The Creative Revolution — Madison Avenue in the Sixties

In the previous episode, we watched radio and television carry advertising into the living room, saw a new currency called the ratings point come into being, and witnessed mass production and mass consumption enter their golden age. Advertising had become a vast factory, churning out standardized words by the ton.

But when nothing but standardized goods are lined up, people eventually stop seeing them at all. Amid the flood of advertising that repeated the same promises in the same voices with the same smiles, the consumer’s eye gradually grew cold.

It was then that a quiet rebellion began, on Madison Avenue in New York — that single street that became the very byword for the advertising industry. A movement to turn advertising from a ‘noisy hard sell’ into ‘something you can’t help but watch.’ This was the upheaval of the sixties that would later be called the Creative Revolution.

A Small Car in the Corner of a White Page

At the heart of the story is a single advertisement.

In 1959, an agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) created a print ad for the Volkswagen Beetle. America at the time was infatuated with big, flashy cars made in Detroit. Chrome-trimmed, long, and powerful, such cars were the very emblem of prosperity. What DDB set out to sell was small, plain, foreign-made, and burdened besides with a history said to trace back to a concept conceived under the Nazi regime. By any ordinary reckoning, it was unsellable.

DDB’s answer was to do the opposite. They filled most of the ad with white space and placed a single small Beetle off in one corner. And the words they added were — ‘Think Small.’

In stark contrast to the contemporary car ads that flaunted luxury, this advertisement spoke honestly, with humor and intelligence, of the product’s smallness, its low price, its practicality. It did not treat the buyer as a child, but as a clever adult. This approach later continued into another ad in the same series, ‘Lemon,’ which conveyed the strictness of the company’s own inspection process through paradox.

This ‘Think Small’ is reported to have been chosen as the greatest advertising campaign of the twentieth century in a survey conducted in 1999 by the American trade journal Advertising Age. A single sheet of paper changed the sensibility of an era.

The Invention of the Pair — Bill Bernbach

The figure at the center of this revolution was William (Bill) Bernbach.

In June 1949, he founded DDB together with Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane. The change Bernbach brought was not only in how advertising looked. It lay in transforming the very ‘mechanism’ by which advertising was made.

At agencies until then, the common workflow was an assembly line: a copywriter wrote the text, and an art director in a separate room decorated it afterward. Words and pictures were divided. Bernbach seated these two together as a single team from the very start. To think of words and pictures at once, with the same mind — the prototype of the ‘creative team’ that has become standard in advertising today is said to have been born here.

Indeed, the ‘We Try Harder’ campaign created for the rental car company Avis — ‘We’re number two, so we try harder’ — also symbolizes this era. Far from hiding the fact that it was second in the industry, it proclaimed it proudly, and argued that this was precisely why it strove so hard. It was a paradoxical kind of advertising, winning trust by speaking honestly of one’s weakness. Its reception in test research is said to have been unfavorable, yet the result was a great response.

Bernbach’s philosophy is often distilled into a single idea. Advertising is not a science but an art of moving the human heart — data and formulas alone will not move people. He sought to pull persuasion back from a mechanical technique toward expression grounded in an understanding of human beings.

The Era When Advertising Became Culture

On Madison Avenue in the sixties, this sensibility spread all at once. Advertising shifted from being a mere tool for announcing products to a form of expression that mirrored the mood of the age, and at times created it.

Changes occurred in style as well. Photography came to be used more than hand-drawn illustration, and crisp sans-serif type and bold white space were favored. The tone of an advertisement — its very voice and attitude — came to be regarded as part of the product itself. It was an era that asked not only what you say but how you say it.

The atmosphere of the advertising industry of this era is also known through the later television drama Mad Men, which depicted it including both its light and its shadow. While there was an exhilaration of creativity, there were also problems the industry of the time was said to carry: long working hours, injustices of gender and race, a culture of heavy drinking. The revolution was not all dazzle.

Still, what this revolution left behind was great. Advertising rose in standing from ‘something noisy’ to ‘something that can, at times, stay in the heart.’ That a fine advertisement could become part of the culture that remembers its age, alongside film and music — this was what Madison Avenue of the sixties proved. The paired team that Bernbach seated together side by side still lives on in production studios around the world.

Advertising became, at once, the craft of selling a product and an endeavor that touches how people feel and what they find beautiful. This series, which began with the science of persuasion, has here reached a kind of summit — the brilliance of expression itself.

But this revolution is, after all, a story of America, of the Western world. Around the same time, beyond the Pacific in Japan, a giant of advertising moving by wholly different principles was quietly but surely growing up. In the next episode, let us turn our gaze to that singular figure.