Bill Bernbach Simulacrum

The Life

William Bernbach was born in New York in 1911, worked as a copywriter at several New York agencies through the 1930s and 1940s, and in 1949 co-founded Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), which he served as creative director until his death in 1982. The agency became the most influential creative force in American advertising of the 1950s and 1960s. The campaigns associated with his direction — the Volkswagen *Think Small* and *Lemon* series (from 1959), the Avis *We try harder* campaign, the *You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's rye bread* posters — defined what came to be called the Creative Revolution in American advertising.

The Thought

Bernbach's revolutionary move was to break with the cluttered, exhortative, research-dominated advertising style that had prevailed in America through the 1940s and 1950s. The *Think Small* Volkswagen advertisement of 1959 — a small black-and-white image of a Beetle against a vast white field, with two words of headline — was a deliberate rejection of the contemporary style of crowded layouts, exaggerated claims, and selling pressure. Bernbach argued that advertising should respect its audience's intelligence, should make a single clear point, should be witty rather than shrill, and should work by allowing the reader to draw the implicit conclusion rather than having it declared.

The creative team he assembled at DDB — notably the writer-art-director pairings, a structural innovation that treated copy and design as a single creative unit — became the model for creative departments across the industry. His often-quoted working principle was that advertising must first be noticed before it can sell anything, and that the craft of being noticed is the craft of originality within specific commercial constraints.

The Legacy

The Creative Revolution that Bernbach's DDB inaugurated reshaped American and subsequently international advertising. The modern creative agency, with its writer-art-director teams and its emphasis on distinctive craft, descends directly from his innovations. Many of the dominant advertising figures of the following generation — Jerry Della Femina, George Lois, Ed McCabe — trained at DDB or in shops directly modelled on it. The standard of creative excellence that Bernbach established has become so thoroughly internalised that his original battle — against dull, shouting, condescending advertising — now seems, to practitioners formed within his inheritance, common sense rather than revolution.