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you need SNIAGRAB (spell it backwards)’, over a picture of a white-coated man pointing straight at you, spoofed another style of advertising, this time pharmaceutical. But the idea was not so much satirising other ads as having fun with the whole notion of buying and selling and advertising, a conspiratorial wink between seller and buyer.
    A few years later, in 1959, they produced another startling ad, in which a cat wearing a fashionable hat and smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder makes catty remarks about a friend behind her back, revealing that she isn’t as wealthy as she seems – she achieves the illusion by, shocking to reveal, shopping at Ohrbach’s!
    Ohrbach’s was like a client magnet for DDB. Other New York businesses looking for an agency would ask around to find who did the advertising and then approach DDB to handle their account. In fact, in the following decade DDB rarely, if ever, made a formal new business presentation, as often as not being approached by clients rather than the other way round.
    ONE INTERESTED ENQUIRY came from Whitey Rubin, put in charge of a small Jewish bakery in Brooklyn by its bank in a last-ditch attempt to turn the business around and keep it from bankruptcy.For 30 years they had traded successfully selling bagels, onion rolls and challahs to an almost exclusively Jewish clientele. The problem arose when the company extended its range to a variety of breads baked to appeal to a wider market. The Jews didn’t like it and the gentiles didn’t know about it. Quoted in Robert Glatzer’s The New Advertising , on his first sampling of the new breads Bernbach said, ‘Mr Rubin, no Jew would eat your bread. If you want more business, we have to advertise to the goyim [non-Jews].’
    So the initial original thought by DDB for Levy’s was a media idea, concentrating exclusively on a specific market. Next, they contradicted the received wisdom that good bread must be soft, and they began to promote the nourishing values of Levy’s Oven Krust White Bread with a series of intelligently but simply-argued ads. One asked ‘Are you buying a bread or a bed’ and another, against a drawing of a fat child contrasting with an athletic child, ‘Is his bread a filler-upper or a builder-upper?’ This was good hard-working stuff, and a slow improvement in sales followed.
    Then Phyllis Robinson wrote a radio campaign around a small boy whose mother continually tried to correct his faulty pronunciation of ‘Wevy’s Cimmimum Waisin Bwead’. His pay-off line, ‘I wuv Wevy’s’, became a catchphrase, boosting Levy’s name recognition and fame. But the taste of things to come was an ambitious claim, with a simple layout graphically illustrating the thought: over three pictures of the same piece of rye bread, quickly disappearing as bites are taken out of it, were the words ‘New York… is eating… it up!’
    New York certainly started nibbling. It was advertised as ‘Levy’s real Jewish Rye’, itself a little contrived as there’s nothing particularly Jewish about rye bread. And Rubin, anxious about anti-Semitism, couldn’t initially understand why its Jewish provenance needed to be flagged up at all. ‘For God’s sake’, countered Bernbach, ‘your name is Levy’s. They’re not going to mistake you for a High Episcopalian.’
    In the increasingly worldly and sophisticated market that New York had become, maybe that touch of exoticism was exactly what the brand needed. What came next, created by writer Judy Protas and Bill Taubin, generally reckoned to be one of the very best of DDB’s earlier art directors, reinforced and amplified that exoticism. In one large picture and onesimple line they linked one minority – the Jews – to all the other emerging minorities making their presence felt.
    Subway passengers became aware of posters with large,