The creative revolution in advertising

Over the years advertisements have increasingly developed, with the designs becoming more and more sophisticated.

Before the creative revolution their used to be a unified layout design for print advertisements, as designers knew it was a well tested approach to attract the attention of the viewing public. Their were also far more restrictions in the design process, such as their was a higher awareness of using the correct use of language in order to not offend anyone.

The image would also have as little white space as possible due to the cost of an image would be the same regardless of how much or little content it was comprised of. Therefore the company would want a full image to get their moneys worth. Even if the designer felt that the composition would have had more impact with less content by creating a more balanced image, the head of the company would have the final say.

 The standard layout for a print ad was a squared up image, with a heading describing exactly what was shown in the image. It would also have three columns of text underneath the heading and a large logo at the bottom, which is shown in the following advertisement. It shows the typical American dream car, which was in fact was a ‘dream’ as only a small majority of Americans could actually afford it.

However with the influence of pioneering graphic designers this unified approach of design for advertising soon developed and broke away from the old regimented restrictions and designers started taking risks with their designs.

One key graphic designer from the creative revolution was William Bernback, who introduced the idea of the concept into advertising communication. Bernback also developed the art director and copywriter team, due to designers and writers use to have to work separately, where designers were called commercial artists by joining these two teams together allowed for a far more creative and efficient process.
In 1949 William Bernback, Ned Doyle and Mac Dane co founded the advertising agency; Doyle Dane Bernback, in which was responsible for the famous revolutionary Volkswagen advertising campaign.


This advertisement shows how ‘DDB’ changed the approach of advertising from the American dream of a huge expensive car, to a more realistic compact car. Their approach was to not state the obvious, for example the title ‘Lemon’; is not expected and it is not directly describing the image, but makes the viewer read the piece of text underneath to get the complete meaning.

 Even today, the same approach of advertising is still being used for Volkswagen, for example the following image is recent Volkswagen campaign where it highlights the fact it is a reliable car, however it is not stating the obvious.