in your life. And it's very hard to
  judge the value of it. You distrust
  it and everybody distrusts it.
       So what was new about all this
  work? The VW look was basically an
  evolution of a classic three-column
  Ogilvy layout. Nothing particularly new
  there. The revolutionary things were
  advertising strategy and photography.
  Simple. flat lighting. straightforward.
  The exact opposite of the sharp,
  shiny, extreme perspective style
  coming out of Detroit at the time.
  Cars had not been photographed
  like that before (contact sheet of
  VW shoot set-up, shown, 6). And then
  when the 5.000,000th VW was sold.
  another new photograph (ad shown,
  4). No car. A photograph of empty
  space. Totally surprising, totally
  memorable. Another VW ad for the
  Station Wagon, simply featured a
  crude model of the car made from a
  box (shown, 2). Groundbreaking work.
  Krone: If you don't startle the client,
  you won't startle the reader.”
       You'd probably irnagine a pretty
  startled client looking at the Time-Zero
  Super Colour ads for the first time
  (shown, 3 ). No product No headline.
  No logo. They Look modern and fresh
  today. In fact they're 25 years old and
  were created, incidentally, when
  Krone was in his late 50s. But how
  about this for a quote from Ted Voss
  at Polaroid: “The reason we could do
  what we did, and allow the agency to
  do what it did was (Dr Edwin] Land's
  theory of science, which was that it
  was okay to fail, because only through
  failure could you succeed. So you
  should try new things, you should
  never do what you did before. A great
  philosophy to work with.” He goes on:
  “One of our responsibilities was to
  motivate them, to appreciate them.
  For example, with an agency. rather
  than be adversarial, you really get
  much more for your money if you
  make them want to work on your
  business,” I'm pretty sure they don't
  teach you that at Harvard Business
  School . They should. And this book
  should be on the reading list of all
  marketing courses.
       Every art director, copywriter,
  planner, account person and client
  should read it. It will make you better
  at your job. But I wonder how many
  clients actually will. There's a saying
  that clients get the advertising they
  deserve. Well the Avis client Robert
  Townsend got one of the best
  campaigns ever (ad shown, 5). “Ugly
  but great” is how Bob Gage described
  it. Brilliant strategy and copywriting of
  course. And art direction with
  unusually large copy and no logo. Do
  the ads communicate any less
  effectively because of this? No.
  They're more effective because
  they're more unexpected and
  therefore more memorabIe.
       Clive Challis has done a
  remarkable job unearthing all the
  details and anecdotes associated
  with these famous campaigns, I was
  fascinated, for example, by the
  description of the strange typographic
  decisions within the Avis We Try
  Harder campaign (shown, 7). And the
  way that typography actually improved
  the VW copywriting style. Of course
  you may not find stuff like that
  interesting or important. But then
  that's probably because you're just a
  “concept creator”.
       The final words should go to
  Krone; I'm bored to death with art
  directors no longer being art directors.
  An art director sits down with a writer
  and when they get a concept they put
  it down with a coloured marker,
  They've done their job. For me, that's
  where it starts.'

  Paul Belford (07973153801) is ex-
  Creative director at AMV.BBDO. Helmut
  Krone, The Book., by Clive Challis, is
  Published by The Cambridge Enchorial
  Press and priced at £44.95

 He Tried Harder
  Helmut Krone helped define
  modern advertising art
  direction in print. A new book
  looks at his life's work and at
  the Creative Revolution he
  was a part of in the 1960s,
  Paul Belford looks on in
  admiration