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not only did he learn how language could be
used to effectively persuade people—he also learnt that people are persuaded more easily if you respect their intelligence.
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of … free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, and then to another.”3
conversational copy instead of advertising jargon, and clean minimalism instead of cluttered layouts.
For Bernbach, knowing the right thing to say was only the starting point—it was how you say it that made for an effective ad, and “if breaking every rule in the world is going to achieve that,” he demanded, “I want those rules broken.”11
“I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness … that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance … There are a lot of great technicians in advertising … But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art …”
he became a non-conformist. Someone who looks at the world around him and asks, “Is there a way I could improve it?” Someone who drives change and creativity. Someone who decides to speak out his beliefs and stand up for his ideals.
“We would only present one campaign. Maybe that was cockiness on our part, but it seemed like faith in our work, we used to say, ‘Sorry, we’re not going to show you our wastebasket.’”
“We think we will never know as much about a product as a client. After all, he sleeps and breathes his product. By the same token, we firmly believe that he can’t know as much about advertising. Because we live and breathe that all day long.”
“As children we’re taught to obey rules. If you’re being creative
you are breaking rules. A basic desire to be well-liked is a serious problem if you want to be creative … You can’t be nice and answer the assignment in a radically new way. Because you’re going to throw out some of the rules in the process. And throwing out some of the rules is not the ‘nice’ thing to do. It doesn’t make you popular with your peers.”2
“When you really don’t know what to put on that blank paper in the typewriter, you should just write ‘Dear Charlie’ at the top. Assume that Charlie is a neighbor of yours, a very nice, bright, intelligent guy, with a sense of humor. He’s got all the mental equipment you have, but none of the information that you have about the Volkswagen. So just put down what you want to tell him in this ad, and cross off ‘Dear Charlie,’ and you’ll probably be all right.”10
products are like people—we like them
more when they’re able to make a joke about themselves or when they admit their flaws.
The solution is to take advantage of the concerns that a prospect may have with your product. Agree with his doubts, then find a way to overcome them.
Just say as skillfully as you can … what it really is that you are selling, what is good about it and why somebody should buy it instead of what they are buying now,”
psychology of breakthroughs,
a constraint is generally seen as a “limitation, imposed by outside circumstances or by ourselves, that materially affects our ability to do something.”17 That’s why most of us tend to see constraints as adversely limiting. But, in fact, the opposite is true: constraints must not be restrictive, they can be “fertile forces of enhancement, stimulating new possibilities,”
“If you look at a commercial and fall in love with the brilliance of it, try taking the product out of it. If you still love the commercial, it’s no good. Don’t make your commercial interesting; make your product interesting.”8
“What was clearly wrong in those days was that anyone in advertising was represented as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Bill Bernbach began putting Jews and Blacks, Irish and Italians in his ads, celebrating the differences instead of pretending they didn’t exist. That’s the power of advertising. It can be a force for good.”10
It didn’t sense that the tide had turned and cleverly associated itself with the new wave. It didn’t leverage a cultural tension to deliver a powerful message.
What a proof for the power of creativity: a car designed for the masses becomes a symbol of the critique of mass society; a car designed for the Nazis becomes the preferred automobile of the Peace Generation.
