The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell Page A

Aviv for El Al Airlines. The way the ad worked on the eye was the demonstration itself. El Al’s budget was relatively small, a fraction of that of even most domestic airlines and DDB could have imitated the approach of all other carriers, using little more than flight schedules printed on the page, with no attempt at any personality. But with El Al, they went further than just new visual ideas – there was a new verbal excursion as well.
    El Al was one of Bernbach’s many Jewish accounts. While it wasn’t remarkable that they should have so many, what was remarkable was the way they handled their Jewishness. Far from hiding it, as Whitey Rubin of Levy’s had been inclined to do, DDB celebrated it, and wrote their ads in Borscht Belt idiom. A full page advert with a picture of Noah’s Ark made the point: ‘We’ve been in the travel business a long time’, a terrific example of how words can take off from the picture to make a further point.
    While the Italians were infiltrating the art department, it’s difficult to overemphasise the role the Jewish writer and Jewish idiom played in the Creative Revolution. If you look at the roster of the artists, architects, designers, musicians and particularly writers who were illuminating the fifties, you’ll see an extraordinary percentage of Jews. It had its effect; the Yiddish vernacular and Jewish humour were creeping into the New Yorkers’ daily language. Few advertising agencies, dominated as they were by pallid WASP values or an incipient Anglophilia, had seemed to notice it, but as DDB’s doors were open to the immigrant and the Jew, the people who lived and breathed these things, it was only natural that it would end up in their work.
    SO ON THE VERY VERGE of the 1960s, from many and varied directions, apparently unrelated circumstances converge. We can connect them. In the world’s greatest modern city, a massive economic expansion creates a huge need for the raw product of the advertising business, the ads themselves. The audience for this outburst is a demographically younger, newly wealthy and curious American, on the edge of a consumer boom – and thoroughly tired of the advertising it’s been fed. A brand new medium is sweeping the country and revolutionising advertising practice, bringing with it opportunity and the chance to experiment.

    Understanding the market and the idioms, the El Al Airlines ad campaign, from 1958 to 1970, was among DDB’s very best work.
    The doors of a few agencies are being opened to a completely new breed of creative person, one who sees no value in looking back, and who demands to do things in a radically new way. The images and references that will influence their work crackle around in their heads, fizzing from one of the greatest cultural eruptions the world has seen.
    In one agency, DDB, those same people are given greater autonomy and prestige, and a new way of working together, which not only overturns the nature of their output but doubles their influence within the business. This financially successful, creatively-led agency is no unproven flash in the pan; for ten years now it has been proving that research does not know everything and, as Bernbach recognised publicly, cannot be used to come up with ideas. That, as his agency had slowly been proving, is the job of these new creative people.
    As these circumstances converged, intertwined, coalesced and reformed, it was time for those creative people to take control.

 
5 Thinking Small

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    â€œThey did one last year, the same kind of smirk. Remember, Think Small . It was a half-page ad on a full-page buy. You could barely see the product.”
    HARRY CRANE MAD MEN
    T he most famous part of the most famous campaign was born out of accident and confusion. At least half of the creative team who conceived it had doubts—and if it hadn’t been for the intervention of the client, one of the greatest ads ever