The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell

Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike… the list goes on.
    This was the background to the formative years of this new generation of creative people. Whether they immersed themselves in all, part or none of it is not really the point; the fact is that this was their seedbed, seeping osmotically into all creative endeavour. It couldn’t but help inform and illuminate their work.
    BY 1960 , JWT had doubled their 1950 billing to $250 million, retaining the number one spot. Their growth neatly reflected the decade’s overall doubling of national advertising spend, up from $5.7 billion to $11.96 billion, evidence of the boom in business accelerated by the growth of TV advertising. But DDB had spectacularly outstripped the market with a hundredfold increase, taking them from $500,000 in 1949 to $46.3 million ten years later. A creditable client list of all product types and sizes (although they still lacked a major packaged goods client), from Coffee of Colombia to Rheingold Breweries, Philip Morris Alpine Cigarettes to Max Factor, Chemstrand to Clairol, defined an agency that was now firmlygrounded. And a succession of campaigns began to demand that their competitors take them seriously.
    For Polaroid, the first camera to produce a print within 60 seconds of the picture being taken, DDB produced several campaigns, each as radical as any advertising the public had ever seen. The previous agency, BBDO, had completely missed the point and produced messy, uninspiring work based on a mishmash of propositions, including price, which served only to make the product look a cheap gimmick.
    On taking over the account in 1954, DDB zeroed in on the product benefit with a ‘live’ TV campaign that appeared on Steve Allen’s The Tonight Show . During the transmission Allen would take a picture on stage, maybe walking into the stalls to snap a member of the audience, and then talk about the camera while the picture developed. Showing the print to the audience was like the climax and reveal of a conjuring trick, always eliciting applause. How simple, direct and desirable, to have an unsolicited live TV audience applaud your product on national TV.
    Then, in 1957, Polaroid introduced a highly sensitive black and white film, and again dramatic simplicity did the trick. The art director, Helmut Krone, hired fashion photographer Bert Stern to take tight close-up pictures of characterful faces, some known and some anonymous. In full-page ads, these dominated the page: every pore, every line, every shadow clear and faithful. Simple copy by Bill Casey told you all you needed to know with the minimum of fuss. There’s seldom been a better example of letting a good product sell itself.
    ANOTHER TREND in DDB’s work started to become noticeable. In contrast to the rigid laws on the use of space laid down by Ogilvy, DDB art directors were quite prepared to play with the imagery, with the page itself, to make the point visually. If advertising had always been regarded as sales talk in print, DDB was frequently doing demonstration in print.
    To dramatise Flexalum dirt-resistant window blinds, Bernbach suggested a picture of a tennis ball bouncing off the slats. In another campaign, Helmut Krone showed a photo of a gift-wrapped package in a thin vertical space up the side of a page of Life magazine. When the reader held the page up to the light, as invited ‘for an X-ray peek at a great gift’, they saw a bottle of Ancient Age (‘If you can find a better bourbon, buy it’), apparently on the inside. It was illustrated on the reverse side of the page and showed through in the light.

    1958 DDB ads for Polaroid, featuring Salvador Dalí and Louis Armstrong. Instant picture, instant success.
    You got the point at one glance in one of DDB’s greatest-ever ads, opposite, when Bill Taubin tore a strip off a picture of the sea to advertise a new faster service from New York to Tel