The VW campaign that put agency Doyle Dane Bernbach firmly on the map. It looked different, it felt different, it was different. In the 1950s cars in America looked like something from a scientific age – more like military jets or spacecraft. At the time it was widely believed that advertising too could be reduced to a science, and it had become dull and repetitive as a result.

So when DDB took the brief to advertise this funny-looking German car, they decided to do things differently. Where others showed the impossibly long lines of their car, DDB would show theirs as small and foreshortened. Where others would talk about the soon-to-be obsolete new features of their vehicle, DDB would show theirs as unchanging. Where others would talk in terms of beauty and perfection, DDB would talk in terms of ugliness and imperfection. The campaign caught the reader’s eye; it had their ear. It made history.

Bill Bernbach knew that, to succeed, advertising needed personality. He came from a school of advertising that respected its audience, and he sought to make advertising that elevated society, rather than brutalized it.

In the last twenty years, we have entered another technical and scientific age of advertising, and I fear that some of these human principles of communication have been lost. The result is less effective advertising.

I’d like to make advertising better – more entertaining and interesting for audiences, more enjoyable for agencies and, crucially, more profitable for advertisers. Because, believe it or not, these three things are linked.