Bill Bernbach

Bill Bernbach was the Creative Director for Doyle, Dane, Bernbach during its heyday. Working with Helmut Krone as Art Director, Bernbach invented a new way to project a message to consumers, by introducing wonderful creativity and a kinder, gentler approach to advertising. The agency led the way with its fanciful Volkswagen ads from the 1960s, which supplied both entertainment and product information. Do you remember “Think small”? It was a huge shift in advertising communication and became the industry standard that lives to this day.
So memorable and trend-setting was that original Volkswagen advertising that when the New Beetle was introduced in the 1990s, the agency for Volkswagen of America, Arnold Communications of Boston, chose not to Dot-coms to dot-bombs in one easy lesson Whenever I think of Bill Bernbach’s very insightful quote, “Dullness won’t sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance,” I’m reminded of the super-expensive commercials for various fledgling dot-com businesses that ran during the Super Bowl broadcast in January 2000.
Clearly, most of these businesses had never bothered to read Bill Bernbach, because their commercials simply reeked of “irrelevant brilliance.”
And most of the dot-com spots, purchased for as much as $1.5 million per 30 seconds, were so contrived, so devoid of a selling message (let alone a call to action), and so downright confusing that they wasted most, if not all, of their millions of ad bucks. This misuse of funds is also true of companies in other industries that choose to gamble the entire year’s ad budget on the Super Bowl commercials, but the 2000 dot-com debacle was the worst. The majority of these companies didn’t survive more than six months after their spots appeared — other than Pets.com, whose adorable sock-puppet spokesman starred in several Super Bowl commercials (before the company eventually went kaput).
Why weren’t these flashy ads successful? Because they not only forgot Bernbach’s rule, but they also ignored one of Ogilvy’s — namely, “We sell or else.” Their spots were so clever that they forgot to include a selling message that actually motivates someone to buy. Sadly, many even forgot to mention what service or product it was that they were selling. And, most important, they forgot to tell viewers why anyone should buy it.
These companies and their agencies got so lost in having a creative, good time on unlimited production budgets that they forgot why they were buying the incredibly expensive time on the most-watched show on television in the first place — they simply forgot to sell us something.
create a completely new campaign from the ground up, but rather to emulate the original concept. For example, the campaign for the New Beetle featured lots of white space (a Krone innovation that means just what it says — the ad wasn’t filled with color and copy from edge to edge), a small photo of the VW New Beetle in profile, and brief copy that read, “Zero to 60? Yes.” This kind of advertising is great stuff, and a compliment to the original ads created by Doyle, Dane, Bernbach over 40 years ago. In fact, Arnold Communications, when submitting its work for awards, still lists Krone and Bernbach as creative contributors.
Bill Bernbach, like David Ogilvy, was good for a pithy quote now and then, including the following: “Dullness won’t sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.”