Thinking Small (62 page)

“I knew there couldn’t be only one
²
creative agency,” George later said. Papert’s proposal struck a chord. It was 1960. The time seemed right. And there was the desire to see if they had the talent to succeed without Bill. In any case, they were not leaving because they had any problems with Bill. If anything, they were leaving
because they wanted to be more like him. The three men even styled their name after Doyle Dane Bernbach: “Papert Koenig Lois,” no commas. George insisted on being the third position in the title because he wanted his name to be in the same position that Bill’s name was at DDB.

But even once they had put their plans into motion, they put off telling Bill the news. It wasn’t until late December 1960 that they made their way to his office. They both wore dress coats, an unusual sight at Doyle Dane Bernbach. They met at the elevator at an appointed hour. The first time they had tried to go to
Bill’s office to break the news, Julian had instead taken the elevator down to the lobby and gone home. But by the second
attempt, they managed to make it through Bill’s open door. As soon as he saw the two in their dress coats, he must have known something was up. “We go into the room and we don’t have anything in our hands,” George says. “No ads or anything to show him like usual, so Bill was cautious. He goes and sits behind the desk in the corner of the room—I’d never in my life seen Bill sit behind a desk before.”

“I told him we were leaving,” Julian recalls.

“Julian said we were leaving,” George says. “But he said it just like that, ‘Bill, we’re leaving,’ and so I had to jump in and try and smooth it out. I told him we were very excited about starting the second creative agency, thinking he’d be proud of that.”

But Bill was hurt, not proud. “There can only be one creative agency in the world,” he told them. It felt like a punch in the stomach to Julian and George. They stammered out something about how it could work “just so long as we model ourselves after you.” That softened Bill a bit. “I don’t want to lose ya,” he said. “This is just something we feel in our gut, Bill,” George replied. “It’s just
something we have to do.” And what could Bill say? He had once done the same thing himself, hadn’t he? “It’s not about the money,” George said. “We’re not taking a single one of your accounts.” That itself was quite an unusual move, a sign of how much Julian and George respected Bill. After all, when Bill had left Grey all those years before, he’d taken the Ohrbach’s account with him. He probably wouldn’t
have been able to leave had he not. As Julian and George left his office for the last time, Bill gave them both long hugs. “Just know you’ve always got a home here,” he said. And they knew he meant it.

Helmut Krone was not happy to hear what Julian and George had planned. Not only did he feel left out, and not only did it seem that Julian had “sided” with George, he also thought they were simply crazy: Even if they’d asked Helmut, there’s no way he would have left DDB then. Like Bill, Helmut thought there
could be only one creative agency, and that was Bill’s agency. Like so many others, he just didn’t
think DDB’s model would work anywhere else. When Helmut saw Julian and George walking together through Bryant Park just after they’d resigned, he called out a mocking “cuckoo-cuckoo.”
³
And he wasn’t the only one: A lot of people at DDB saw them as traitors, or thought they were setting themselves up to fail.

As it turned out, however, there could indeed be more than one creative agency in town. In fact, all of Madison Avenue would eventually use the same arrangement Bill had pioneered. It is a transformation that has since been called the Creative Revolution of advertising. It happened in the late 1960s when the entire advertising establishment, mirroring the counterculture as it challenged the status quo, began a structural reorganization, eventually throwing out many of
its old policies and ways.

It might seem like Bill’s students were rejecting him by leaving, but in reality, it was the ultimate sign of his success. DDB didn’t suffer; it actually benefited from their departure. In fact, it was perhaps Julian and George’s move that truly solidified Bill Bernbach as a name everyone on Madison Avenue knew, the leader of a revolution, a man who transformed the structure of advertising and instigated a new norm on Madison Avenue. It was by
leaving Bill that his “students” spread his philosophy and ideas, and DDB became a kind of “founding father.” In 1965,
Advertising Age
wrote: “It is quite possible that the effect of DDB is
⁴
as culturally significant as that of, let us say, writers such as Mickey Spillane, Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, or artists such as Paul Klee,
[or] Andy Warhol.… ” By the 1980s, a whole new generation of advertising agencies such as Wieden+Kennedy (inventors of Nike’s Just Do It ads), Goodby, Silverstein (Got Milk?), and Chiat\Day (creators of the Think Different ads for Apple, one of which featured Bill Bernbach himself)—all used the same structure of free association and teams that DDB had begun, to create beyond-the-box ideas born from the spirit and revolution that began with Bill.

Papert Koenig Lois was a huge success. The agency made millions of dollars and produced scores of legendary ads. Eventually others began to break off from Bill to start new agencies; Mary Wells Lawrence, a protégée of Bill’s who became the first female CEO of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (Wells Rich Greene), was one of the more successful and famous ones. Helmut Krone would also leave for a while, and though he
would be known as one of the most influential and brilliant art directors of his time, he would eventually go back to DDB and stay there for the rest of his career.

In the early years of DDB, Bill carried a card around in his pocket that said, “He might be right.” He would pull that card out in meetings and hand it to the person he was meeting with: It was supposed to remind them both to keep open minds. And that would prove to be something Bill himself constantly struggled with. The more famous he became, the more difficult it was for Bill to remember that the other guy might be right. But even those who disagreed
with him found it hard to stay angry at Bill for long. “We disagreed sometimes about how an ad should be done,”
⁵
Helmut once said about his relationship with Bill. “And now and then we played this game of getting a little mutual antagonism out of the way before settling down to work. But he never squashed me … He could have so easily … But he always left me some breathing room. Yes, we argued, but all the while we did it with love … ”

Bill Bernbach died in 1982 at the age of 71. One of the last things he talked to anyone about was Volkswagen (DDB was working on a new ad for them at the time). When the guys from DDB reluctantly left his hospital room the night he died, Bill reassured them: “I’ll be back on Monday,”
⁶
he said, “and we’ll do some great stuff.”

“What a different life it would have been without Bill Bernbach,”
⁷
Helmut Krone later said. That was true in more ways than one. No one who ever worked with Bill was able to leave him behind because from that day forward, no matter where they went, their time at DDB would be one of the most important parts of their résumé.
⁸
But a
person’s legend is often bigger than the actual woman or man. And “trying to live up to one’s legend” is oftern a road to insecurity or hubris. Bill’s reputation became so big that he was rarely capable of sharing the stage. Some felt that Bill disowned his “sons and daughters” when they left him; he never sent any business their way or praised or recommended them, but in truth, he was always aware of them, watching them from afar. In
1978, for instance, nearly eighteen years after George and Julian left DDB, tragedy struck George’s family: He lost one of his beloved sons. That very next morning, Bill was waiting downstairs in the lobby of George’s building, just standing there quietly, so that when George came down he could give him a hug.

In the end, who was most responsible for the VW ads, most claimant to the fame that followed? It’s hard to say. And frankly, it doesn’t matter. The magic was in the interaction. DDB was an environment that nurtured ideas, and it was that inexplicable chemistry that made every new ad at DDB seem unexpected but fated, or as George once put it, “like pulling pigeons from a sleeve.”
⁹

In the years
following the Second World War, the push and pull between Germany’s banks, its businesses, its governments, and its people—especially in the form of labor movements and work councils—evolved into a new system that helped people get out of their own way, and for a while, the market was in a state of grace. No matter which way you slice it, postwar Germany was eventually a major
triumph in the history of democracy, a time when the choice was made for a national economy based on freedom, rather than one based on governmental or corporate controls. As the next twenty years in Germany would show, Realpolitik in the country became a matter of economic rather than military might. In an interview from February 1975, in the Swiss journal
Finanz und Wirtschaft,
West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt summed it up well when he said,
“For some years now
our economic policy has simultaneously been our foreign policy.”
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And one strong pumping organ of that economic policy has been Volkswagen.

People in America (and that included me, before spending so much time in Germany) rarely understand what a giant international company Volkswagen has evolved into in the decades since the Second World War. Most of us don’t even know that the VW Group (which is a subset of Volkswagen AG) includes Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Seat, and Škoda or that today VW is Europe’s largest carmaker and the second largest car company in the world. In 2009,
VW’s corporate earnings were 911 million euros (about $1.2 billion), and this in the midst of a worldwide recession.

The Volkswagen parent company became an
Aktiengesellschaft
(Volkswagen AG) in 1960, when it first decided to open some of its shares to the public. In that new configuration, 20 percent of the company was retained by the state government, 20 percent was retained by the national government, and the
other 60 percent was sold to stakeholders and shareholders. For clarity, to imagine this same configuration applied to an American car company
like Ford, it would be as if the American national government controlled 20 percent of Ford, while the state of Michigan controlled another 20 percent, and the rest was owned by private investors and stockholders. This is not a comparison that would literally hold true, but it does highlight the very different ways the two companies started: VW as a national enterprise, and Ford as a private one.

While many car companies have had moments where they were at times publicly owned (in other words, owned and funded by the taxpayers and the government), that has been less a rule or founding principle of other car companies and more a temporary fix to save a company from going bankrupt, or to carry it through a changing political and social climate (after the Second World War, for example, many European car companies experienced some degree of public ownership until
they could survive as private enterprises). But the reason why Volkswagen has been more
permanently
structured as a (partly) publicly owned company goes back to the way the VW company itself was formed.

Because the plant was built using funds of the German Labor Front—a national, governmental organization that had been formed by the Nazis from the workers’ unions and required all workers to pay fees to it—it was built from the money provided by German workers. And because of that, German workers’ unions (IG Metall, for example), which are economic powerhouses in Germany in their own right, still, to this day, have an agreement with VW that
gives them an important stake in the management of the company (an agreement reached between VW and the unions after the Second World War) and a very big say in VW’s decision-making process. Volkswagen’s executives, for example, have to have the consent of labor representatives before they can do something like move the production of a car to a new plant.