The Real Mad Men (7 page)

Like Reeves, Ogilvy's proclaimed approach was mechanical—take these ingredients, mix them my way and
voila
! Guaranteed Advertising Success.

THE REEVES/OGILVY RELATIONSHIP
was complex. Says Roman, “They respected each other, they were rivals. David was his student when he came here. Rosser was a big deal, a big copywriter. David adopted him as a mentor. They used to lunch together regularly. Rosser
used to say “Do you want to be admired or do you want to be successful?” And he felt there was a dichotomy there. But David brought taste and style… so they parted ways on that. They parted ways on a lot of things. When David divorced Rosser's wife's sister, that was a break, on a personal basis. And Rosser really brought up David's son for many years.”

“The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”

DAVID OGILVY

There were other personality differences. While Ogilvy was regularly (and rightly) praised by the press for his business ethics and integrity, the Bates agency was in constant trouble with the Federal Trade Commission concerning overclaiming and false and rigged product demonstrations, all driven by Reeves' desire to ram home demonstrable product differences.

Yet Ogilvy never stopped proclaiming his belief in Reeves' advertising philosophy, telling him he was “his most fervent disciple.” The whimsy of those early advertisements and the small eccentric clients on which Ogilvy had built his early creative reputation had gone. There was a good reason—he lost money on both Hathaway and Schweppes. The agency was now large and in the major league, winning the vast Shell business in 1960 to go with earlier successes from General Foods and Lever Brothers. These larger clients liked the reassurance of rules and formulae—they found the serendipitous nature of campaigns that work apparently just because the character happens to have a comedy beard, unnerving. “After that,” said Ogilvy of the Shell win, “we changed from being a creative boutique, and got to be a proper agency.”

Throughout the agency the rules were applied, and they hobbled the output of the creative department, particularly the art directors. This bothered Ogilvy little, as he didn't have much faith in the intuitive nature of his creative staff anyway. Bart Cummings quotes him in
The Benevolent
Dictators
: “Most of the people who do advertising campaigns are rather run-of-the-mill people. If you impose a dogma on them that is research-based, you save them from wasting so much of the clients' money.” Cliff Field, an English creative director under Ogilvy, said he “threw up his hands at art directors.”

So it's hardly surprising that the ads started to look repetitive—just a glance at
page 39
and you can see how similar they were. Looking back in 1982, Ogilvy himself said, “For years it was difficult for us to persuade an art director to work at Ogilvy & Mather.” Yet the ads had some quiet elegance and style. As Ogilvy put it, “I have come to believe that it pays to make all your layouts project a feeling of good taste, provided that you do it unobtrusively. An ugly layout suggests an ugly product.”

Reeves was ever dismissive of Ogilvy's more refined approach, once describing the sort of ad Ogilvy would do if he had the Anacin account as “Cecil Beaton or Truman Capote reclining on a bed in a Viyella bathrobe with a caption of ‘You'll never know you drank that gin if you brush your teeth with Anacin.'”

Cruel—but pointed. And with that parody of Ogilvy's cultivated approach from the man who brought you hammers pounding the inside of your head, you get a perfect illustration of a battle of ideologies that had been running within agencies since the late nineteenth century, almost from the day that copywriters started working.

It was a pendulum swinging between those who believed in the hard sell, like Reeves, and those who believed in a softer sell, like Ogilvy—between an unadorned utilitarian “reason to buy” appeal and a more emotional “image” approach. But while Ogilvy and Reeves were battling it out, the advertising world was beginning to look another way, noticing the pendulum swinging in a new dimension, to an approach that altogether transcended the old extremes.

 

‘I know the copywriters tell the art directors what to do and the account executives tell the copywriters what to do.'

PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

R
eeves once warned against originality, citing it as ‘the most dangerous word of all in advertising', and every day that belief was enforced throughout Madison Avenue, to the detriment of the work and dismay of the creative people. Their lives were ever more driven by research, which in turn reinforced the status quo, since only that which already exists could be researched. Add to that their servility to clients who were happy only with the familiar, and it's inevitable that originality would be stifled.

In most agencies the creative work was merely a functional job. The power within the organisation rested with the account people, those who fronted the agency and liaised with the client. It was they who brought the requisition for the campaign to the copywriters, they who frequently decided the particular strategic platform on which the ads had to be built, they who judged whether or not they wanted to present it to the client, and they who eventually did so.

Next came the writers. Received wisdom had it that advertising was ‘salesmanship in print' and as salesmanship was spoken sales patter, it followed that the ‘word' had primacy over pictures. At the bottom of the heap were the art directors or visualisers, whose opinion was rarely sought, who hardly ever received the brief and never met the clients. They did the
writers' bidding, usually simply executing his or her instructions as to how the ad should be laid out and illustrated.

Not even the creative director had much of a say, and few had the autonomy of Don Draper at Sterling Cooper. It was the account men – almost exclusively men – who were the judge and executioner on all creative work, with the power to reject, edit and even personally rewrite if they so wished. The account executive, like an obsequious waiter grovelling to a valued diner in a bad restaurant, took the order to the creative kitchen who served up exactly what the client wanted – usually what he'd had the day before and the day before that. And if the client wanted ketchup on his sea bass, then the waiter saw to it that the kitchen people damn well gave him ketchup on his sea bass.

ALL THIS CHANGED
on 1 June 1949, when Bill Bernbach, together with Maxwell Dane and Ned Doyle, opened Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). To decide the running order for their names in the agency title, they'd tossed a coin. They also agreed on doing away with the commas that usually ran between proprietary names: ‘Nothing will come between us, not even punctuation', said Bernbach. The agency was twelve people in all and they started what would remain one of the two biggest upheavals in advertising until the growth of the Internet – the upheaval now known as the Creative Revolution.

Bill Bernbach's philosophy was so radical it was almost incomprehensible: ‘We have no formula at all. The only common denominator in our ads is that each one has a fresh idea. We present the story in a fresh and original way.' Agency writers, and particularly art directors, constrained in the executional straitjacket of a Reeves or Ogilvy dogma, found it astonishingly liberating.

For Bernbach it had been a comparatively short haul in advertising from fledgling copywriter to agency owner. Born in 1911, one of four children to Russian and Austrian Jewish middle-class parents, and brought up in the Bronx in an unremarkable childhood, he went on to study music, philosophy and business administration at NY. It was as good a mix as any for a future in advertising, although at the time that was far from his intention.

He left university in Depression-shrouded 1932 and he took a job his father had arranged for him in the mail room of a local brewery, Schenley Distillers. While he was there, he took to creating ads for Schenley's American Cream Whiskey, almost little more than doodling, and sent them off to the company's agency, Lord & Thomas. A few months later he was amazed to see one of his ads in a paper.

‘I had gotten to know [Schenley President] Rosenstiel's secretary… and she took me under her wing, and a very powerful wing it was too,' he recalled in Bart Cummings'
The Benevolent Dictators
. She encouraged him to establish credit for the ad by visiting L&T to see if he could look through their files to find a copy of the letter he'd enclosed with his suggested ad, proving it was his idea.

‘I was reading a book of poetry at the time, Kahlil Gibran, a romantic Indian poet that I, at that moment, was in love with. And I went to call on this girl who was in charge of the files up at Lord & Thomas and she said, “What are you reading?” I showed it to her and, lo and behold, she was a devotee of Kahlil Gibran. So she went to the files and sure enough, there was the letter.' The upshot was a job in the marketing department at Schenley, and Bernbach's career in advertising was launched.

MAJOR EVENTS WERE
also developing in his personal life, described by Doris Willens in
Nobody's Perfect
:

‘The Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified on December 5th, 1933, repealing Prohibition. Ex bootleggers turned into distillers. At the young Schenley company, headquartered in an elegant midtown brownstone, Bill wrapped bundles of ‘The Merry Mixer', a promotional brochure of cocktail recipes much in demand across wet again America. A young Hunter College graduate, Evelyn Carbone, addressed the labels, often glancing up to see if Bill, as he often did, re-buried his head in a book. She loved his passion for books, seeing him as a kindred spirit in a coven of bootleg-era survivors.'

Fairly soon they were seeing each other regularly and the increasing warmth of his welcome in the Carbone family was in inverse proportion to the freeze he experienced in his own home. His mother could not reconcile herself to the idea of her children ‘marrying out' and was implacable in her hostility to the relationship. Increasingly, Bernbach was swapping a Jewish life in the Bronx for an Italian one in Brooklyn, and in 1938 he made the break final by eloping and marrying Evelyn before a Justice of the Peace.

Bill Bernbach in his office in 1966 with several famous DDB campaigns shown behind him.

Meanwhile, his career had been given a massive leg-up by the larger-than-life figure of Grover Whalen, an alleged PR and marketing expert, who had been New York City's police chief during Prohibition and who had subsequently joined Schenley as Chairman of the Board.

In 1935 Whalen was put in charge of organising the New York World Fair that was to open in 1939, and he took the young Bill Bernbach with him to work in his offices in the Empire State building and at the site in Flushing Meadows. In May 1939,
Time
reported, ‘the fair as it stands today – a $157,000,000 extroversion of Mr Whalen's fantastic extrovert personality – gives him fair claim to the title of the greatest salesman alive today'.

The proximity to such a central character in New York business life, together with the experience gained in dealing with the corporate sponsors, press and politicians, was a fast track for the young Bernbach fresh out of a small company marketing department. And as his primary function was in creating publicity – he claimed to have written speeches for Whalen and ‘many prominent people' – his grounding in commercial communications continued on a broader scale.