Defining Moment: VW Beetle ad prompts a creative revolution, February 22 1960

Right at the start of the 1960s, a revolutionary advertisement appeared in Life magazine. “Think Small” was part of a campaign begun the previous year to sell the Volkswagen Beetle to America.

These ads sought wilfully to break virtually every prevailing rule of advertising, and inaugurated what has been called the industry’s creative revolution.

The US in 1960 was still enjoying a huge economic boom – a spendthrift nation on an endless spree, buying houses, clothes, food. And automobiles: nothing exemplified the excess of consumption better than the finned, chrome-encrusted behemoths being churned out by Detroit. To export an ugly bug from Germany into this market, only 15 years after the end of the second world war, was a hard sell indeed, but the challenge was accepted by ad agency Doyle, Dane & Bernbach.

DDB – Ned Doyle, administrator; Maxwell Dane, finance and marketing; and Bill Bernbach, Creative Genius – were real-life Mad Men. Bernbach hated both the overblown vulgarity of 1950s consumerism and its attendant advertising: heavy with useless information, crammed with the lurid and the gimmicky, preying on the hopes and fears of those terrified of being lumbered with last year’s obsolete model.

Contrary to normal practice, under which the client had a say, Bernbach insisted that his agency had total control over the advertising. He refused to take on a client if he didn’t believe in their product. Bernbach believed in the Beetle. “Think Small” aimed far beyond keeping up with the Joneses. The tiny monochromatic car in an expanse of white, the perfect pun of the strapline, and the sardonic copy beneath appealed to the smart and the hip, rather than to the merely acquisitive.

The ad presaged the rejection, later in the 1960s, of unfettered materialism – it is no coincidence that the VW Beetle became the counter-culturalist’s car – and by 1972 had helped VW to surpass the Ford Model T as the world’s best-selling car, with sales of more than 15 million.

definingmoment@ft.com