The fifth season of Mad Men returned to US screens on Sunday night, to much fanfare and social media action. The event inspired Matt Straz to pay homage to the men who inspired the show, the industry giants who ruled Madison Avenue over 50 years ago, and reflects on how much the advertising agency space has changed in that time.
Mad Men returned last night after a 17-month hiatus, and it is good to have the show back. The hour-long drama has characters and storylines that are deeply compelling. Although you never know exactly where the story is going, you always have the sense that it’s going somewhere. The show has left an indelible imprint on the advertising industry, similar to what “L.A. Law” did for lawyers and “The West Wing” for politicians.
Because I’m a fan of advertising and its history, it’s almost impossible for me not to think about the show each time I’m in Manhattan, especially when I visit agencies like Y&R at 285 Madison Avenue. It was here that the real Don Draper, Draper Daniels, toiled as a copywriter a half century ago. When I drink at former industry haunts like Keen’s Steakhouse, I quietly raise my glass to the industry giants that came before me.
I know many of them by name because I’ve read the books that inspired Matthew Weiner to create Mad Men. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War by Jerry Della Femina and Ogilvy on Advertising are on my bookshelf.
The very last vestiges of the era are now fading into history, though. Most of the original Mad Men are gone, driven to an early grave by some of the same products that they marketed. The ones that somehow survived it all are living legends. These Mad Men of yore will sometimes complain about the quality of today’s advertising and its obsession with technology. Like the fine arts, much of the world’s creative energy has been funneled into new industries like software and gaming.
But when you go back and look at the advertising of that era, it’s clear that much of it would not work as well today. The proliferation of ads and the fragmentation of media make it far more difficult to cram a message — no matter how well-written — down the throats of the masses like you could in the 1960s.
The aging Mad Men will often say that their times were wilder and more fun. That may be true, although anyone who lived through the dot-com startup boom and the advent of digital media knows that fun was not confined to the ‘60s. In some ways it was more extravagant, what with the industry boondoggles to the Caribbean, publisher-sponsored ski houses in Lake Tahoe and web site launch parties in Las Vegas. I fully expect that someday a writer will tell the story of that era in an entertaining way, too.
However, the Mad Men are right in the sense that agencies are more sedate and professional now, especially compared to the workplace shenanigans that Della Femina describes in his book. Agency-sponsored inter-office hookups and open drug use would certainly not pass muster with HR today. The flipside of this institutionalized debauchery is that agencies are now safer and more diversified places to work. And while still not statistically likely, it’s now at least possible that someone other than a white male can get the top agency jobs.
Advertising’s creative revolution is now just a memory. We have spent the last decade transforming advertising into a technology business, a relentless process that will continue until all media is targeted, dynamic and electronic. Fittingly, next year Y&R will pack up its offices on Madison Avenue and move uptown to Columbus Circle. While 285 Madison will forever be connected to the Mad Men era, the building’s nest of small offices had long ago stopped serving its workforce properly.
It’s time to turn the page and write advertising’s next chapter.
This story was first posted on MediaPost and was republished with the kind permission of MediaPost.com.
