Volkswagen

 “I was wrong” Krone said referring to the Volkswagen campaign, a hallmark in the creative revolution.  He wanted to make the car as American as possible, he wanted to make people “see the USA in the Volkswagen”.

The creative team for this campaign was formed by Julian Koenig, as the copywritter, Helmut Krone, as the art director, and Bill Bernbach, as a counselor.

The discussion came around to presenting the car apparent deficiencies as virtues: basic and utilitarian, therefore cheap; low horsepower, therefore high mileage; ugly and unchanging, therefore well-crafted and less ephemeral. The ads admitted failures and gave facts in straightforward prose.

The Volkswagen campaign turned out to be irreverent.  The communication was simple and honest. Gone were the exaggerations and the appeal to status that dominated advertising in the 50’s.  The skeptical audience of the 60’s was disarmed when presented with the manufacturer making fun of its own product. The Lemon ad admitted that some of the cars were in fact lemons, but at the same time reassured the consumers that VW’s quality control procedures were the toughest in the industry. [1]

To get this strategy to the eyes of the consumer, Krone chose a conventional format of filling the page with two-thirds picture, one-third copy, with the headline in between.  Certain details helped produce the feeling of simplicity and candor: the picture was “naked” looking and the copy was in an austere sans serif typeface with windows and incomplete lines at the end of the paragraphs to avoid symmetrical solid blocks of text. [2] The basic format of the VW ads was disarmingly simple. It consisted of a modular division of the rectangular space with the illustration occupying the upper four-fifths of the space.; A centered bold headline appears below, followed by 80 to 150 words of text. By using simple graphic presentation DD&B achieved universal identification for a product that was almost unknown when the campaign began. Although the campaign ranged over a broad range of appeals, it held to a simple declarative presentation of both word and images.