“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?”

This oversized hardback book is a compendium of Volkswagen advertisements produced by Doyle Dane Bernbach.

The format is quite simple: The 364-page book consists almost entirely of ads — 500 in all. Content is grouped in a dozen sections, most dedicated to specific types of VW models, marketing and geographic locations. Each section is introduced with a wee bit of background.

That may not sound terribly interesting, particularly given the $65 price tag. Yet I find this book to be among the most mesmerizing on my shelf. That’s partly because the quality of the ads is so exceptional. As discussed further here, “DDB’s Volkswagen campaign is considered to this day to be the best ad campaign ever conceived,” says Andrea Hiott (2012, p. 367).

However, this book also functions as a portal to the life and times of the 1960s and 70s. It’s an opportunity to connect a society-wide phenomenon — the VW Beetle — with our individual memories.

The authors — Alfredo Marcantonio, David Abbott and John O’Driscoll — state that they decided to put this book together more than 30 years ago. “We had all owned Beetles in our day and we had all been involved in Volkswagen advertising. One of us as a client, one as an art director and one as a copywriter. To let the Beetle and its advertising pass on without a permanent record seemed a crying shame” (p.5).

Agreed. Thanks, guys.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?”

• Marcantonio, Alfredo and David Abbott, John O’Driscoll; 2014
• Merrell Publishers Limited, London, UK

“Back then, the copywriters and art directors who wrote and designed the ads worked separately, often on different floors. The headline and copy would be written, then sent to the art director to be laid out and mocked up. Bernbach put the writer and the art director together, because he believed that an ad’s copy and visual should be developed together. His hiring policy, like Grey’s, also swam against the tide. Italians and Greeks became his art directors, New York’s Jewish and Irish communities provided him with his copywriters. And tellingly, the new agency’s very first copy chief was a woman, Phyllis Robinson.” (p. 15)

“It was on the racecourse, not the graphics course, that Koenig found much of his inspiration; the language of ordinary New Yorkers. Humanity replaced pomposity. The headlines would frequently ask the reader a question rather than follow convention and make a claim. They were witty and disarmingly honest. They admitted that the Beetle was no oil painting, but boy, did it work.” (p. 16)

“It was twelve months and one copywriter later that the seminal version of the ad appeared. Koenig had left DDB along with George Lois to start their own agency, PKL. It fell to Krone’s new writer Bob Levenson to pen the ‘consumer version’ (of ‘Think small’). The ad’s impact was enormous; the idea of thinking small flew in the face of everything post war America had been brought up to believe in.” (p. 48)

OTHER REVIEWS:

Speedreaders |Popmatters | Amazon

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RE:SOURCES

• Hiott, Andrea; 2012. Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle. Ballatine Books, New York, NY.