ADVERTISING: Adman’s Adman

The fastest-growing ad agency on Madison Avenue is a quiet, unspectacular shop where research-one of advertising’s most sacred cows-has been put out to pasture and ignored. From billings of $2,000,000 a year after it started in 1949, Manhattan’s Doyle Dane Bernbach has shot up to $20 million-and the growth of its reputation has been even more spectacular. Reason: Doyle Dane Bernbach believes that copy is more important than market research, graphs, formal presentations and much of the other paraphernalia that dominate many agencies. Says Agency President William Bernbach, 46: “We get people to look and listen by being good artists and writers. We don’t expect of research what it is unable to do. It won’t give you a great idea.”

Bill Bernbach (“I’m probably the only agency president who lives in Brooklyn”) created the agency as a special vehicle for his own strongly held ideas about advertising. A onetime speechwriter for the New York World’s Fair, he began his advertising career with the old William Weintraub agency, became a vice president of Grey Advertising in 1945. There, while working on the account of Ohrbach’s, a low-priced Manhattan and Los Angeles department store, he stressed sophistication instead of price with the eyecatching illustration and a minimum of copy that later became his trademark, e.g., Ohrbach’s recent cat ad (TIME, March 17). But Bill Bernbach found his style crimped by conventional ad concepts. He left Grey in 1949 to form his own agency with Grey Vice President Ned Doyle and a friend, Maxwell Dane, took the Ohrbach account along as the nucleus of the new agency.

Bernbach stressed a simple but striking idea, a specific selling point that got across a message without a lot of talk. He disdained the use of gimmicks to lure readers. Said he: “A picture of a man standing on his head would get attention, but the reader would feel tricked by the gimmick-unless, of course, we were trying to sell a gadget to keep change in his pocket.” He got a reputation for being an adman’s adman, for putting small accounts on a level with big ones. He made an obscure New York bread one of the city’s best known with ads showing nibbled slices and the message, “New York is eating it up.” Among the agency’s other memorable copy: a plug for Israel’s El Al airline’s new, faster Britannia plane service, with a picture of the Atlantic Ocean one-fifth torn away (“Starting Dec. 23, the Atlantic Ocean will be 20% smaller”); its challenging ads for Ancient Age bourbon (“If you can find a better bourbon, buy it”); a Max Factor lipstick ad showing the Colosseum and a pair of fiery eyes staring from a Roman Senator’s bust (“Any man will come to life when you wear Roman Pink”).

The agency, waxing strong as its ads drew notice, went into TV, attracted such clients as CBS, American Export Lines, Gallo wines. But clients are accepted on Bill Bernbach’s terms. They are warned in advance that the agency will run the ad account as it sees fit. Says Bernbach: “It’s more important for us to know our business than their business. I’ve seen too many people morally wrecked in this business.” Says General Manager Dane: “All three of us live very modestly. We don’t have to be afraid of our clients.”