Bernbach speaking: How to write a 'Think Small' CV

When we founded Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1949, Madison Avenue didn't take us seriously. Because we weren't doing advertising — we were telling the truth. Look at a Volkswagen Beetle: small, ugly, German economy car. In 1970s America, in a sea of finned Cadillacs, it had no business selling.

When the client came to my office, I put a sentence on the desk: "Think small." Two words. Without filling the page. Advertising the mocked car by claiming its smallness. The client lost color. Then said yes. Then within three years the Beetle was the cult car of America.

This is the trouble with CVs. Everyone tries to be a Cadillac. Everyone writes "highly motivated, solution-oriented, dynamic." Everyone looks for adjectives that make them look bigger. The recruiter no longer sees those adjectives. Visual blindness. They skim a queue of Cadillacs and toss whichever CV they touch first.

Tell the point at which you are ordinary

Bernbach's rule: "State your weakest point, and your strongest will look sufficient." We did this again and again with Volkswagen. One ad simply headlined: "Lemon." Lemon as in defective. Because a VW about to ship had a faulty chrome on the glove-box, and a VW inspector had pulled it off the line. The body of the ad said: "This Volkswagen missed the boat. That's why Volkswagens last longer."

An astonishing excuse. Pulling a car because of bad chrome. But the discipline behind the excuse was real. Customers remember the small weaknesses you admit far more than the great strengths they're told about.

How does this look in a CV? Like this. Instead of "strong communication skills" — that sentence should be outlawed — write: "Two of my first presentations went badly. After the second I paid for a public-speaking workshop. By the third, the CEO told me I'd become 'a different kind of speaker.'" That line shines among the 200 CVs that say "strong communication skills." Because it smells of a human.

A creative CV isn't decorated; it's brave

A graduate once sent me his CV. A fancy Adobe Illustrator design, four colors, three fonts, headers running right-to-left and bottom-up. Inside, just one sentence caught my eye: "Part-time Burger King cashier on the night shift, 14 months during university."

We stripped the decoration. One page, Helvetica, paragraphs flowing left-to-right. We moved the Burger King line near the headline. We simplified the words around it: "Expensive school but I paid the tuition working night shift at Burger King. Three semesters averaging four hours of sleep, 3.7 GPA. I learned the skill of hard-time-thinking right there."

Same person. Same talent. The only difference: brave honesty. Four interview requests came in within three weeks.

Three rules of a creative CV

• No adjectives — irony. Instead of "I'm very hardworking," show hardworking through irony. "I drew 47 prototypes the night before the stage; the team called me 'the rough-draft factory.' Two of those drafts shipped to market."
• Plain visual, poetic content. Helvetica, white space, single page. Not Cadillac — Beetle. Designed so the recruiter's eye rests, written so the mind cannot forget.
• Have one "lemon." A small weakness, openly admitted. "My first company collapsed. I was a partner. Lost 200K TL in 18 months. The second I kept alive seven years."A flawless CV is a lie; a lie gets filtered.

Creativity needs measurement

The period DDB began to register on Madison Avenue, we published our Volkswagen campaign's results in the trade press. "Before this campaign we sold X cars a month; after, we sold Y." Those who did not believe in creativity believed in data. Without data, creativity is a closed game with itself — we lived off sales, not the game.

CVs obey the same rule. You wrote a brave, ironic, honest CV — is it working? Is the recruiter actually reading the "Burger King cashier" line, or skipping it? Does the second page open, or do they stop on the first? To know, you need written evidence.

That is what a tool like Luriendoes: measures whether the creative parts of your CV are actually being read. Entirely practical. The equivalent of Volkswagen's Nielsen. Writing well before the campaign, measuring well after, belong to the same craft.

The Bernbach discipline in three exercises

For this week I suggest three exercises:

• Adjective hunt. Underline every adjective in your CV. "Dynamic", "solution-oriented", "motivated" — delete them all. Replace with verbs. "Solution-oriented" → "Closed a three-week production incident in 36 hours."
• Add one lemon. Find a small failure story in your CV. Collapsed. Rejected. Dead end. Then what happened? The exit story. Add that sentence. It will be the only sentence the recruiter remembers.
• Go plain visual. Three colors → one color. Three fonts → Helvetica + Inter. No right-to-left lines. Abundant whitespace. Like the Beetle — small, durable, cult.

Last word: We remember Beetle CVs

Forty years on, Madison Avenue still talks about "Think Small." Because that ad sold not a price advantage but a dignified weakness. CVs are remembered for the same. Not your Cadillac-perfect sides, but your Beetle-dignified blank spaces. Anyone who adds a single "lemon" line to their CV after reading this article will have done a service to advertising forty years from now.

Without courage, no advertising. Without courage, no CV either. The recruiter forgets the "highly motivated" candidate; the recruiter calls the one who wrote "I was in the wrong job for two years; in the third I quit."