What Bernbach Knew That We Have Forgotten
He changed advertising by insisting it should be good.
Bill Bernbach died in 1982, and with him died something that the advertising industry has spent the subsequent four decades trying — and failing — to replace. It is not easy to say exactly what that something was. It was not a technique. It was not a process. It was not a philosophy, in the academic sense, though Bernbach was more philosophical than most of the people who followed him. What Bernbach possessed, and what he instilled in the people who worked for him at Doyle Dane Bernbach, was a conviction that advertising could be good. Not good in the sense of effective, though it was that too. Good in the sense of worthy. Good in the sense of honest. Good in the sense that it respected both the intelligence of the consumer and the dignity of the craft.
I never met Bernbach. By the time I entered the industry, he was already a legend, and legends are dangerous things because they calcify. People quote Bernbach the way they quote scripture — selectively, without context, and usually in support of whatever position they already held. "Properly practised creativity must result in the product becoming more a part of the reader's life," he said. And also: "In communications, familiarity breeds apathy." And also: "Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula." These are fine sentiments. But quoting them is not the same as understanding them, and understanding them is not the same as living by them.
What Bernbach actually practised was something more demanding and more uncomfortable than the quotations suggest. He insisted that the creative department should lead. Not the account men, not the researchers, not the clients. The people who made the work should determine the quality of the work. This sounds obvious now. It was revolutionary then. Before Bernbach, the copywriter and the art director were technicians — skilled technicians, perhaps, but servants of the strategy, not shapers of it. Bernbach elevated them. He put them in the room. He gave them authority. And the result was Volkswagen "Think Small," and Avis "We Try Harder," and Levy's "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's," and a body of work that transformed not just advertising but popular culture itself.
The Partnership Model
The most radical of Bernbach's innovations was also the simplest: he paired copywriters with art directors. Before DDB, these two functions operated in sequence. The copywriter wrote the copy. The art director laid it out. They might never meet. Bernbach saw that this was absurd. The words and the pictures were not separate elements to be assembled. They were parts of a single idea, and they needed to be conceived together, by two minds working in concert.
I have worked in both systems — the old sequential model and the Bernbach partnership model — and the difference is not subtle. When a copywriter and an art director develop an idea together, the result has a unity that cannot be achieved any other way. The headline is not placed on top of the image. It emerges from the image. The layout is not a container for the copy. It is an expression of the same thought. The Volkswagen advertisements are the supreme example. The small photograph of the car, surrounded by white space. The two-word headline. The body copy that is witty, self-deprecating, and persuasive. Every element serves the same idea. Nothing is decoration. Nothing is filler.
We have lost this. Not everywhere, not completely, but substantially. The partnership model still exists in name, but the substance has eroded. In many agencies today, the copywriter and the art director are both junior to the strategist, the data analyst, and the platform specialist. The creative idea is no longer the starting point. It is the end product, arrived at after the strategy has been set, the audience has been segmented, the channels have been selected, and the key messages have been approved. By the time the creative team receives the brief, the interesting decisions have already been made. What remains is execution — the least important part of the process, treated as the most important.
The Rebellion Against Research
Bernbach was famously hostile to research, and this hostility has been widely misunderstood. He did not oppose knowledge. He did not oppose understanding the consumer. What he opposed was the use of research as a substitute for judgement, and the elevation of data above intuition. "Research can tell you what people want," he said, or words to that effect. "It cannot tell you how to give it to them." This is a crucial distinction, and it is one that our industry has largely abandoned.
In the agencies I have worked in over the past decade, research has become not a tool but a tyrant. Every idea must be tested. Every headline must be validated. Every creative decision must be supported by data. The result is work that is safe, predictable, and invisible. Because research, by its nature, measures response to the familiar. It cannot measure response to the genuinely new, because the genuinely new has no precedent against which to be measured. If you had tested the Volkswagen campaign in advance — this small, ugly, German car in a market that worshipped size and chrome — the research would have killed it. Bernbach knew this. He trusted his judgement. He trusted his craft. And he was right.
I am not arguing against all research. That would be foolish, and I try not to be foolish more than once a week. Research has its uses. It can identify problems. It can reveal misunderstandings. It can confirm that a message is being received as intended. But it cannot generate ideas, it cannot evaluate originality, and it cannot replace the informed instinct of a talented practitioner. The best advertising I have ever seen was made by people who knew their audience deeply, cared about their craft passionately, and then had the courage to do something that had never been done before. Research played no part in that courage. If anything, research would have prevented it.
What Remains
I think about Bernbach often, especially when I see the work that passes for creativity in our industry today. The purpose-driven campaigns that are indistinguishable from public service announcements. The social media activations that are forgotten before the day is out. The brand manifestos that are all manifesto and no brand. Bernbach would have found these risible, I think. Not because he was against purpose or social media or manifestos. Because he was against work that does not work. He understood — and this is the thing we have forgotten — that the creative idea is not a luxury. It is the most efficient tool in the advertiser's kit. One great idea, executed with skill and conviction, is worth more than a hundred competent executions of a mediocre idea.
"Properly practised creativity can make one ad do the work of ten." This is not a metaphor. It is a statement of economic fact. The creative idea is a multiplier. It amplifies the message. It extends the reach. It deepens the impact. It makes the client's money go further. And yet we treat it as though it were the least important part of the process — the icing on the cake, the polish on the shoe, the thing we get to if there is time and budget left over after the media plan has been finalised.
Bernbach knew better. He knew that the idea comes first, and that everything else — the strategy, the research, the media plan, the production — exists to serve the idea, not the other way round. He knew that advertising is a creative act, and that creative acts require creative people, given creative freedom, held to creative standards. He knew that the consumer is not a target or a segment or a data point. The consumer is a person, and persons respond to wit, to intelligence, to beauty, to truth.
We have not lost the ability to do what Bernbach did. We have lost the will. The talent is still there. The ambition is still there. What is missing is the institutional courage to let creative people do creative work, to trust their judgement, to protect their ideas from the corrosive effects of committees and research groups and risk-averse clients. Bernbach had that courage, and he built an agency around it. The question is not whether we can learn from his example. The question is whether we have the nerve.
What Bernbach knew was this: advertising is a craft, and like all crafts, it demands respect — respect for the work, respect for the audience, and respect for the idea. Everything else is commentary.