Phyllis Robinson helped start the Creative Revolution as part of the founding team at Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB).

This is a thread about the story of her incredible creative mind.

1) “She helped to make it possible for Doyle Dane Bernbach to have courage of it’s convictions, to know the difference between good creative work and mere creative acrobatics” said Bill Bernbach about Phyllis.

2) Robinson was born in New York in 1921, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1942 studying sociology. She landed her first job in advertising at Bresnick & Solomont in 1946.

3) On drives around Manhattan with her father when she was a kid, she was fascinated by billboards. When she said she wanted to go into advertising, her high school maths teacher’s eyebrows shot up because it was absolutely unthinkable then.

4) In 1947, she found a sales job with Grey, where Bill Bernbach, a Creative Director then, recognised her writing talent and had her transferred to the copy department.

5) When Bernbach left in 1949 to set up his agency with Doyle and Dane, he took Robinson with him as chief copywriter, the first female agency copy chief in US advertising history.

6) “My title was chief copywriter but I was the only copywriter. Copy chief of me.” remembered Robinson

7) For Phyllis, this newfound freedom came with tremendous responsibility. The work didn’t just need to be creative; it had to do the job for the client as effectively as possible.

8)“That means distinguishing between an untried idea that’s good and an untried idea that doesn’t deserve to be tried,” she wrote.

9) In 1958, Phyllis made the department store Ohrbach’s famous with ads like the one where a cat wearing a stylish hat finds out their friend, Joan, buys her amazing looks on the cheap at Ohrbach’s.

10) Another iconic work that had Phyllis' involvement was “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread” for Levy’s bakery. The campaign featured a photo of, variously, an African American kid, a Native American man, and an Irish cop enjoying a sandwich.

11) Such conversational tone became a hallmark of Phyllis’ and DDB’s work.

12) The campaign “It Lets Me Be Me” developed by Phyllis and her team for Clairol ran for many years and was seen as helping to assert women’s status in society. Executions below from the 70s.

13) Her biggest triumph was arguably for Polaroid, as she dispelled the notion that instant cameras were gimmicky. “She made everything that Polaroid did famous,” says her friend Ted Voss, Polaroid’s former vice-president of worldwide marketing.

14) “Believe me, none of us thought we were starting a revolution. We were making it up as we went along.” confessed Phyllis.

15) In the late 1950s, When Volkswagen decided to introduce the Beetle to the U.S. market, they did not conduct an agency search. Instead, they simply said, "We want the agency that does Ohrbach's". That was the set up to the development of the most famous ad campaign ever.

16) Phyllis Robinson and the DDB team in the late 60s.

17) Robinson quit as Copy Chief when her daughter was born in 1962. She switched to working three days a week on accounts like Polaroid and continued to work part time at the agency until 1982 when she left to work as a consultant.

18) One of her protégées, Mary Wells, recalled their first meeting: “She was like the lead angel in an opera, tall, handsome, strong, brimming with energy and humour and purpose.She swept me into her office and turned her intelligence on me like a beam from outer space.”

19) In addition to copywriting, Robinson helped mentor many up-and-coming advertising talents at the agency, including Mary Wells Lawrence, Paula Green, Julian Koenig, George Lois and Rita Selden.

20) “We wanted people who could do the kind of work no one was doing. So we couldn’t look in someone’s portfolio and expect to find that kind of work. More often than not, it was tucked away in the back of the portfolio as ideas that had been killed.” remembered Robinson

21) Phyllis paved the way for women to break out of traditional creative roles in food and fashion divisions while helping to build the most creative agency of the Mad Men era.

22) “An important part of my style was to encourage everyone in his own personal way of doing things,” Phyllis said. “There would be no point in having many little Bill Bernbachs and Phyllis Robinsons. Instead we have all these wonderful strains of all these people intermingling”

23) Asked about the secret of a good advertisement, Robinson once said: “First, you must know your product. You can’t communicate excitement if you don’t know it. It would be like telling somebody about a marvellous party you didn’t go to.”

24) It was an environment of respect that Phyllis nurtured and found most important. Respect for coworkers, clients, the audience and yourself were the secrets to success she shared in her acceptance speech to the Copywriters Hall of Fame at her induction in 1968.

25) In 1999, Advertising Age magazine named her one of the 100 most influential figures in the history of advertising. Phyllis Robinson died on December 31, 2010 at the age of 89.

26) Some of the sources for this thread:
https://www.ddb.com/about-phyllis/ 
https://www.brandinginasia.com/phyllis-k-robinson-looking-back-at-a-legend/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2011/01/phyllis_robinson_was_the_origi.html
https://www.ft.com/content/daa7c1fa-2596-11e0-8258-00144feab49a
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/phyllis-robinson-29489/ https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/media/22robinson.html

27) To end this thread, here’s a video of Phyllis talking about the exciting early days of DDB.