Thinking Small (41 page)

Still, some asked: If Nordhoff became the figurehead of the plant, what would be
his
checks and balances? Some felt his policy of “workers first” was coupled with an authoritarianism that kept most decisions solely in his hands. But Nordhoff saw it more as “tough love,” and he rather controversially made efforts to reduce the sway of the unions and Works Council, as he felt that he knew what the workers needed and could more quickly
give them what they wanted. He was, in effect, centralizing management. In a later article written in praise of the plant,
The Times
of London would refer to Nordhoff’s style as “cradle to grave paternalism.”
²

It was hard to argue with Heinrich at the time because he was exceeding all expectations, proving magnanimous with the workers and earning their trust. A wages commission was set up, and with the important contribution of the Works Council, the factory saw a 50 percent increase for the lower wage groups by the end of Nordhoff’s first eighteen months. Heinrich also set up a system that gave workers a 4 percent share in the company’s yearly profit. In the
early days, he installed a new kitchen and bartered cars with local farmers in order to get enough food for the VW workers to at least have one good meal a day. He also began regular “family-style” meetings in the colossal warehouse-like halls of the factory, where all the workers would put down their tools for a period and meet to hear Nordhoff speak. In these speeches, he used “we” instead of “I” and phrases that had been used by past
Communist organizations in Germany—“work comrades”
³
or “workmates” or “workers community”—seemed to take on another meaning in his leading of the postwar democratically inclined plant. He wanted to use words people knew, but redefine them: In doing so, he was redefining one’s concept
of work.
“
I am firmly convinced that there is no more natural an alliance,”
⁴
he told the men, “than that between a factory management and its employees.” It would sound like propaganda, except for the fact that he actually meant what he said.

At one of the first of these meetings, he spoke to the same group of men who were building
one
car every 300 hours and said his goal for them was
one hundred cars
in
one hour.
One hundred cars in an hour! In another session, he talked of the factory’s potential to prosper
—
an idea that felt fantastical at the time—and promised that Volkswagen could become one of the best car companies in Europe. Upon hearing this,
the workers groaned. And yet, they also couldn’t help but smile. They liked what he was saying, even if it did sound far-fetched. By setting such a high bar, Nordhoff brought a new energy into the
plant. And after half a year on the job, there was a noticeable difference there, even Ivan Hirst had to admit as much. The factory had a full working
German management and board; it looked and moved like an industry again. More men were coming to work regularly. And they were discussing Nordhoff on the lines. Nordhoff would often walk through the plant, not something German managers did at the time, and interact with the workers. He spoke in an even tone, never raising his voice, but his authority was clear, and his words and manner were unpretentious. Nordhoff knew, and openly said, that he would rise or fall with this factory,
and with his men. And those words were true. Nordhoff had stepped into a very unusual moment in history, and he was meeting it with unusual means. No one was sure yet just what they were moving toward. The British were slowly relinquishing authority it seemed, but what would happen from there? After all of Hitler’s motivating speeches, inspiring unity and pride through a paternal stance was a method that could not help but remind people of the very recent past. Many wondered
if Nordhoff was seeing the situation clearly, or if he was overstepping his bounds. His intentions seemed honest, but were they? Only time would tell.

The doors of DDB
officially opened on June 1, 1949. It was a hot summer day in New York City. The air in the stairwell was thick, but the mood was light. “Nothing will come between us,”
¹
Bill Bernbach said to his new partners, “Not even punctuation.” And he meant it
literally
: The name they’d chosen was a name without a comma or a dash—Doyle Dane Bernbach, just like that. It was the first time the masthead of an advertising agency had been written in such a way; a small difference perhaps, but
one already hinting at changes to come. Seeing that name appear in the directory of advertising agencies, Madison Avenue had to stop for a moment and scratch its head. Who were these guys? No commas between
their names? Was that a gross mistake, or had they done it on purpose?

“There was a spirit of high adventure,”
²
Phyllis Robinson said of those early days at the agency. When Bernbach, Doyle, Dane, Gage, and Robinson moved into their first office together at 350 Madison Avenue, an 1,800-square-foot space a flight above the building’s last elevator stop, Bill had just turned thirty-eight years old. He was the
youngest of the partners, but he was clearly the agency’s creative head. The unusual young men and women that DDB would soon hire would be coming there because of him, lining up outside his office, wanting his opinion on their ideas and projects. When Bill got excited about an ad, the whole room would seem to glow from his enthusiasm. It made his small, loyal team work hard for him, stay late, come in early; they probably would have slept there if they’d had the chance.
“We did it to see Bill’s eyes light up,”
³
Robert Gage once said.

Bill was perhaps the only one who did not stay late at work—he always caught the train back to Brooklyn in time to have dinner with Evelyn and the boys—but he was totally and completely
present
every moment he was in the office. His door was always open. He would listen to any idea, take anyone’s call. His eyes were everywhere. He was aware of every campaign DDB did. His presence set the temperature and mood of any room. Some people hid
from him when they weren’t ready to take what he would surely dish out: the truth.

In fact, telling the truth was just about the only rule at DDB, and that one rule was challenging enough to keep them all occupied, every moment of the day. The partners had agreed that they would start their agency with a clean slate. They’d do work that inspired them. When creating their accounts, they would still use research, but they would weigh that research with their
own intuition, remaining aware that just because something had worked
once didn’t mean it was the only option, or even the best option, for a new situation that might have since emerged. In other words: Just because something was right yesterday, that doesn’t necessarily make it right for today (but it could!). They weren’t in it just to get rich, to schmooze and booze high-profile accounts—they’d done all that. They were looking for a deeper nourishment now, a way to creatively have an effect on the world. They were
still a business—tuned in to their customers and accounts—but a business like none Madison Avenue had seen before. Even they did not know exactly where they were heading, only that it felt like they were heading in the right direction.

Whatever direction it was, it wasn’t fancy. The office space was clean and neat, but little time was delegated to decorating (they would later use their ads to decorate their walls). When clients visited, Bill didn’t want them to choose DDB because of the fancy art or pricey whiskey or quality leather couches, but rather because of the agency’s approach. Decoration would only distract people from the thing that mattered: the work. Some clients might
take such minimalism as an affront, but no matter, those weren’t the kind of clients DDB wanted. DDB was going to be about the people, the relationships,
the ads
; perhaps an obvious, but nevertheless unique, idea. According to Bill, the client is not
always
right. In his eyes, it was important for his team at DDB to trust their own ideas and work, and he wanted the clients to give them room to do that. Bill knew that the clients would always have a big
say—clearly they knew their products best—but he wanted the attitude of the clients they took on to be one of respect, not of power plays and veiled threats.

For that reason, every person creating an ad within the walls of DDB knew they could count on Bill to get behind them if what they were doing was honest and coming from the heart. If Bernbach thought their work was good, he’d back them, even if it meant losing a client, and he wasn’t afraid of taking risks. Feeling that vibe from the boss reduced the debilitating fear of
upsetting the client that so many on Madison Avenue must have
suffered from at that time; Bill’s trust opened up a space for real creativity, gave people the freedom to try and fail. It wasn’t about cultivating giant egos—though giant egos would remain a peril of the trade—it was about finding a way
to connect.
In short, with DDB, Bernbach wanted to flip the focus. Instead of asking what the client or the customer wanted, DDB asked: What do we have to give? Ads were meant for an audience, and it was the
audience that needed to be at the center of the ads, not the client. By focusing on the audience, Bill thought, his firm would inevitably do well by the client too: if those looking at the ads were taken care of, that could only bode well for the subject of that ad.

Bill would walk through Manhattan, or sit on the train, or watch people reading their magazines, and he soon realized that most of them were hardly even glancing at the ads surrounding them. In fact, they were often trying to avoid them, as if ads were an intrusion into their day, a giant sign of how polished and lovely their lives
should
be. In the heat of a stressful workday, those ads always seemed too far from the reality—giant homes and smiling
faces and beautiful ladies draped across the newest models of cars; such images created a status anxiety that only added to the frustration of everyday life. They also seemed to be using the same faces and colors, the same landscapes, the same words, as if there was a perfect, protected world; if people just kept spending, maybe they would get to that happy place too. The ads were meant to inspire, but they turned into a burden instead. People felt guilty for not being as happy as
they were told they should be in such a modern and technologically advanced age. People jealously looked at their neighbors and colleagues and imagined they were the only ones who hadn’t managed to reach that ideal happy place. But that place didn’t exist, Bill knew; it had never existed, and it never would. With DDB, Bill wanted to make ads that would pleasantly surprise, something that would catch the eye, relate to the customer and remind them that they were alive.
Just look at all this opportunity,
all these walls and billboards and train station walls,
Bill thought.
And what are we doing with it? What are we really giving people here?
To him, it felt like a terrible waste.

Theirs was an easy enterprise to mock: too idealistic, too dreamy, too hard to bring to life. And for DDB, there would be days when they would wonder if their goals were naïve. After all, the system that had been in place in advertising agencies before them seemed to be pervasive for a reason: It worked. Why go against the norm? Because creativity required it: “Rules are what the artist breaks,” Bernbach said. “The memorable never emerged
from a formula.” And breaking the rules at DDB meant being disciplined and confident enough to find something worth standing behind, even though it might be an angle or idea that had never been tried. It would be a lot of work, especially considering they had no precedent, but because Bill had thought it through so fully, the emotion and inspiration he felt weren’t running away with him, and he was ready for whatever might come. Now that he had his own agency, he could
change things from the ground up. To do new work, they’d have to create a whole new structure as well. They’d have to think strange.