underwear and one of the socks in question. “We’ve asked you to put on a short sock the length most men wear,” an announcer says, “and Burlington’s new mid-length sock.” The man is challenged to “make it fall down,” and accordingly he begins to leap about the set, gritting his teeth, whirling around and waving his arms. Naturally, all his activity is for nought, the sock refuses to sag, and he abandons the struggle in exhaustion. The pant-less patriarch’s humiliation is complete.50

Then there is the DDB commercial that won all the prizes—and still does, whenever a trade group or publication decides to designate the “top ads of all time.” It is a 1970 spot for Alka-Seltzer that dramatizes the product by depicting, of all things, the making of a television commercial in which an actor is required to eat from a plate of spaghetti and exclaim, “Mama mia! That’s a spicy meatball!” Unfortunately, the actor fumbles his lines again and again, and we hear a director’s voice saying things like “cut” and “take fifty-nine.” The viewer suffers through each attempt with short clips that appear to be actual outtakes from a filming session. The commercial was a masterpiece of the agency’s long effort to turn public skepticism into brand loyalty: it recognizes advertising as artifice, and as a particularly ridiculous—and transparent—form of artifice as well. The actor is plugging an absurd product, a brand of ready-made meatballs that come in an enormous jar; he is filmed on an absurdly contrived set, with a smiling Italian mother type standing over him as he essays the dish; and when delivering his lines he adopts a grotesque Italian accent, which, of course, he drops when pleading with the director. Advertising itself—especially the prerevolutionary variety with its stock figures, its stereotypes, its contrivances, its fakery—is ridiculous stuff. Only Alka-Seltzer, which intervenes to rescue the long-suffering actor’s tormented digestion, stands above the mockery. Consumerism, like Alka-Seltzer, now promised to relieve Americans from their consuming excesses.⁵¹

But the agency’s best-remembered achievement was its 1964 election-year effort to sell none other than President Johnson as a symbol of opposition to mass society’s greatest horror—the specter of nuclear war. Without giving Barry Goldwater’s name, the commercial managed to portray the 1964 contest as a choice between automated holocaust and preconsumer innocence: a child playing with a daisy fades into a mechanical-sounding adult voice counting down to a nuclear explosion. Over the years, the commercial has been criticized as an unfair portrayal of Goldwater’s views, and it is certainly true that Goldwater was not, strictly speaking, in favor of nuclear destruction. But the commercial’s power has nothing to do with Goldwater, or with Johnson, for that matter. It aimed, rather, to case the election as an expression of the archetypal cultural conflict of the age. Its stark division of the world into flower-child and technocratic death-count couldn’t have caught the mood of the nation more accurately or more presciently. And although it was run only a limited number of times (and DDB never did political advertising again), it summarizes the aesthetics and faiths of the consumer revolution more concisely and convincingly than almost any other document of the decade.52