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Health & Fitness

A Tribute to Two Great Men

One I was fortunate enough to work for.

Much is being reported today about Steve Jobs. And rightly so. He was a great thinker. An innovator. As his advertising so aptly put it in their 1997 campaign, he dared to “Think different.”

The aforementioned Apple ad campaign used, as examples, figures from other industries who also dared to “Think different.” Albert Einstein, for example. And the man in the ad pictured here, advertising genius Bill Bernbach, who I was fortunate enough to spend the major part of my adult life working for.

Bill Bernbach is known as the father of advertising’s so-called “creative revolution.” He dared to think different about how to advertise a product.  When others were zigging, he dared to zag. When automobile manufacturers were bragging about how big and glitzy their cars were, his famous Volkswagen ad told people to “Think small.” When being number one in any industry was thought of as being the best, he challenged that notion with an Avis campaign that said, “We’re only number two.  We try harder.”

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In the advertising world, many of Bill’s quotes were quite famous, like “Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.” But one that I think is particularly appropriate at this time is the one on the full-page obituary that Doyle Dane Bernbach ran in The New York Times a few days after his death in 1982: “The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.”

I salute two of those poets.

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