This weeks lecture as on one of the most fascinating greats of the advertising world, Bill Bernbach. During the 1950’s, Bill Bernbach along with a few others managed to revolutionise the advertising world. They took American advertising from below top, to below bottom. Quite a feat, but more on that later.
He was one of the founders of DDB who are most famous for their Levi’s adverts. During this time he also managed to revolutionise the way that advertising agency’s were run. Beforehand, it was unheard of for a creative director and a copywriter to work together, however Bernbach saw this as something that could produce amazing work and to this day now, you won’t find a creative director without a copywriter and vise-versa. The team is now an industry standard.
It was with Helmut Krone during the 60’s that Bernbach created one of the most famous print campaigns ever. The Volks Wagon Beetle. This campaign really revolutionised advertising, but before this, you have to realise what they were trying to do, and why it is such a feat not just creatively. First of the Beetle was designed by Hitler and a lot of the target audience as well as Bernbach were Jewish. How on earth are you supposed to sell a Nazi car to a Jew? Secondly, the way in which all other cars were being sold was with this vision of the perfect American life, which frankly, during America in the 60’s, didn’t exist. People just wanted to buy into that idea. How could they change their minds? Honesty and a little bit of humour.
Bernbach and Krone, like many advertising moguls take their inspiration from Fine Art, and as you can see from looking below and the examples coming, he took inspiration from artist of the time Mark Rothko.
One way that Bernbach and Krone revolutionised advertising was the use of white space. Such as above (top left), good adverts then were seen to be the ones with lots of detail and really quite busy. They really were genious’, when this campaign was released, there was nothing like around at the time.
All the car ads before the VW Beetle were for the big burly muscle cars and tried to sell the ‘life style’. The Beetle ads were just honest.
And a little bit funny.
More importantly about the above image, how many times do you see a poster successfully advertising a car without actually showing it?
And again, finally, honesty.
No comments:
Post a Comment