The Other Club

         Madison Avenue in the 1940's was termed "The Club" by those practitioners who did not fit into the stereotypical mold of the successful adman: white, Ivy League educated, Protestant with a home in Connecticut (Rothenberg, 1994). Members of "The Club" worked for McCann-Erickson, J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam among others. These privileged Anglos comprised the mainstream of advertising and were in no way eager to bring minority partners into the fold.

         In 1953, only ninety-two of the five thousand men listed in the Who's Who in Advertising had visibly Jewish names (Rothenberg, 1994). Not only did Jews find it difficult to enter the mainstream advertising community, many advertisers refused to allow Jews to work on their account. Therefore, Jews (including Bill Bernbach) seeking to make a name in the advertising industry were forced to either work for lesser known agencies or for the handful of Jewish-run agencies which serviced primarily Jewish or other ethnic clients. Bill Bernbach chose the latter route, working for Grey Advertising until he joined forces with Mac Dane (also Jewish) and Ned Doyle (Irish) to form DDB. In contrast to larger agencies' exclusionary practices, Bernbach was less concerned with hiring employees who possessed the right credentials than finding people with enthusiasm for the advertising process. Many of his staffers were ethnic minorities and he also employed some women in positions of importance, which at that time meant almost anything above secretarial duty. While the agency did hire a certain number of M.B.A.'s, Bernbach voiced his concern about their conventional thinking when he said, "...they learn the arithmetic of advertising. Now, that very fact that they learn the knowledge of advertising, and the arithmetic of advertising, will work against them as a judge of an ad. You're right, all your facts are right, but you're still dull, because you're saying everything that everybody else is saying," (Cummings, 1984).

         For the first several years, DDB gained it's notoriety from its work on behalf of Jewish clients. Orbach's department store, Levy's Jewish Rye and El Al airlines provided DDB the opportunity to develop noticeable work, which would eventually gain the attention of an unlikely client, Volkswagen. The addition of Volkswagen to the DDB client list proved to be a two-fold boost to the agency. First, it was the agency's first automobile account. Automobiles are coveted above most other clients for their high dollar expenditures and opportunity for high creative visibility. Second, DDB's affiliation with Volkswagen was a coup in that the 2/3 Jewish owned agency was able to direct the advertising efforts of an automobile developed by the German Nazis. For both reasons, Bernbach and his partners single-handedly lifted Jewish advertising agencies from the corners of their relegation to a level of mainstream identifyability, in the process developing "The Other Club" (Rothenberg, 1994). In the years to follow, a number of small agencies popped up, many led by Jewish and Italian creatives who wanted to be the next Bill Bernbach. In 1969 alone, over one hundred new agencies opened, insuring the legacy of Bill Bernbach for decades to come.