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One of the earliest ads focused on the Beetle's air-cooled engine. It showed the car, shot from above, covered in soap suds. The headline read: ‘The only water a Volkswagen needs is the water you wash it with.' Here, already, was a tiny revolution – if one that passed unnoticed by
the vast majority of the public. The headline ended in a full stop. Clive Challis explains: ‘Putting a full point in a headline was an act of sedition. It broke the pace and invited inspection – maybe even circumspection – of the statement. Of course this is exactly why Krone used one: he had statements to make which he wanted to be examined.'

All of these elements – the stark simplicity, the dramatic effect of the full point, the factual yet entertaining copy – came together in the most iconic ad of the series. It started out as a corporate ad for the trade press, the longish copy ending in the lines: ‘Volkswagen has become the world's fifth largest automotive maker by thinking small. More and more people are doing the same.'

For the headline, Julian Koenig plucked out the words ‘Think small.'

Krone is said to have been fairly unimpressed by the idea at first, although the visual interpretation was obvious: ‘I suppose you want me to make the car small?' Almost everyone in the art department – including George Lois and Bob Gage – seems to have offered advice on the matter, but Krone finally placed a little Beetle on the upper left corner of a blank page, at a slight angle. The ad was so well received that a slightly tweaked version – this time with even tighter copy by Bob Levenson – ran in the consumer press a few months later. Encouraging consumers to ‘think small' in the land of the large, where the automobiles were the size of buses, was subversive.

Another celebrated ad in the series shows a straightforward picture of a gleaming new Beetle, above the word ‘Lemon'. The copy, by Julian Koenig, explains: ‘This Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced.' It concludes: ‘We pluck the lemons; you get the plums.' In her book, Mary Wells claims that the ad got past the German client because he didn't understand the play on words – and was too embarrassed to say so. Bernbach later recognized that the daring one-word headline changed the fortunes of the agency: ‘Suppose we had merely said, “Every VW must pass rigid inspection?”'

Bob Levenson writes that DDB's Volkswagen advertising has been ‘imitated, mimicked, swiped, copied, misunderstood and admired more than any other campaign before or since'. But its secret lay in Bernbach's unwavering focus on the product. ‘He saw the Volkswagen car for what it was: honest, simple, reliable, sensible, different. And he wanted the advertising to be that way too.' The imitators were therefore doomed ‘because they weren't selling Volkswagens and he was'.

Advertising people tend to get a little over-excited about DDB's VW ads. But there's no denying that their iconoclastic wit and (let's face it) Teutonic precision have stood the test of time. When the New Beetle was launched in 1998, the advertising paid homage to the 1959 original, with only minor changes to Helmut Krone's classic layout. It speaks volumes that the older campaign still looked far superior.

Murderers' row

George Lois was one of the street fighters of the creative revolution. A Greek florist's kid from The Bronx, he was the archetype of the band of fast-talking, self-confident New Yorkers who wanted to upset the protestant applecart of Madison Avenue. When I met Lois in his Greenwich Village apartment, his opening line was this: ‘At Doyle Dane Bernbach [in the late fifties] you had the four best art directors anywhere in the world: Bob Gage, Bill Taubin, Helmut Krone – and me. It was a killer line-up. It was murderers' row.'

Lois admits that he was ‘very aggressive and passionate'. He had learned the value of hard work from his florist father, who would finish each day with his fingers lacerated with scratches. And as a Greek kid growing up in an Irish neighbourhood, George got used to fighting his corner. Talented from day one (‘I was always sketching and drawing 3D lettering on everything'), with the encouragement of a teacher he put a portfolio together and gained entrance to the prestigious High School of Music and Art (a public school founded in 1936 by New York City mayor Fiorello H LaGuardia for students who excelled in the arts). ‘The greatest school in the world, influenced by Bauhaus,' says Lois.

When he emerged, although he knew he wanted to be a designer, advertising was ‘still a wasteland' in the late 1940s. ‘The stuff they were doing was awful. You were taught six basic layouts.' After being drafted for the Korean War and getting back in one piece, he worked at CBS for its creative director Bill Golden, designing advertising and graphics for the network.

‘But I still had this idea that there were things to do in advertising. Bill warned me not to go. He said: “Don't do it George – advertising is a world of schlock.” He thought I was crazy.'

Fortunately, Lois got a job at Sudler & Hennessy, where the art director was Herb Lubalin, the highly influential graphic designer. ‘But even then
it was clear that the place for me was Doyle Dane Bernbach. In fact Bob Gage had already tried to hire me once, for the agency's promotions department, but I turned him down – I told him I wanted to do my own advertising. When I went back there two years later, it was as an art director.'

Lois says DDB was ‘the only creative agency in the world' at the time. ‘The industry was very WASPy. There were some ethnic kids doing edgy things in design, but apart from that it was pure bullshit. Ogilvy was creative, but in a different way – it had a traditional look, there was no room for an art director to breathe. There were a million rules; I had no rules.'

Even in the hothouse environment of Doyle Dane Bernbach, Lois stood out. ‘When I joined Doyle Dane in around 1958, I got an immediate reputation as a very different kind of art director. My stuff was edgy, tough, with a sort of street sensibility. It was pretty striking even by Doyle Dane standards.'

Plus, Lois was a livewire. His colourful language and incendiary temperament are legend. George recounts the time at Sudler & Hennessy when his boss and some clients entered his office at the very moment he was embroiled in a brawl with an account man. ‘I literally had the guy off the floor by the scruff of his neck. Sudler turns to the client and says: “All our art directors are very passionate individuals.”'

Another of his favourite anecdotes concerns the fact that at Doyle Dane Bernbach art directors weren't allowed to talk to clients. ‘I changed that single-handedly. During my first couple of weeks I produced a subway poster for Goodman's Matzo [snacks]. It was basically a giant matzo… really striking-looking image. The account guy took it over to the client, Mr Goodman. When he came back he said, “He doesn't like it, do another one.” I said, “F**k you!” and I took the poster and went over there myself.

‘So Goodman is sitting there in a big glass office, surrounded by his grandchildren. And they're all looking at the poster and saying, “You know, that's kind of fun, we ought to run with that”, and the old man keeps barking, “I don't like it!” Finally I lose my temper and stride over to the big casement window. I open it and lean out with the poster, as if I'm about to throw myself out. “See what you make me feel like doing?” I shout. “You make the matzos – I'll make the ads!” He yells at me to come back in, practically having a heart attack. His people are fanning him; they give him a pill and a glass of water. When he can finally
breathe again he says: “All right, kid, all right: run the goddamned ad. And if you ever get fired, come back and see me. I'll give you a job as a matzo salesman.”'

After a few weeks at DDB, a small delegation of art directors and copywriters did indeed go to Bernbach with the intention of getting Lois fired. ‘They thought I wasn't right for Doyle Dane. But it was the wrong move, because Bernbach had liked me since the first day, when he came to say hello to me in my office. I'd painted the place over the weekend and brought in this great Mies van der Rohe chair. And I was working on an ad for a liquid ear wax remover – I'd made a huge photograph of an ear about to be attacked by pencils and paperclips, which Bernbach absolutely loved. So when they tried to get me fired, Bernbach paid me the greatest compliment of my life. He said: “Are you kidding? This guy's a combination of Paul Rand and Bob Gage!”'

As it transpired, even Doyle Dane Bernbach wasn't big enough to contain the Lois persona. In late 1959, he approached DDB copywriter Julian Koenig with the idea of setting up ‘the world's second creative agency'. They would join forces with Fred Papert, who had left an agency called Kenyon & Eckhardt. ‘When I told Bernbach that I was leaving, he was beyond stunned,' recalls Lois. ‘It was like I'd punched him in the mouth. He said to me very seriously, “But George, you don't understand,
there can't be two creative agencies
.”'

Undaunted by this challenge, Papert Koenig Lois set up shop in the new Seagram building in January 1960. The agency drew on the ethos of DDB, with the same disregard for research and emphasis on raw talent. ‘It was the first time the art director had assumed the most prominent role in an agency,' says Lois. ‘From that moment on, every hip young kid wanted to work in advertising as an art director. We were like rock stars.'

Immediately successful, PKL won work from Peugeot and Xerox. Its Xerox TV campaign zeroed in on the simplicity of the machine, showing a chimpanzee making copies. ‘We were really the start of the creative revolution,' contends Lois. ‘One agency is not a revolution. Doyle Dane Bernbach was the trunk, but we were the first branch.'

The revolution will be televised

Further branches soon emerged. Another renegade, Carl Ally, broke out of PKL in 1962 to set up his own agency with the US $1 million Volvo
account. A fighter pilot during the Korean War, the pugnacious Ally wanted to make advertising that grabbed people by the throat. On his wall he hung an exhortation: ‘Comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable.' Ally won the Hertz rental car business and turned DDB's advertising back against it. ‘For years Avis has been telling you that Hertz is number one,' read the lashing copy. ‘Now we're going to tell you why.' Later, for Volvo, his agency came up with the line: ‘Drive it like you hate it.'

The new generation revelled in their irreverence. The copywriter Jerry Della Femina summed up the attitude a few years later, when he wrote a book that took its title from a slogan he had wickedly suggested to a Japanese electronics firm:
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbour
.

In 1967, copywriter Ed McCabe teamed up with Sam Scali and Marvin Sloves to form Scali McCabe Sloves. McCabe had started working in the mailroom of McCann Erickson when he was just 15 years old, and he went on to become one of the most respected wordsmiths in the business. Creativity, in other words, was breaking out all over. As Lois puts it, ‘Even the traditional agencies became creative around the edges.'

At the centre was one of the most important women in the history of advertising: Mary Wells, co-founder of Wells Rich Greene. In its Advertising Century round-up,
Advertising Age
calls her ‘advertising's first international superstar'. If Lois thought of television advertising in terms of moving art, Mary Wells considered it a form of theatre. Arguably, she was the first advertising executive to unlock the potential of TV advertising as spectacle.

Born in Youngstown, Ohio, Wells could have easily become an actress. As she reveals in her biography, her mother – who clearly wanted her to get ahead – found her an elocution teacher at the age of five. At the age of 10, again encouraged by her mother, she played her first roles at the Youngstown Playhouse. Later, she enrolled at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York, followed by further theatre studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. But here she suddenly realized with a shock that ‘I not only didn't care about becoming an actress… I didn't know what I wanted to study or be or who I was.'

During this period she met and married Bert Wells, an industrial design student at Carnegie Tech. She left the school and returned to
Ohio determined ‘to make money Bert and I would need for life in New York'. She fell into a copywriting job at a department store called McKelvey's, where she had sold hats as a teenager. Vera Friedman, who headed the store's advertising department, hired Wells ‘because I had theatre training and I could type – the perfect combination of resources, she thought, for a trainee copywriter'.

Friedman would soon discover how right she was. Energized by the idea that her words could induce people to buy clothes, Mary discovered her metier. By 1952 she was back in New York with Bert, where she got a job in the advertising department of Macy's. She had a gift for romanticizing the world that was perfect for marketing clothes. ‘Fashion is about… wearing your dreams,' she writes. Her next stop was McCann Erickson – but her career locked into gear in 1957, when she went to work at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

At first, neither Wells nor Bernbach were sure that the agency was the right place for her. For a start, she didn't trade in snappy puns. ‘My strong suit, theatricalizing life with dreams, irritated him.' Later, though, Bernbach referred to her as ‘the agency's dream merchant' and would bring clients around to get a look at her customized office, with its orange vinyl floor and tropical rattan furniture. This oasis was a sight to behold in the notoriously ramshackle agency, which prided itself on scruffy normality as a contrast to the slicker Madison Avenue monoliths.

Wells spent seven years at DDB, working on accounts such as Max Factor, General Mills and the French tourist office. (For the latter, Wells commissioned photographer Elliot Erwitt, who shot a classic image of a father and his little boy, both in berets, on a bicycle gliding down a tree-lined French road, with a baguette strapped to the bike. It romanticized the simple pleasures of the French countryside for a generation – and when I saw a print at a photography exhibition in Paris recently, the image still leapt out at me.)