Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How to Create a Billion Dollars and Die Broke: The Rise, the Revolution, and the Death of the Greatest Agency in Advertising History

How to Create a Billion Dollars and Die Broke: The Rise, the Revolution, and the Death of the Greatest Agency in Advertising History

Sussfeld, Joshua

Paperback

AccountingMarketing

ISBN13: 9798259294622
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 28 2026
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.59 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The agency that invented modern advertising created more value than any creative enterprise in history. Then its parent company decided it was worth more dead than alive.

In December 2025, Omnicom Group dissolved DDB Worldwide - the agency founded in 1949 that launched the Creative Revolution, created Think Small for Volkswagen, We Try Harder for Avis, and You Deserve a Break Today for McDonald's. The dissolution eliminated 4,000 jobs and erased the most storied name in advertising. This is the story of why. DDB built brands worth over $400 billion - Volkswagen ($70B), McDonald's ($200B), State Farm ($130B) - and captured almost none of that value.

The gap between what DDB created and what it kept is the central mystery of this book, and the central warning for every consultant, designer, writer, and service professional who creates more than they capture. From Bill Bernbach's radical insight that creativity could be systematized, through Keith Reinhard's forty-year fight to keep Bernbach's philosophy alive inside a holding company that valued spreadsheets over ideas, to the final email that dissolved seventy-six years of creative history in a single Monday morning - this is the definitive account of the most important agency in advertising and the business model that destroyed it.

Drawing on decades of published interviews, trade press reporting, and behavioral science research, How to Create a Billion Dollars and Die Broke is a business book dressed as a history - and a warning dressed as a story.

For anyone who builds things for other people and wonders why the builders always end up broke.

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