HISTORY's Moment in Media: DDB Ushers In the Creative Revolution of Advertising

It wasn39t until the socalled creative revolution of the 1960s that advertising became something resembling what we see today creative bold and designed to stand out and get your attention About the idea and the emotion about entertaining you Designed to make you want the product not just to tell you what the product isAnd the creative revolution can trace its roots more than anywhere else to the pioneering agency Doyle Dane Bernbach which opened its doors on June 1 1949 72 years ago this month and its visionary leader Bill BernbachAd Age once described him as quotthe single most influential creative force in advertising39s historyquotBernbach worked at Grey Advertising in the years after World War II becoming vice president responsible for art and copy before he was 40 He befriended Ned Doyle a vice president and account supervisor there and together with Maxwell Dane who ran his own small agency the trio launched Doyle Dane Bernbach in a walkup office at 350 Madison Avenue later for many years the global headquarters of Condamp233 Nast Doyle would handle accounts Dane would run the business Bernbach would lead creative They started with 13 employeesBy 1982 according to Bernbach39s New York Times obituary the agency had grown to 2900 employees and 27 branch offices in 16 countries around the world Annual billings at 500000 in 1949 reached 12 billion in 1982Their first big account brought over from Grey was for a New York department store called Ohrbach39s which specialized in nofrills shopping for highfashion clothes quotHigh is the world for Ohrbach39s fashionsquot Bernbach39s copy read over a photo of a welldressed model Below it quotLow is the world for Ohrbach39s pricesquotIn its minimalism and its ability to truthfully sell a brand in a lightly humorous way it set the model for the legendary DDB work to come what that Times obit called the agency39s quotlowkey provocative and usually believable sales messagesquotBernbach and his team often leaned into what might be seen as a negative to truthfully and charmingly sell the product quotThink smallquot for the Volkswagen Beetle which really was small quotWe Try Harderquot for Avis which really was No 2 to dominant Hertz The classic quotYou don39t have to be Jewish to love Levy39squot for Brooklynmade rye breadBut DDB39s revolutions happened behind the scenes too Because the founding partners were committed to bringing in the most creative talent they hired many who had been overlooked at more traditional agencies including Phyllis K Robinson as the first female copy chief in US history Long before diversity was a priority for most corporations Bernbach and his colleagues realized that they39d get the best ideas and the best range of perspectives from a creative team with different backgroundsBernbach and Robinson were also the first to pair copywriters and art directors into creative teams that work together and allow images and copy to inspire and influence each other Previously no one saw any need for the copy and the art to coordinateAlmost threequarters of a century later nearly all the DDB innovations remain standard practice starting from the foundation of the creative teamAnd the DDB name nearly made it to its 72nd birthday tooFor a bit it seemed like it wouldn39t in 1986 as the agency floundered after Bernbach39s death there was a neardisastrous merger with Chicago39s Needham Harper Worldwide that turned into a threeway tieup with the agency network BBDO leaving the combined DDB Needham Worldwide as a unit within the thennew holding company Omnicom But within a few years the agency righted itself and in 1999 on its 50th birthday it jettisoned the Needham name For more than a dozen years it was once again proudly DDB But then in 2012 DDB Worldwide acquired the hot UK agency Adam ampamp Eve and the London office became known as adamampampeveDDB Then on May 31 2023 one day shy of that birthday DDB NYC announced its own merger becoming adamampampeveDDBClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: DDB Ushers In the Creative Revolution of Advertising

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: DDB Ushers In the Creative Revolution of Advertising

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