The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell Page A

the account people went. So they presented the ad, came back and said ‘Willkommen is out’. Fortuitously, Helmut Schmidt—the client—didn’t want Willkommen, which I knew they wouldn’t because that made it a German car, and we wanted to be as American as apple strudel, as the ad says. He saw the line ‘Think Small’ and thought that should be the ad.”

    1959–60, early examples from the DDB campaign for VW.
    So one of the most famous advertising headlines of all time was, if not exactly written by a client, certainly spotted and promoted by one. Koenig says, “I’m told in Germany they credit the ads to the copywriters Helmut Schmidt and Julian Koenig.”
    According to Koenig, it took the famously grumpy Krone two days to bring himself to put the line down on paper. Meanwhile, the requirement had changed from a corporate to a product ad so it needed to show a VW. Initially, this further exasperated Krone by suggesting that logically, this meant the car should be shown small, which he didn’t want to do.
    But he calmed down and, encouraged by Bob Gage and others around him, worked fastidiously at the layout. Eventually he placed a small car at a slight angle in the top left hand corner of the page—and an advertising icon was created.
    THE CREDIT FOR “LEMON,” too, has a convoluted path. “The art directors used to put their advertising ideas up on the walls,” says Koenig, “and Helmut had put up my headline ‘This VW missed the boat’. Rita Seldon came into Helmut’s office and she said, ‘Lemon!’ Helmut said go tell Julian and she walked about thirty-five feet down to my office and said ‘Saw your ad, Lemon!’ I said, ‘Terrific’. So Lemon became the ad and I took my headline and made it into the first line of copy.”
    This version is disputed by George Lois, who claims that Koenig wouldn’t listen to Seldon, and it took her two weeks to persuade him to make the change. But as the two have been, and still are, in a high-energy spat over who did what on all sorts of ads they worked on, some of which were created fifty years ago (with one of them even going to the extent of preparing an ad for The New York Times to “set the record straight”) it’s difficult to know who to believe. But it is to Koenig’s credit that he’ll cheerfully admit that the provenance of the world’s two most famous advertising headlines were not his and his alone.
    The impact of the campaign was immediate, with the ads getting unusually high readership figures. Imported car sales at that time had halved in two years under the onslaught of the simultaneous launch of brand new compacts from all the major players in Detroit. But in the same period, VW sales actually rose by nearly 25 percent.
    Reinforced by this obvious endorsement from the only meaningful measure, the marketplace, DDB forged ahead with the campaign in the style which Bernbach, Krone, and Koenig had set. In less than a year, Koenig had left to set up his own agency with George Lois, their big fallout yet to come. But there were plenty of other brilliant writers to carry on the idea, amongst them Bob Levenson, who went on to write the definitive book about the agency’s groundbreaking creative output, Bill Bernbach’s Book . Other art directors, too, would come along to work on the account, but all followed the template and attitude set by the original team.
    In TV, too, executions were conducted with the same spare directness, but still with the knowing wit of “Think Small” and “Lemon.” In one, “Funeral,” the solemn occupants of a long funeral cortege of huge cars are shown one by one as the voice of the deceased intones over each:
    â€œI, Maxwell E Snavely, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath the following: To my wife Rose, who spent money like there was no tomorrow, I leave