Who is this Ad Man anyway?
Imagine being the man known for making a car that some say looked like a therapeutic boot popular. Imagine being the man who was so far ahead of his time that his work is mimicked twenty years later. Imagine being Helmut Krone.
Helmut Krone did not set out to be an art director. His passion was industrial design. When he was 21, he took his first step towards advertising working with designer Robert Greenwell doing freelance ads for magazines. Although this job was awfully close to the profession that would become his life's work, he purposely steered clear of the "hard-core" advertising agencies until later in his life. "If you had any respect for design, any self-respect, and you wanted to tell your mother what you were doing, you worked around advertising, but not in it (Krone)." So Krone worked with Greenwell, in pharmaceuticals, in fashion, and in publishing, but not for advertising agencies. It was not until 1954 that Helmut brought himself to the world of advertising proper. At the age of twenty-nine, he took a job working for Bill Bernbach at DDB as one of only four art directors.
on the map
Helmut Krone has been labeled, "the guy who literally changed the look and feel of advertising (Chase)." He was the art director for award winning campaigns as Avis' "We Try Harder", Levy's bread, Orbachs, and Volkswagen. It is the Volkswagen ads that Krone is most noted for. And if you asked him, they weren't all that special. (Although, the world continues to disagree.) According to Krone, the idea was not unique.
"There was nothing new about the Volkswagen idea, the only thing was that we applied it to a car.... Probably eight years before that, Bernbach did an ad for Fairmont strawberries where he showed a whole strawberry in the middle of a big page, just one life sized strawberry.... I took a traditional layout A,... 2/3 picture, 1/3 copy, three blocks with a headline in between. But I changed the picture. The picture was naked-looking, not full and lush. The other small change was the copy, which was sans serif rather than serif."
Sarah Griswold
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