COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 03/03/2020
John Long
“NOTHING MAKES a bad product fail faster than a great advertising campaign.” This is probably the most quoted line from William Bernbach, the legendary “Mad Men”-era co-founder of the agency DDB. Under Bernbach’s creative direction, DDB produced some of the most memorable advertising of the twentieth century, including “Think Small,” the agency’s timeless campaign for Volkswagen. The notion that great creative hastens the death of an inferior product speaks to both the power and limits of advertising. The presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg, who owns a media empire and whose net worth exceeds $60 billion, offers up a candidate the likes of which has not been seen outside of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. But Bloomberg may run smack into Bernbach’s theorem.