Thinking Small (55 page)

Julian, however, only remembers the little tart.

Toward the end of their stay, a dinner party was thrown for George and Julian. It was a fun night. Julian told the Germans all about American baseball, and he and George—perhaps after a drink or two—even demonstrated “the American baseball slide” for the gathered crowd. Julian was a good player, and his baseball slide was indeed something worthy of being watched. Julian got a running start as George covered the napkin that served as home
plate. Nobody played umpire. Julian was safe.

On the trip back, George had to admit to Julian that now he actually kind of liked what he’d previously (before the trip) been referring to as “the little Nazi car.” There was, at least to an American eye, something kind of sweet about the car that made it almost comical when seen as the center of all that earnest technical attention at the factory. Julian was also impressed. “Julian was already talking about it like it was a bug,”
George said, “calling it a little beetle, that sort of thing, something kind of schmaltzy.” Still, George couldn’t help feeling a little guilty about his quick change of opinion. Once he was back in the DDB offices, in “an act of atonement for succumbing to helping sell Hitler’s People’s Car,” his old anger got one last comic vent; he spent hours creating a twenty-four-page flip book where the Volkswagen symbol ever so slowly morphed
into a swastika. “Very interesting,” Bill said when he saw the little flip book. “Now throw it out.” As for Julian, his first “ad” of the campaign was a photo of Hitler behind a desk with a miniaturized Volkswagen sitting in front of him. The caption read: “The man behind Volkswagen.” Years later, Julian would still laugh at the memory of it: “It was just a joke.”

In any case, Bill now had his team, and it was the very team
he’d originally wanted. Julian was to be the copywriter on all the ads. Helmut was going to be art director for the Beetle. And George would do the art for the VW Bus. In typical DDB-style, that meant Julian was to spend his weeks shuffling back and forth between George and Helmut’s offices, brainstorming with the German perfectionist and then comparing notes with the
rebellious Greek.

It was beginning to look like Carl Hahn had made the decision to advertise just in time. According to a
Time
magazine article from October 1959, “Not since Henry Ford put the nation on wheels with his model T has such a great and sweeping change hit the auto industry.” And that big change was something now referred to as the “compact car.” With the recession setting in, Detroit finally took notice of the fact that small cars like the
Volkswagen were indeed selling. The Big Three came up with plans of their own. Chevrolet was the first to introduce their compact car, the Corvair: “This is just a prelude,”
⁴
Time
magazine said upon the Corvair’s release:

And indeed it would.

In the United States
in 1959, one book seen in dentists’ offices, on subways and buses, in homes all across the nation, was the bestselling self-help book of the day,
The Magic of Thinking Big.
¹
It’s not surprising that a book with that title would have become a hit in the 1950s, but
the book’s message was not quite what you’d expect. It’s easy to look back and criticize the media or the car companies or capitalism itself for the deep societal problems beginning to surface at the time, but back then, it wasn’t so obvious that Thinking Big was truly a problem. And, in truth, dreaming big, fantasizing, wishing for the best: None of those things alone
were
problems. One has to look just a little longer and a little deeper to see
what was really going on. And to remember that for Americans it was the first decade after the United States had become a superpower, and that the country was experiencing prosperity unequal to anything seen in former times. Likewise, one has to remember that the United States was still a segregated country, a place where blacks and whites weren’t supposed to mix, and where being a woman, or of a certain color or class, was enough cause for discrimination—problems that
we are still trying to understand clearly even today.

In the 1950s in America, there was an exaggeraged emphasis on thinking big. Thinking big in those days was heavily equated with the commercial world: As more of the population now had more money to spend, as the middle class expanded dramatically after the Second World War, this emphasis on thinking big quite often got misinterpreted as “buying big,” and this led many Americans (perhaps subconsciously or unconsciously) to feel a void in their lives that
was hard to define. The dominant culture of the time urged consumers toward believing that the answer to life’s ills was in acquiring more, and this resulted in the well-known inertia of trying to
keep up with the Joneses.

But that was only one part of a very complex nation. In the
decades since that time, in recalling literature such as Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
or Vince Packard’s
The Status Seekers,
or in films that have been made about the 1950s such as
Pleasantville
and
Far From Heaven,
the decade has sometimes been seen as a time of suppressed emotions and out-of-control consumer desires. And while
there is truth in those notions, and certainly those books and movies express a legitimate reality, the 1950s was also a
good
moment in history, a time of abundance and enjoyment and progress. To put it another way: There is nothing wrong with thinking big; in fact, it can be very healthy, and the prosperity and well-being of many Americans in the 1950s is a testament to that fact. But that does not dismiss the other current that was running parallel to that progress: Many
were coming to the sober realization that there is no end to the struggle to keep up, it is a race
no one
can win. Likewise, no matter how good life is, or how much prosperity one experiences, it never pays to turn a blind eye to the larger realities of other individuals, groups, and views. Mysteriously, in 1959, DDB was able to sense that conflicted moment, and reflect it in a way that would ultimately resonate beyond their intentions or control.

The first DDB Volkswagen ad to run in
Life
magazine appeared on August 3, 1959. It was in black-and-white, and it showed a picture of two VWs from above, one covered by a sheet, the other not. The headline read: “Is Volkswagen contemplating a change?” DDB’s VW campaign got its first public plug on Madison Avenue because of this ad. In the issue of
Advertising Age
from October 5, 1959, in a piece titled “Didn’t Need
Research,” that first ad is shown alongside the article. The article reads:

The ad simply stated what Julian had noticed on his trip to Wolfsburg: the car never changed, but was constantly improving. He’d played on that knowledge but had given the writing, as the author above suggests, the feeling of a surprise or a mistake so that one had to read on and solve the puzzle. But he’d also given the plain honest truth. Nothing to boost the reader’s ego, other than the fact that the ad assumed people were smart enough to get the
twist. The article in
Advertising Age
goes on:

The piece generated only the smallest of waves, but from it, one can see how different DDB’s approach was, how Julian had absorbed the proceedings at Wolfsburg and used them to create a new voice and tone, one that had never been seen before, even at DDB. What he had done, in retrospect, looks so simple. He even says so himself: “We had conspicuous
⁴
obsolescence going on in every other car model in the world and here was this thing that doesn’t change.” Now, the ad looks somewhat obvious. But Detroit’s “conspicuous obsolescence” was hardly obvious at the time. In any case, this was the first ad to run in
Life,
but it wasn’t the first ad they’d made. The first ad they’d made would be the ninth Volkswagen ad to appear in
Life
magazine, but
it would go down in history as the DDB shot heard ’round the world.

It was late spring 1959 and George and Julian had just returned from their trip to Wolfsburg. Julian and Helmut sat down together in Helmut’s office on the twenty-fifth floor of the DDB offices, cigarette smoke drifting out the door and down the halls. Observing New York after Europe, Julian could acutely feel the difference: The culture felt very aggressive. Part of the aggressive feeling came from the mentality of thinking big, a kind of mad and endless
grasping for more. What if they stopped thinking the answer was always in more? What if they started noticing the details again, looking at the little things?

In the first ad, Koenig went against every rule in the DDB book (he evolved a style he’d admired and would later attribute to a rival of Bill’s named David Ogilvy) and wrote some of the longest copy in the history of DDB. He did it in a childlike cadence
that no other ad executive would have dared use. It was a simple, honest little story:

That was the first copy of the first Volkswagen ad. It was a tone that would be used for decades of advertising to come.

Helmut cringed when he read it, shaking his head and saying, “I suppose that means you want me to make the image small, like a little beetle?”
⁷
As far as Helmut was concerned, the last thing the American consumer was capable of in the 1950s was “thinking small.” But Julian held firm. He knew Helmut well enough by then to know that
his resistance to the idea was not what it seemed: Sometimes, the more Helmut liked copy, the more he’d criticize it. Helmut would later say that he always gave what was wanted, but never what was expected. Working on that account, Helmut explained, they all knew that the biggest sin would be to tell a lie, to say anything that was not true. And the car was small. And simple. These things were true.