Ogilvy vs. Bernbach
What follows is a completely rewritten version of a post written for this blog over a decade ago; same viewpoint, just better expressed. Appropriately, it's one of the essays in my book, Thinking Too Hard and Rethinking Too Much: Stories and Essays from a Career in Advertising.
If there was anything new to be gained from the [then] recent passing of advertising legend David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, I hope it will be a long-overdue re-evaluation by my generation of his ideas and principles about advertising.
Oh sure, the industry press carried the expected pronouncements of admiration from various creative superstars, but in nearly every case, it ran along the lines of “the quintessential ad man, built up a darn big agency” – backhanded compliments that discredited his actual creative accomplishments, if only by omission.
Trust me, I understand. I was here in the 80’s, the decade of Ogilvy On Advertising, the book wherein Mr. Ogilvy codified all his immutable guidelines (okay, rules) on how advertising should be created. In fact, I used to call it the Most Dangerous Book Ever Published, because of the way it made every client or account executive who read it feel like the final authority on creative decisions. Of course, my fellow creative department staffers read it, too, and we just snickered at the non-negotiable commandments he carved in stone throughout the book: Thou shalt not use reverse type. Thou shalt not run ads without headlines. Thou shalt use bullet points whenever possible.
But all of us, account people and creatives alike, had it wrong.
To industry insiders (and now, regular viewers of Mad Men), the business of modern advertising is often thought of as a tug-of-war, with the creative department on one end of the rope and account service on the other. But that conflict is more like scrambling to be King of the Hill.
At the mid-century mark of the 1960s, the real tug-of-war was between two competing philosophies for creating ads – and the creative legends who pioneered and embodied those philosophies.
David Ogilvy (1911-1999) believed the ultimate success of advertising depended on fastidious consumer research, which he distilled into news- or benefit-oriented headlines. These were usually backed by long copy that was shaped by results from ad readership studies and his own experience selling AGA Cooker ovens door-to-door in his 20s.
Following a stint as employee and acolyte of pollster/researcher George Gallup, Ogilvy formed his own agency, Ogilvy and Mather, based on his principals for consumer-focused advertising that was single-minded in one purpose, to sell. He crystalized this approach in notable ad campaigns for Rolls-Royce (“At sixty miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”) and Dove Soap (“Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream.”)
But he was also capable of brand imagery that transcended pure rational appeals, as evidenced by his work for Hathaway Shirts (built around “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” an intriguing aristocrat with an eyepatch); Schwepps Tonic Water (where he created a similar mystique around the bushy-bearded president of the company, Edward “Commander” Whitehead); and the romanticism of his ads for Puerto Rico tourism.
Of course, even those flights of fancy were grounded in meticulous, logical copy. As he famously said, “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”1
But not everyone shared that belief. “We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.”2
That was Bill Bernbach (1911-1982), founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency that sparked advertising’s Creative Revolution of the 1960s. For Bernbach, creative intuition, not a slavish devotion to audience research, was the underlying force to be nurtured and channeled.
After cutting his teeth in a distillery’s ad department, Bernbach eventually was hired by the William Weintraub agency, where he worked alongside Paul Rand, the innovative graphic designer. Rand saw advertising not as carefully massaged text that was illustrated almost as an afterthought. Instead, he envisioned copy and images as an integrated whole, text pared back and in the service of simple, bold images that would result in more impactful messages.
Like Ogilvy with Gallup, Bernbach had found a muse who would prove to be deeply influential in his approach to the business of advertising. But that’s where the similarities end.
Rand’s style made such an impression on Bernbach, that after he moved on to Grey Advertising and rose to vice president and creative director, Bernbach found himself at odds with the direction of his own agency. He outlined his philosophy in a 1947 letter to his bosses at Grey, like Martin Luther hammering his theses to the church door. Along with taking aim at “the scientists of advertising,” he almost seemed to have Ogilvy in his sights as well:
“There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you better readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or this long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier and more inviting reading. They can give you 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.”3
Two years later, Bernbach put his ideas into action, forming his own agency with likeminded partners, Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane. At DDB, Bernbach drove the creation of ad campaigns that were off-beat, unexpected, and distilled to one powerful impression to leave with consumers. Think of Volkswagen with its anti-Detroit, anti-bigger-is-better messaging (“Think Small.”). Or Avis and its scrappy, paradigm-breaking “When You’re Number Two, You Try Harder” campaign; in business, you never trumpeted being anything less than the best.
See also the agency’s work for The Federation of Coffee Growers of Columbia, which not only created a preference for coffee made from Columbian beans, but introduced a new advertising character into popular culture – Juan Valdez, the coffee grower who harvests his beans “Juan by Juan.”
Certainly, Juan’s humble, earthy persona was a far cry from the aristocratic “Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” perhaps mirroring the difference between Bernbach and Ogilvy themselves – Bernbach a Bronx-born son of immigrants, Ogilvy the scion of a British stockbroker.
Oh sure, the industry press carried the expected pronouncements of admiration from various creative superstars, but in nearly every case, it ran along the lines of “the quintessential ad man, built up a darn big agency” – backhanded compliments that discredited his actual creative accomplishments, if only by omission.
Trust me, I understand. I was here in the 80’s, the decade of Ogilvy On Advertising, the book wherein Mr. Ogilvy codified all his immutable guidelines (okay, rules) on how advertising should be created. In fact, I used to call it the Most Dangerous Book Ever Published, because of the way it made every client or account executive who read it feel like the final authority on creative decisions. Of course, my fellow creative department staffers read it, too, and we just snickered at the non-negotiable commandments he carved in stone throughout the book: Thou shalt not use reverse type. Thou shalt not run ads without headlines. Thou shalt use bullet points whenever possible.
But all of us, account people and creatives alike, had it wrong.
To industry insiders (and now, regular viewers of Mad Men), the business of modern advertising is often thought of as a tug-of-war, with the creative department on one end of the rope and account service on the other. But that conflict is more like scrambling to be King of the Hill.
At the mid-century mark of the 1960s, the real tug-of-war was between two competing philosophies for creating ads – and the creative legends who pioneered and embodied those philosophies.
Following a stint as employee and acolyte of pollster/researcher George Gallup, Ogilvy formed his own agency, Ogilvy and Mather, based on his principals for consumer-focused advertising that was single-minded in one purpose, to sell. He crystalized this approach in notable ad campaigns for Rolls-Royce (“At sixty miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”) and Dove Soap (“Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream.”)
But not everyone shared that belief. “We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.”2
After cutting his teeth in a distillery’s ad department, Bernbach eventually was hired by the William Weintraub agency, where he worked alongside Paul Rand, the innovative graphic designer. Rand saw advertising not as carefully massaged text that was illustrated almost as an afterthought. Instead, he envisioned copy and images as an integrated whole, text pared back and in the service of simple, bold images that would result in more impactful messages.
Like Ogilvy with Gallup, Bernbach had found a muse who would prove to be deeply influential in his approach to the business of advertising. But that’s where the similarities end.
Rand’s style made such an impression on Bernbach, that after he moved on to Grey Advertising and rose to vice president and creative director, Bernbach found himself at odds with the direction of his own agency. He outlined his philosophy in a 1947 letter to his bosses at Grey, like Martin Luther hammering his theses to the church door. Along with taking aim at “the scientists of advertising,” he almost seemed to have Ogilvy in his sights as well:
“There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you better readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or this long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier and more inviting reading. They can give you 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.”3
Two years later, Bernbach put his ideas into action, forming his own agency with likeminded partners, Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane. At DDB, Bernbach drove the creation of ad campaigns that were off-beat, unexpected, and distilled to one powerful impression to leave with consumers. Think of Volkswagen with its anti-Detroit, anti-bigger-is-better messaging (“Think Small.”). Or Avis and its scrappy, paradigm-breaking “When You’re Number Two, You Try Harder” campaign; in business, you never trumpeted being anything less than the best.
See also the agency’s work for The Federation of Coffee Growers of Columbia, which not only created a preference for coffee made from Columbian beans, but introduced a new advertising character into popular culture – Juan Valdez, the coffee grower who harvests his beans “Juan by Juan.”
Certainly, Juan’s humble, earthy persona was a far cry from the aristocratic “Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” perhaps mirroring the difference between Bernbach and Ogilvy themselves – Bernbach a Bronx-born son of immigrants, Ogilvy the scion of a British stockbroker.
But another, less heralded side of Ogilvy was revealed in a 1987 book, The Unpublished David Ogilvy. In a July 18, 1977 memo entitled “Confusion?” he writes: "For many years you heard me inveigh against “entertainment” in TV commercials and “cleverness” in print advertising. When the advertising world went on a “creative” binge in the late 1960s, I denounced award winners as lunatics ...
“Then, two years ago, you began to receive memos from me, complaining that too much of our output was stodgy and dull ...
“I woke up to the fact that the majority of our campaigns, while impeccable as to positioning and promise, contained no big idea. They were too dull to penetrate the filter which consumers erect to protect themselves against the daily deluge of advertising. Too dull to be remembered. Too dull to build a brand image. Too dull to sell. (“You cannot bore people into buying your product.”)
“I want all our offices to create campaigns that are second to none in positioning, promise – and brilliant ideas ...”4
Yes, you can argue that there’s still a world of difference between what Ogilvy and Bernbach each saw as a “brilliant idea.” But to me, this memo alone should upend calcified notions of Ogilvy’s creative philosophy as somehow inferior and should recast (and for many, redeem) his reputation in creative circles.
For my generation (and subsequent generations) of creative people, it’s been too easy to pass off David as more account man than creative person – too rational, too rigid, too formulaic, and too slavishly devoted to the principles of selling. Nothing like the more intuitive, more free-wheeling creative decisions of Bill Bernbach.
After all, didn’t Ogilvy once say this? “Our job is to sell the client’s merchandise … not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.”5
Actually, that wasn’t David. That was Bill.
* * *
1 David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, (New York: Crown Publishers, 1983), 158
2 Bob Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book: A History of the Advertising That Changed the History of Advertising(New York, Villard Books, 1987), 117
3 Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, xvi
4 Joel Raphaelson, ed. The Unpublished David Ogilvy, (New York: Crown Publishers, 1987), 42-43
5 Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, 81
2 Bob Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book: A History of the Advertising That Changed the History of Advertising(New York, Villard Books, 1987), 117
3 Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, xvi
4 Joel Raphaelson, ed. The Unpublished David Ogilvy, (New York: Crown Publishers, 1987), 42-43
5 Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, 81
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