First Adventures in Advertising

In 1969 at Doyle, Dane, Bernbach,  I was the youngest copywriter by 15 years.  The rest of the people I might have competed with for a job were still in school.  I was 19 years old and having a very good time.  For quite a while, the people I worked for liked everything I did.  Even if they didn't understand all of the work I was doing, they figured it was coming from the mind of a new generation and approved it anyway.  I thought I was working over my head.   Never having taken any formal courses in advertising, I was making it up as I went along.  I thought I was sort of a fraud and figured they'd realize it at any moment and the jig would be up.  But it never happened.

I just kept climbing the creative ladder and nobody but me thought there was anything strange about it.  They had a video studio at DDB, one of the first agency video studios in the city.   We could go down there and try stuff out to see if it worked.   I remember one commercial we (me and my art director, Alan Small,  tested that featured two people, a married couple, staring at the camera for 45 seconds, wondering what was going on.  The idea was to make the viewer squirm.  We'd turned the tv screen a two way mirror.   They ate some Sara Lee cake, but it was very subliminal.   They never said anything like, "Wow, is this cake great or what?"  They just said what normal people say about cake when they eat cake.  Nothing.  They wondered what was wrong with the tv and talked about the money they didn't have to pay the bills.   At the end of the spot the super came up - backwards, so that it appeared they were reading across the viewer.   It said, as it always did, "Nobody Doesn't Like Sara Lee"

We finished the video (I still have it), and took it up to our supervisors for a vote.  Helmut Krone was my supervisor, a very famous fellow in the advertising world.   He had done both the ground breaking Avis We try harder campaign and the equally famous Volkswagen campaign, "How much longer can we hand you this line?".   He was the closest thing there was to a honest to god genius in advertising.  He was, to nearly all advertising people, a deity.   But not to me.  I didn't know enough to realize how good his ideas were.  So I treated him like any guy you'd meet.   He seemed to like that and would actually come into my office from time to time and ask my opinion of his work.  Me.

We racked up our test commercial and waited for the applause to roll in.  Helmut watched the spot and then gazed out the window.   A full minute must have elapsed.  Finally Helmut said, "Rob, we're in advertising.  We're not making pretty little art films."  Wow, I thought. I've made an art film!