If the flood of articles last month about the final “Mad Men” episode was any indication, a lot of Americans were sad to see it go. I have to admit I wasn’t one of them. One reason was the fact that every time I ran into someone who knew I’d begun my 35-plus-year career in advertising in 1959, they invariably asked, “Do you watch ‘Mad Men?”
By Allen Clark
If the flood of articles last month about the final “Mad Men” episode was any indication, a lot of Americans were sad to see it go. I have to admit I wasn’t one of them. One reason was the fact that every time I ran into someone who knew I’d begun my 35-plus-year career in advertising in 1959, they invariably asked, “Do you watch ‘Mad Men?”
What they really wanted to know was, “Was it really like that?”Although I watched only three of the first season’s shows, I had a pretty good idea what “it” was – smoking, drinking, fooling around and maybe, “Did you guys really look like that?” With the curtain finally down, this seems a good a time to answer those questions.
First of all, I didn’t stop watching the show because of how they depicted the ad agency world in the 1960s. In my opinion, advertising was simply the skeleton on which the writers and actors draped a tale of office intrigue, personal foibles and familial issues. It could have been an office of lawyers or a travel agency – who knows, maybe even a funeral home. Don Draper could have fit into any number of professions and had the same affairs, frustrations, personality crises and family upsets.
But since the action revolved around an ad agency, let me set the record straight. While the 1960s did issue in the so-called creative revolution, and with it much looser working environments, there was little of the open-office drinking and sexual moonlighting going on in any of the offices, despite what my former partner/boss Jerry Della Femina might like to claim.
Certainly no established firm like Sterling Cooper had decanters of Scotch sitting out on fancy tables ready for consumption any time of day. The kind of WASPy agency depicted was a kind of “white shoe” operation, to lift a law-firm descriptor – much more representative of a staid J. Walter Thompson than an Italian upstart like Della Femina or Greek George Lois. That’s not to say that a lot of drinking didn’t go on after hours at my old firm. And certainly the two- and even sometimes three-martini lunches happened. But the TV show, as a good series does, exaggerates to make a point.
Same thing goes for the gender issue in “Mad Men.” Advertising in the ‘50s and ‘60s wasn’t too different from other businesses. The show pretty accurately showed the subservient role of the classic secretary and the roadblocks for them to improve their positions. Actually, the looser, more creative new breed of ad agency offered much greater opportunity for women than the establishment did. But the show really was about the changing moods and social mores throughout the country during the decade than it was about advertising. I think “Mad Men” was mostly about the kinds of issues we’ve come to expect TV drama to deal with – the “glass ceilings,” as well as personality identity, frustrated ambitions, extra-marital goings on, homophobia, and racism (mostly by the absence of any African-American characters).
Where the show fell short, I felt, was what might be called the Cliff Notes fashion in which ad campaigns and individual ad creation were described. In my limited viewing of the first year, I felt the show understated the hard work that went into the advertising process and overstated the “light bulb” concept of creativity. In my experience, successful practitioners of advertising in the middle of last century were serious about their trade at the same time they enjoyed what they did.
Additionally, critics have long accused advertising of not telling the truth, of fabricating to gain awareness or to differentiate products and services. The New Republic writer Ruth Franklin said that the show’s “method is to take us behind the scenes of the branding of American icons … to show us not how the products themselves were created, but how their ‘very sexy … very magical’ images were dreamed up.” She went on to say, “In this way, we are all Don Drapers, obsessed with selling an image rather than tending to what lies underneath.” Once again, I saw this attitude as stereotyping. It may make good TV drama, but I don’t think it accurately portrayed the bulk of advertising created in this period.
One last comment. Yes, we did look like the characters in “Mad Men.” The meticulous staging of all the props and costumes on each show was a real tribute to creator Matthew Weiner and his almost manic attention to detail. Stylish suits were the perfect match for the expense-account lunches at some of New York’s finest restaurants. Of course, as the show depicted in its later years, fashions quickly changed as the ‘60s took hold. No one could ever accuse the ad business of being static.
