“Think Small”

By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal
Oct. 18, 2006

It was more than a headline in an ad for a funny-looking little German car in the early 60s. It was a statement by the late great adman Bill Bernbach that challenged the basic assumption of US culture. That bigger is better. And even bigger is even better. Not, it said, with totally sparse, witty copy, pristine design, an absence of adland bells and whistles. But that was then . . .

Today, we have only to think of our bigger than ever national debt of $8 trillion plus, our big Bush annual budget deficit of $320 billion (for fiscal 2005), our biggest trade deficit ever, $725.8 billion (for fiscal 2005). And our biggest war tab ever, $5 billion per month in Iraq and Afghanistan (USA Today), nearly $60 billion a year, not including monies spent on rebuilding Iraq’s electric grid, water supply and infrastructure.

Not to mention the super-sizing of everything from fast food calories to sporting events to Wal-Mart’s stores, the average super-sized American waddling around the aisles, eyes spinning, cart wobbling, wondering if his credit card is maxed, wondering if he’ll get past the register.

Wondering too if he’ll get to his bigger than ever nine-passenger SUV, that gets a big 12 miles a gallon, the price of which recently dropped (at least till election day) from the highest ever, $3 to $4 per, making Exxon Mobile’s net profits the biggest ever.

Somewhere we made a wrong turn off the interstate of life and ended up on this war-torn, body-tossed road to Hegemony, headed towards the New World Order, the Super-sized Empire of All Times, thanks to a bunch of schmucks, most of whom never went to war.

Include too in the super-sizing, consumer ad campaigns crammed with money-gulping special effects, bonzo athletes, and gonzo media schedules. And add political ad campaigns backed by more bucks than the economies of many Third World nations. And you got big. But do you got quality? Do you got honesty, integrity, a bringing together of people. Or do you got war war everywhere and not a drop of peace to spare. Oh brother, can you spare a dime, something for lunch, a drug prescription plan for seniors without a hole in it? That’s today.

But back in the early 60s, “Think Small” challenged our genetic “think-big-ness” with the simple facts that the Volkswagen or “People’s Car” got 32 miles per gallon at 50 mph and featured a 1200-cc, four cylinder, air-cooled rear engine that needed no water pump and hoses or their various leaks that left you stranded on this highway or that, whenever they blew, inhaling the coolant fumes. My ’66 Mustang, with its Zoomerama V-8, silver blue finish, did exactly that and drove me to my first Volkswagen, which by 1970 had also evolved a small station wagon with an automatic transmission, still with the rear air-cooled engine that worked like a charm. I paid $2,700 for it, new.

My Brighton Beach Brooklyn neighbor and buddy, Walter Keller, in 1960 bought a black Beetle for $1,800 (the first were $1,500) and had constantly sung its praises to me. Simultaneously, Bernbach, who happened to be Jewish like Walter, went on to make a sensation of the Volkswagen which Hitler himself had asked Ferdinand Porsche to design, supposedly supplying the first profile sketch. So much for irony. Walter was a great guy and Bernbach in a class by himself.

Even when handed a lemon, Bernbach made a headline out of it. “Lemon” sat over a VW shot, the word for a “loser” car that in addition to the low price, great mileage and low maintenance, wasn’t built for planned obsolescence, which is what we still build for today. Some “lemon.” How many times these days have you heard, “Introducing the New Improved (fill in blank), now with less turbo excrescence and more wheel drive, a computer map system to nowhere, and auto-powered seats that will recline you into the poorhouse? You get the drift.

The VW never changed its design in all the years of its heyday. That was part of the car’s ethos: one design for all the people, amazing from a totally nuts, totalitarian regime. There was no I’m better than you, because I’ve got fins like a shark and gurgle like a speedboat. No, sorry you don’t have chrome by the ton like I do. Or a stereo DVD system that also does your laundry, optional extras, with more sticker prices than pretzels have salt. In fact, another of Bernbach’s great ads showed 1949 models of six cars, five by companies that had gone under in the ensuing decade. The headline read, “Where Are They Now?” Well, one could ask that same question today about all the closed auto plants in America. Also the autoworkers and others in manufacturing, seemingly planned human obsolescence, vanished into the service sector or down the rabbit hole.

In another Bernbach ad was the headline, “Ugly is only skin-deep.” Ironic, self-effacing yes, but to make the point that under that painted shell of your “Volks” was an engine, a beautiful system, that could run for hundreds of thousands of miles, get scrapped, and have new guts or skin parts inserted like a set of batteries, and run until it vanished.

In that headline was also a proposition about people, a "don’t judge a book by its cover" notion that is very central to core American (human) values. In fact, Bernbach’s lines (and his agency’s -- Doyle Dane Bernbach) always had that humanism. For AVIS, “When you’re number two, you have to try harder.” Or “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levi’s real rye bread.” And you don’t have to be German to write great ads for a funny German car. You have to be smart and have a heart and understand how it works. Which Bernbach did, quietly creating his revolution in advertising, with his penchant for humanity.

Bernbach was noted to say, “Nothing kills a lousy product better than a great ad campaign.” The premise was great ads could get people to the store once, maybe twice. But if you were selling a bow-wow product, sooner or later you couldn’t fool all the people all the time. Sound derivative? It was. With an implied warning for clients to come up with quality products with real value.

You would think that premise would have put George Bush and his administration out of business by now, what with its soaring deficits, rising levels of terror panic, increased tax cuts to the rich, rising number of poor, diminishing middle-class incomes, millions of vanishing jobs, and increasing low esteem in the world, etcetera, etcetera, etcera. But perhaps the time frame for stupidity, dishonesty and corruption is nearing its end. And Bernbach will be proved right once again.

But then Bill Bernbach was by nature a square shooter. He once told me (the rookie scribbler), “Listen, you’ve got three seconds when people are turning pages in a magazine, so make sure what you say has meaning and stops them.”

I had presented him a line and poster design for National Library Week, a non-profit organization I worked for, on whose steering committee Bernbach sat. The line was, “Explore Inner Space. Read.” Aside from the psychedelic implications, he didn’t care for the cubist graphics that made the reader squint to read. In about two seconds he looked up and said, “Why do you want people to read?” I and others in the meeting said, “Well, to improve themselves, personally, career-wise, educationally, spiritually, every possible way.”

About four seconds went by. He looked up and said, "How 'bout 'Be All You Can Be. Read.'” And everybody went “aahhhhh,” as in an ah-so, moment of illumination. This was in 1967, decades before the Army and its agency, A.W. Ayer, appropriated the line, consciously or not, for the United States Army. “Be All You Can Be. Army.” Oh boy, what a change. In purpose and personal intent. From reading to war-making. From life to death.

Meanwhile, VW’s scatter the landscape still, in various incarnations, whether as scrapped artifacts of another era in an American desert. Or they’re in-mint condition, gems of that era from LA to NYC, still running, sticks swiveling, with zip to spare. They are icons of care, and of a nation that was involved back then in an equally disastrous war, Vietnam, $111 billion for 10 years.

My friend Walter Keller and I and our wives would drive to demonstrations in his black Beetle. He slapped the peace sign and a few love flowers on it. In fact, Walter got fed up with New York, Brighton Beach, et al, and one day packed his wife and little girl and drove out to Oakland. He said he felt more comfortable there. It was the home of the Black Panthers. He also gave up selling fuel oil and became a male nurse to help people, not just profit off them. People did things like that then. So Walter’s one guy, with one Volkswagen, in one time I’ll never forget.

Volkswagen stopped producing Beetles for America and Germany in 1978. It turned south and went to Mexico. By 1973 Volkswagens amounted to 30 percent of all motor vehicles in the country. There’s something about those Bugs, something as real as the ads that made them famous and sold them. Though finally the cars sold themselves, their price, their durability, the fun they were to drive. It might be the one good thing to come out of the wretched Third Reich. Certainly, the neo-Nazis who post WW 2 spread all over Europe, the US, and South America weren’t. We live with the results of that fascist thinking in this corporatized global economy, moving toward its one government of elitist world rulers, and one population of worker bees.

Part of Volkswagen popularity was also fueled by he 70s “energy crisis” and specifically for the 1973 Mid-East oil crisis, when oil production was sharply reduced, partially over Arab-Israeli conflicts lingering to this day. The prices of gas skyrocketed. Lines at gas stations formed and the rubber stopped hitting the road for a while. Detroit finally woke up and started producing smaller, more economical cars, but not before the Japanese once again scooped them and their market share for good.

Curiously, it was the fact that the VW couldn’t meet emission standards, coupled with the Japanese imports that helped signal the end of its era. Also, in the halo of Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which basically panned American cars, Volkswagen’s “trunk in front” concept took a hit. People suddenly said, geez, if you had a head-on in it, you’d be tuna on toast. Well, nobody had worried about it for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles Bugs and VW vans and mini-buses were driven in every direction. But auto safety was an idea whose time had come -- and perhaps now has split again.

Isn’t it curious that more than half the vehicles on the road today are SUVs and pick-up trucks, not built with the safety specifications of automobiles, yet increasing the danger to their occupants with their sheer size and diminished stability and/or weight impact? Well, so much for logic and standards. After all “a kiss is just a kiss, a car is just a car, as time goes by.” Although zooming through the back streets of Brooklyn to Cape Cod didn’t feel like it at the time. With a few bucks, we could fill the tank. And, sitting on those felt covered bucket seats, the table of the world seemed set before us. Sandwich anyone? Ham and cheese on rye. Excuse me, Levy’s rye.

In 1998, 20 years after splitting, the new Beetle reappeared. But it wasn’t the same. It was more a luxury Bug, a designer Volks, looking a little egg-like and fragile. And the prices of Volkswagen cars, including SUV’s, went skyward like everyone else’s. So it goes. Think big.

But bless you, Mr. Bernbach, wherever you are. After 30 years in the business, the best ads I ever did were the ones that looked like they came from your shop. Now if we could only get America to “Think Small” again. I know. We’ve got three seconds to grab them. How about, make peace not war? The life you save may be your son’s. Or your own. Or the world’s. I’ll think about some it more. And you out there should too. It’s real important.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at [email protected].

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