Excerpt: Think Small, Basic, Ugly, Economical, and Foreign

As we get closer to the return of everyone’s favorite dysfunctional televised ad execs for Mad Men’s hotly-anticipated fourth season, it’s easy to let impatience get the best of you. For those with the TV DTs, the Tip Sheet gives you another dose of 1960s adman excitement, this time from Andrew Cracknell’s The Real Mad Men: The Renegades of Madison Avenue and the Golden Age of Advertising, just out on Feb. 28 from Running Press.

CHAPTER 5: Thinking Small

“They did one last year, the same kind of smirk. Remember, Think Small. It was a half-page ad on a full-page buy. You could barely see the product.” —HARRY CRANE, MAD MEN

The most famous part of the most famous campaign was born out of accident and confusion. At least half of the creative team who conceived it had doubts—and if it hadn’t been for the intervention of the client, one of the greatest ads ever written would never have been created.

The task was utterly daunting; to sell a small, basic, ugly, economical, foreign car to a market enthralled with huge, chrome-finned, gadget stuffed, home-built gas guzzlers. Initially, a number of the people who worked on the Volkswagen (VW) account had misgivings. With the revelations of the full horrors of the Holocaust little more than a decade old, Bernbach, although clearly not bothered himself, had to make considerable effort to persuade his agency to take the account in the first place. As George Lois said, “We have to sell a Nazi car in a Jewish town.” Lois’ parents had emigrated to the US from central Greece before the war, and he was implacable in his opposition; tales of Axis behavior in Greece hadn’t endeared him to any idea of cooperation.

Additionally, the business was at DDB only as a sprat to catch a mackerel; one of Bernbach’s attempts at talking Lois around was to tell him, “We’ll take it for just a year and use it to get GM.” It’s probable he meant it too; it seems a perfectly reasonable business decision, if a little cynical. And it worked later in a different category—their much lauded campaign for El

Al netted American Airlines in 1962.

Lois remained unpersuaded, but international events took a hand. He was sitting in his office one day: “It had those fogged glass windows and I could see Bill lurking outside. Then he opened the door a crack and stuck his head round the corner, like in The Shining—’Heeeere’s Johnny!’—and said, ‘Look at this’. Then he shoved a newspaper through the gap and held it up so I could read the headline; ‘Germany sells fighter jets to Israel’. He said ‘It’s alright, see?’ So eventually I agreed.”

Discontent rumbled on though. Lois remembers one prank when he made a small “flip” book with a VW logo on the bottom of the first right hand page. As you flipped the pages, the legs and arms of the VW symbol quickly and neatly rearranged themselves—into a swastika.

He was showing it to a bunch of creative people when Bernbach walked

by. “Hey Bill, Bill, hey, come here, have a look at this.”

Bernbach watched the little dance of digits, expressionless.

“Very funny George—now burn it.”

Lois went to work on the station wagon, the even less glamorous variant and only alternative to the basic “saloon.” “Basic” is the operative word for the then very alien VW.

***

THERE’S A CURIOUS STORY around the origination of the “Think Small” ad, one which enhances the already noble role of another bold and prescient client who would put his money behind such an unorthodox and, at that point, unproven and manifestly risky strategy.

The ad was originally meant to be a corporate ad, advertising the marquee rather than a specific model, and it showed three huge American cars. Koenig wrote the headline “Think Small” to contrast with this visual. Then, as Koenig remembers it, “Helmut wouldn’t use it. And he who controls the [layout] pad in those days, controls the ad. So we finally come up with Willkommen, which I didn’t want but Helmut wanted, and with ‘Think Small’ in the copy. In DDB, copywriters and art directors didn’t go to the client with ads, 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.”

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.