What would Bill Bernbach think?

Sam Ball & Dave Bedwood

Séance transcript.

19:30, March 6th 2010, Kings Cross, London.

Present: Dave Bedwood, Sam Ball and Marie Baresford

Objective: To contact Bill Bernbach, father of modern advertising, who died in 1982, and seek his wisdom. Has the internet fundamentally changed the principles of advertising? If he were alive today, how would he approach digital advertising?

Marie Baresford: (slowly) Is there anybody there?(silence)

Marie Baresford: Is there anybody there?

Colonel Sanders: Hello, I’m Colonel Sanders, who is this?

Marie Baresford: Is anybody else there?

Bill Bernbach: Hello, Bill Bernbach here, who am I speaking to?

Sam Ball: (slightly startled) God, hello Mr Bernbach. My name is Sam Ball and I’m here with Dave Bedwood, we are the creative partners of a digital advertising agency called Lean Mean Fighting Machine.

Bill Bernbach: What an absurdly stupid name, and what on Earth is digital advertising?

Sam Ball: I won’t begin to explain the name but we work in the world of advertising, most of our adverts appear on the internet. Just to bring you up to speed Bill, the internet is a huge connection of computers that spans the entire globe, enabling people to communicate, find out information, share photos, films, thoughts, instantly, anywhere in the world without taking up any space or costing that much money. Because people are spending so much time using their computers to do these things, advertisers now haveanother medium through which to talk to people.

Bill Bernbach: Have I been gone that long?

Dave Bedwood: Bill, we’ve got so many questions about life, death, God, the Universe but seeing as we might not have much time the most important thing we’d like to ask your opinion on is digital advertising. Do you think we need to rewrite the rule book since the advent of the internet?(Long silence, everyone in the room opens one eye.)

Marie Beresford: Hello Bill, could you respond, I know you are still here…

Bill Bernbach: Sorry was just looking at an old book of my quotes. Well it doesn’t sound to me like you need to re write the rules, rather brands need to go back to the core creative philosophies. I remember the advent of TV, we were creating newspaper, poster and radio ads at the time. The same conversations rung around the office: “Do we need to rethink how we go about doing great advertising? What is great advertising?”

Sam Ball: What were your conclusions?

Bill Bernbach: Let’s put this into perspective. In the early fifties only ten percent of homes had a TV set by the mid sixties this figure rose to ninety five percent. America was young and optimistic there were exciting times ahead. The problem was that the old guard in charge of the advertising industry didn’t know how to communicate with the new consumer effectively: they were still talking to people in a conventional way and treating them as idiots.

Sam Ball: Sorry to say some things haven’t changed…(Long pause)

Bill Bernbach: Well the great art director Helmut Krone had a good analogy about this kind of advertising. He likened it to being sold to by a man on your doorstep. If he shouted or treated you like you were an idiot, or talked down to you, you naturally wouldn’t buy anything from him. We tried to write ads on the new medium of TV in a way that was thoughtful, treating the consumer with respect and persuading them with charm and wit.The skills needed for that turned out to be no different to the ones we were employing with our best radio and press work, and I would guess be the same skills I would employ on your internet.

Dave Bedwood: I remember a quote you had from that time, about the fact that it took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop, it will take millions more for them to vary. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with…

Bill Bernbach: (Abruptly interrupting) …his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own…

Dave Bedwood: Yes, sorry, they are your words.

Bill Bernbach: I still stick by that. Every era has the same problems, we had it with advancements in mass media like TV, but our philosophy was always to adapt your techniques to an idea not an idea to your techniques. It looks like that might be even more important in your era.

Marie Beresford: Quite.(Sam and Dave both open an eye and look at Marie then each other…)

Dave Bedwood: (clears his throat) We feel that the internet is the next step in what you were trying to do Bill. Essentially your ads were trying to talk to people to create a dialogue on their terms, but what we have is the chance to actually have a dialogue, people can talk back, get involved. In the past however successful your communications it was always one way, passive, with our new technology we can create work that goes beyond anything apassive medium like TV could offer.

Bill Bernbach: I take your point and, to a certain degree, I think you are right. I would certainly see the internet as an extension of where I wanted to take advertising. We were trying to create a dialogue. Yes, TV, print, poster are essentially one way but to counter your point, I do think some of our best ads achieve this: they leave a gap for the consumer to fill in. By working out an ad they are interacting with it. I do see the power available to you today through the use of technology but I’d warn you against believing the core principles of advertising are not relevant.

Sam Ball: It’s more that we think digital is different because the technology of the medium is so much more integral to how an idea can be expressed.

Bill Bernbach: But how you go about creating the right strategy, tone, insight and message is exactly the same process if you wish to make a great TV ad or a great digital ad. How it is finally expressed differs because each medium gives a creative person different tools with which to paint their final picture.

Sam Ball: There is great debate at the moment as to who will own the future of advertising, willl it be the traditional agencies or the new digital agencies. What do you think about that?

Bill Bernbach: Well at the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is quite so powerful as an insight into human nature. What compulsions drive a man? What instincts dominate his actions, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him? This is the basis of any great advertising and, of course, has little to do with where or how the advertising appears. Wherever your consumer is, you need to speak to him in this way, via whatever medium. Whoever can manage to do that will own the future.

Dave Bedwood: We often say that a good joke in today’s world could be seen in dozens of different media from a billboard to a text message to twitter to a press ad or on a phone, but what matters most is how good that joke is. To write a good joke takes a lot of skill and understanding of your audience, without that it is not funny and no one will laugh, remember and pass it on...(Silence)

Bill Bernbach: I am sure that is one of my analogies, but I will let it slide. It’s a good point and relevant whatever year it was originally said. Yes you have fantastic technology but it is only a conduit to the story, the idea, and those things again are only powerful if they are written in a way that touches the human psyche. The most difficult thing, as always, is not creating technologythat allows you to share content, it is making content that is worth sharing.

Sam Ball: And how about the fact that people can now get involved in your advertising? Or ignore it altogether if they wish?

Bill Bernbach: How can they ignore it altogether?

Sam Ball: People are becoming more and more in control of their media and how they receive it, so for instance with TV you can record it and play it back skipping all the adverts if you like.

Bill Bernbach: How does the programming afford to be on air? Anyway, I think this is a natural progression and, to be frank, most of the advertising we used to have on TV was terrible, but that was because it wasn’t made with the core creative philosophies I’ve been talking about. Whatever content you make today, as an advertiser you need to make sure it is good enough that the consumer wants to consume it. That in my opinion only happens when it is written from the standpoint I have laid out.

Dave Bedwood: How do you combat the rising power of the consumer when they can use the internet to express their opinions make their voice heard and damage an advertising campaign and product?

Bill Bernbach: If there really is a two way communication because of the internet, then I feel there is even more need to write advertising that adheres to these core philosophies, anything that doesn’t will rightly become a victim of this consumer power: surely we will get less bad work?

Dave Bedwood: Do you wish you were in advertising today?

Bill Bernbach: Well, I’d be alive so, yes… It does sound very interesting. My agency always wanted to create in the latest idiom. In my era that was TV, in yours it is digital media. Like the in ‘60s it sounds a unique time for advertising creativity. In my day it was a change of mentality that allowed greater freedom and letting go of old ways. Now it sounds like a change of technology is provoking this creative revolution…(Long silence)

Bill Bernabach: I have to go now, J. Walter has got a couple of tickets to Johnny Cash and Buddy Holly’s new band.(Silence)

Marie Beresford: He is fading…

Dave Bedwood: Ah quickly, Bill, what is it like on the other side, what does it look like? What happens to you when you die? Do you get to play chess with Einstein? Are there animals in heaven? Is God a man? What was before the big bang? Is there life on other planets? Will the universe go on expanding? Will Dare go on expanding? Is…

Marie Beresford: He’s gone…(Long pause)

Sam Ball: Is Colonel Sanders still with us?What would Bill have made of Sam and Dave’s work for Samsung? The idea behind The Last Call was because the Samsung Beat DJ mobile phone has great sound, with Bang & 0lufsen sound chip and headphones, then the last thing you want is to have your music interrupted by a call or text. So the competition winner was the last person to get a call.He would have hated the music, loved the idea.Sam Ball and Dave Bedwood are the joint creative directors of Lean Mean Fighting Machine, an advertising agency with a mission to explore the creative possibilities of digital advertising.Their clients include Samsung, Bacardi, Coca Cola, Emirates, COI, Unilever and Cadbury. At Lean Mean Fighting Machine there is an absolute dedication to creative integrity, whether this is expressed through a banner ad, a site, a ‘phone app or a film. They are the only UK agency to have been recognized as Digital Agency of the Year at Cannes.