You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's
Levy's (Henry S. Levy & Sons)1961
You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's is a 1961 subway poster campaign for Levy's, created by Doyle Dane Bernbach, New York.
Why it works
A Brooklyn bakery wanted New Yorkers of every background to buy its rye, so Doyle Dane Bernbach put them on the subway walls. Each poster shows one face, unmistakably not the bakery's usual customer, mid-bite into a sandwich under Judy Protas's line "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's real Jewish Rye." The campaign began in 1961 and ran through the 1970s; for the best-known 1967 posters, photographer Howard Zieff deliberately cast ordinary people he found around the city, including a railroad engineer, a restaurant worker and a boy from Harlem, rather than polished models. It is studied as a classic of DDB's "new advertising": a short, disarming headline, a plain photograph, no clutter, and copywriter and art director working as one. It is also an early, affectionate celebration of New York's diversity in mainstream advertising. The line has outlived the campaign by decades, and the posters are held by the V&A and the Library of Congress.
Techniques
- Plain folks Ordinary New Yorkers found around the city, not polished models, bite into sandwiches to show that people of every background enjoy the bread.
- Humour A short, disarming headline plays gently on expectations about who eats Jewish rye.
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