There is a difference between saying you work hard and having a reason you cannot stop. Mine comes from a rental car ad.
Once Upon a Time, an Ad Like No Other
In 1962, Avis had been unprofitable for thirteen years. Hertz owned 61 percent of the car rental market. Avis had 11. The company’s CEO, Robert Townsend, hired the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach and posed a simple question: How do we get five dollars’ worth of impact for every dollar we spend?
Bill Bernbach, DDB’s co-founder, did something unusual. He refused to write a single ad for ninety days. Instead, he sent his team to study Avis’s operations: the counters, the cars, the people. They asked employees a question that would change the company: Why does anyone ever rent a car from you?
The answer came back plain: We try harder. Because we have to.
Paula Green, a copywriter at DDB, turned that answer into a campaign. The first ad read: “Avis is only No. 2 in rent a car business. So why go with us?” Then it told us why, and the why was in all mundane operational details. Clean ashtrays, windshield wipers that work, and a full tank of gas.
That ad broke every rule on Madison Avenue, and David Ogilvy called it “diabolical positioning”, a judo move where a rival’s strength gets turned against them.
Yet, within one year, Avis went from a $3.2 million loss to a $1.2 million profit. Within four years, their market share tripled from 11 to 35 percent. The slogan ran for fifty years, and Green later recalled, “With the first ads, we were really creating an operating manual for the company.”
I often ask others about their favorite marketing campaigns, hoping they’ll ask about mine. I always mention Avis as my top choice, followed by Google’s first ever Super Bowl ad, “Parisian Love.” However, what I didn’t realize the first time I shared this story is who actually crafted the line: “We Try, Harder.” Paula Green wrote it and she was one of very few female copywriters working in 1960s advertising. At DDB, no one told her to stay quiet. “They always presumed me to have judgment,” she said, “and allowed me to contribute as much as possible, ask questions, and be forthright.”
Green became DDB’s first woman creative management supervisor: the highest position available to her at the agency. When she reached that ceiling, she left and founded her own firm. She was inducted into the Creative Hall of Fame in 2012, fifty years after writing the Avis line.
More Than 60 Years Later, I Still Love the Ad
The woman who wrote the most famous underdog slogan in advertising history was herself the underdog. The people who understand trying harder are the ones who have had to.
When asked about being a woman in advertising, she said: “I never just thought of myself as purely a woman. I always thought of myself as a writer, a copywriter, who could do a job.”
And when asked about the Avis campaign, she said something that stopped me: “‘We Try Harder’, that’s the story of my life.”
And I related. During college, as a sophomore, I built my first website in 2012. I discovered SEO the same year. I taught myself to code in 2014. None of this followed a straight line, and none of it came with the kind of pedigree that opens doors on the first knock.
After college, I worked at a marketing and web development agency, and I remember how I got the job. I brought my computer, showed my WordPress code, and pledged I’d learn quickly. The agency owner had already picked his web developer, but decided to bring me on as a second hire and bet on the marketing graduate eager to learn and code. I learned a lot about the web development process.
In 2016, I created an online marketplace like Etsy, handled all the API integrations with Stripe, built the search implementation, and hosted it on Google Cloud. It took me two years and many late nights, but I learned so much.
Before Tandem, I was a contractor for both Harvard and MIT, where I worked on a large Drupal website redesign project after coming from WordPress.
When I joined Tandem Diabetes Care in 2019, I started as a contractor. The healthcare industry was new to me. The Enterprise CMS was new to me. The entire domain was foreign, yet over 6 years I became one of the go-to people in the marketing department for every technology tool the team ran.
But here is the thing about trying harder: it is not bravado. You never think you have all the answers. It is collaboration, research. It is asking around, experimenting, trying different things until you find the solution or learn from the mistake. Just like Avis, who promised their customers nothing but their best shot, every single time.
That’s why I also try harder, since I lack the credentials and connections to take it for granted. Just as Avis’s claim “we’re No. 2” was a fact, I realized that simply stating facts allows you to make the next point: which is why you should bet on me.
Over 6 years at Tandem, that posture produced results I could point to. I supported an Azure migration. I launched 250 international web pages across 22 country-language pairs. I became the subject-matter expert on web accessibility and earned my certification. I integrated tools such as Google Analytics 4 and Zendesk for both the US and Canadian markets. I conducted training sessions. I created measurement plans and dashboards on Google Locker Studio. I often looked at second-order effects and did tasks no one asked me to do, but that ended up useful and at times critical.
Still Trying
Paula Green died in 2015 at the age of 88. The campaign she wrote ran for half a century. Some ideas outlast the institutions that created them because they describe something true about effort.
I first told this story in 2021 to my manager when I was asking for a promotion, and let the ad speak for itself. I told it again in 2023 for the same reason. The story had not changed. I had.
I still tell it nowadays because it is the most honest frame I have found for the type of work I do, one without shortcuts or credentials, and once a company takes a chance on me, giving anything less than my very best is simply not an option.
That is my operating manual.
References
- Was “We Try Harder” the Most Brilliant Ad Slogan of the 20th Century? — Slate
- “We Try Harder” and Other Famous Ad Campaigns by Paula Green — Duke University Libraries
- The Women Who Built DDB: Paula Green — Dave Dye
- The Avis “We Try Harder” Promise — YouTube
- Avis “We’re only Number 2” Original Print Ads — SwipeFile