THE MOST BEAUTIFUL APOSTLE that capitalism has ever had, the man who rebelled against the power of technicians calling them with contempt medicine men, shamans, began his climb from an office at 350 Madison Avenue, the street of New York where he the most powerful advertising agencies in the world appeared.

It was the first of June 1949 and the advertisement was conceived as a precision device, a mathematical formula to seduce the captains of industry and convince them to invest in communication. A mechanism that spoke for tables and percentages, which promised to bend the imagination to the rules of the market. That was the Fordist idea of ​​advertising that Bill Bernbach dared to challenge after he quit Gray advertising. They said his was a coup, that his Ddb was destined to succumb. In an episode of Mad Men, the cult television saga set in the offices of Madison Avenue, a copywriter reserves a striking joke to his agency: “I heard that in Ddb we smoke canes”. Actually, there was hard work between those walls. Then came the rest, the image that ceases to be subordinate to the text, the advertising that frees itself from propaganda and plays with irony. In a Bernbach advertisement there is a sullen child while the headline reads: “We regret to inform you that your school supplies are ready by Ohrbach’s.” In another there is a bottle of scotch now empty: “See it that way. You haven’t given us a bottle of Chivas, you’ve made friends ». What advertising was ever the one who made fun of the products he wanted to sell? It ended up being the others – the medicine men – who had to adapt to Bernbach’s revolution. But the Bronx Jew was still not satisfied. The supermarkets were starting to get stuck, in him he harbored the idea that there were more urgent things to communicate: the good causes that can change the world. For the presidential elections of 1964 he conceived the “Daisy ad”, making a decisive contribution to the victory of Lyndon Johnson: a little girl leafing through a daisy evoking the countdown of a nuclear holocaust. Starting from Madison Av., Bernbach had reached the heart of modern democracy, the building of consensus. He died in 1982 without having time to write the book on which he had long pondered. This deficiency is filled by the homage of an Italian publicist, Giuseppe Mazza, who has looked up all his writings in old company bulletins or in conference proceedings. The material was collected in a book that presents it not only as the mad man who changed the language of advertising, “but as a pure intellectual totally immersed in material culture”. An ambassador of “Think different”, said Apple, inserting it in its famous campaign.