Bill Bernbach and the Law of Unintended Consequences

 '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 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 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.' Bill Bernbach.

July 1959 was when it started to go wrong.

Before then advertising had been a decent profession, a bit flashier than accountancy, a lot easier than medicine and considerably less profitable than law. It was a job for clever artisans, people who could take a few variables and shuffle them about to create an advertisement which, if enough media money was put behind it, would bludgeon the poor consumer into buying the product.

Whether the advertising was in newspapers, billboards, radio or TV there was no real need to overthink it, as the constant repetition of a simple message, would be enough. Advertising folk made a decent living by churning out ads that all looked pretty much the same then returning home to their ever-loving families for a peaceful evening.

Then one man came along and stuffed up this cosy little world forever. That man was Bill Bernbach, who everyone inside advertising will have heard of, but probably nobody outside. He has a lot to answer for.

Bill was a New Yorker who was probably smart enough to do anything he turned his mind to. His insights on advertising, business and media are as relevant now as they were fifty years ago.

Doyle Dane Bernbach had been a small New York agency happily chugging along without anyone taking much notice until in July 1959 they were awarded the contract to produce advertising for Volkswagen in the US and things changed forever.

Bernbach’s theory was that if an advertising message was entertaining enough then you wouldn’t have to spend nearly so much money shoving it down the throats of an unwilling public. People might actually go out and buy the product not because it bullied them into submission, but because it was rather charming. It was the kind of product that you’d like to meet at parties.

This stuffed up the whole industry. Good enough was no longer good enough and competence was sacrificed on the altar of exceptionalism. Instead of copywriters quietly smoking their pipes and thinking up clever puns, they now needed to be streetwise comedians and scriptwriters with an ear for dialogue and a feel for the dramatic. Art directors, instead of workmanlike technicians, needed to have an eye for creating visuals that were compelling and eye catching instead of just the precursor to a big logo.

In a short time, advertising went from being a nice, steady vocation, like accountancy with pictures, into an art form in itself. Other agencies noticed their clients’ interest in this more cost-effective form of advertising and looked to hire staff who could create ads like DDB. The idea was that this creative revolution would save millions by cutting through the piles of dross that surrounded them using soft sell instead of hard sell.  

People who were smart enough to produce creative advertising were very sought after, the main issue being that there was no university or college that taught anyone how to do this. It transpired that failed novelists and artists was a good place to start looking and they started to push out the rather staider practitioners (like my dad). The old crew had dreams of turning advertising into a science, now the doors were blown off and it wanted to be considered an art form.

Over the Atlantic, that the British industry body had been named the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising hints at how they wanted to be perceived by clients. However, Bernbach’s theories were enthusiastically taken up and before long the British had overtaken the Americans in the overall quality of their advertising. Creatives were indulged because as rude and arrogant as they might be, they were somehow laying plump, golden eggs and only they knew how.

In the past most TV ads had been shot in a small studio with an actor or two on the set of a kitchen. These budgetary constraints were seen as being absurdly restrictive to the wonderful ideas that were pouring out. Production budgets shot up and the creatives vied with each other to get the most exotic locations. In London these high budget ads were called ‘Terminal 3 jobs’, as that was the Heathrow airport terminal which serviced all the exotic destinations.

For a while this all went swimmingly. The ads were fun, consumers bought the products they were supposed to, and everybody up the chain made money.

Then the cart started to overtake the horse.

The idea of Bernbach’s Creative Revolution was that creativity would make advertising more cost effective. Over time the ‘effectiveness’ bit got lost and creativity somehow came to be seen as the goal in itself. Advertising used to be judged on how good it was at selling stuff, but that was now considered old hat and the agencies preferred to rank themselves on who was creating the ‘best’ advertisement, as judged by the agencies themselves in the numerous award shows that sprung up.

Agencies would get hugely excited by winning these baubles, even though the public didn’t give a stuff. Somehow they ignored the fact that their job was to sell the client’s products and instead concentrated on accumulating fake gold statues.

This epidemic spread worldwide and agencies from Shanghai to São Paulo became obsessed by winning creatives awards for their ads, with only a cursory glance as whether they’d actually worked. Eventually they went even further, and they stopped caring whether their ads had even appeared in public at all providing they won awards. These were called scams, ads created solely to win awards with no commercial intent whatsoever.

Not long before I left the business I read an article in which clients were asked to rank the most important factors in choosing an agency. I was bewildered to see that somehow they had collectively ranked Creativity higher than Effectiveness: i.e., whether an ad was aesthetically pleasing was more important than whether or not it sold anything. These were people whose job depended on the ads working. This was crazy. This was turkeys voting for Christmas. Clients didn’t care about doing their job well, they wanted to be famous.

So, this was Bernbach’s legacy. He turned advertising from a staid but necessary profession into a breeding ground for egotistical, pseudo-artistic wannabes who were paid a small fortune for thinking up new and ingenious ways to spend marketing money with very little care for the consequences.

Senior creatives zig-zagged across the world to judge these award shows, all expenses paid. All they had to do in return was for their agencies to pay the exorbitant fees to enter the award shows themselves.

I’ve been flown to Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Bali, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, London, and of course, Cannes to spend a week looking at ads, half of which had never run.

The whole thing was absurd.

  But, God, it was fun.