Although he repeatedly asked me to call him Bill, in all the years I worked for him, I could never call him anything but Mr. Bernbach. After six years of working for Jay Chiat, I wouldn’t think of calling him anything but Jay. Other than that, working for both men has been remarkably similar. Far…

In the beginning there was Doyle Dane Bernbach. For the passionate creative people in the early sixties, it was the only place to be. Mainly because it was the only place to be. The great creative agencies that DDB spawned and inspired had yet to be founded. And the country’s most brilliant art directors and…

It was just eleven and a half years ago, during the summer of 1982. I was at Ammirati & Puris and we were looking for a new voice for BMW. I’d heard a voice that I liked a lot on a campaign for Gallo wines, and since an old friend of mine worked at Ogilvy…

In a day and age when good enough passes for great, and passable is more than sufficient, Ralph Ammirati has based his career on a very simple philosophy; no second class anything, any time, any place. How he maintains this quality is really quite simple. No detail escapes him. Even though he has enough laurels…

It must feel great to be elected to the Creative Hall of Fame. I guess the next best thing would be to work with one who was. I did, and it was. Great, I mean. It was 1971 when a young Tom McElligott came in to see me with a book fresh out of Dayton’s…

There’s nothing I can say about Carl that he hasn’t said better himself. Nonetheless. Carl’s resounding success, as I see it, is a tribute to his flaws. In our timid, cautious, respectful, bland, buttoned-up and obedient profession, Carl was termagant, bumptious, abrasive, daring, impulsive, adamant. A genuine aginner. Couple this with a jugular accuracy in…

Bob Gage, like his ads, is one of a kind. He tackled the printed page and it hasn’t been the same since. He made it jump. He made it talk. He made it laugh. He made it whisper. He made it shout. He made the newspaper page, the magazine page seem bigger than they had…

I’m not going to start out by telling you Amil’s a great Art Director. You already know that. What I am going to tell you is – Amil wasn’t born that way. I think it’s important for all of you aspiring young art directors out there to know that. Amil went through every stage every…

When you say Doyle Dane Bernbach, a few clients’ names spring to mind automatically. Volkswagon and Avis are inevitably two of those. Few, if any, advertising campaigns have had the stupefying effect of those two. And they were both Helmut Krone’s. They were his as Art Director, of course. But even more importantly, they were…

Including art directors in the creative hall of fame formalizes the marriage between word and image in the creative process. It’s therefore fitting that one of the grooms in this marriage should be George Lois – that incorrigible maverick who brought a street intelligence and an audacious sense of human feeling into this merging. He…