Advertising / London
Driving forces
Volkswagen’s mid-20th-century adverts were benchmarks. Inspired copywriting, intelligent art direction and, most importantly, a sense of fun came together to motor into the public consciousness. Meet two of the minds that helped to create them.
In the 1950s, Volkswagen had an interesting problem: how to sell a good car with a bad history. Or, as the legendary Madison Avenue advertising executive George Lois put it with regards to the New York market, how to sell a Nazi car in a Jewish town. Well, you put your best people on the job.
The Doyle Dane Bernbach (ddb) advertising agency and copywriter William Bernbach set the tone (humorous, intelligent, ironically detached) for a generation of adverts that have become cultural artefacts. At ddb UK, John O’Driscoll was a creative beneath the…
