Bill Bernbach was the most influential advertiser of the 20th Century, and today our agency carries his letter in the B of Tribu DDB, for which we feel honored, grateful and challenged. In the celebration of his first centenary, all over the DDB world we decided to remember his undeniable legacy, in the times of those other great figures such as David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett.
I invite you to confirm or discover the figure of Bernbach in this video just out of the oven.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SAVDgMkuJQM%3Fversion%3D3_US
Born in the New York Bronx, Bill Bernbach graduated from New York University with a degree in English literature. During his youth, he delved into philosophical and sociological texts and literary criticism.
He began working in the advertising department of a beverage company. After World War II he began working as a creative for the Grey Advertising Agency, a company of which he became vice president, and he rebelled against the rules and methods followed in persuasive practices – logic and excessive analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea” -, understanding that persuasion is more than a science, it is an art. “New knowledge,” he pointed out, “comes from the imagination. Einstein said he owed more to his imagination than to his powerful logic.”
In 1949 he founded the Doyle, DaneBernbach (DDB) Advertising Agency, where he put into practice the best values of his advertising creativity, which found a culminating expression in the Volkswagen Beetle campaigns in the United States and Europe. Bernbach’s work changed advertising practices to the point of being generally considered the most influential figure in the advertising world in the 20th century and the world’s number one in the sector, according to Advertising Age magazine’s ranking.
“William Bernbach certainly exerted as great an impact on American culture as the honorable writers and artists who passed through this magazine during the past 133 years: he invented a new style of advertising, a style that is predominant today, but which at the time was revolutionary,” wrote Harper’s Magazine in 1982, on the occasion of his death from leukemia.
One of his best-known biographies, Bob Levenson’s Bill Bernbach’s Book: A History of the Advertising That Changed the History of Advertising (1987).
