And now, here is a message from our sponsors: "Zal kills germs, it kicks them out. Zal leaves the smell of pine about. For the zingy, springy smell of pine, Zal disinfectant every time." I am a child of the 1960s, when we only had one commercial television channel and it was special. So pervasive were the advertisements that I can still recite many of them more than 40 years later. "There are two men in my life—to one I am a mother, to the other I'm a wife. And I give them both the best, with natural Shredded Wheat." Tragically, I can also sing the tunes. "We all like Ricicles, they're twicicles as nicicles…" and so on. We were a great generation to advertise to. We weren't distracted by video games and YouTube. We didn't skip the ads at 12-times speed having pre-recorded the shows on Sky Plus. And we thought the jolly commercials were an honest and generous form of public service broadcasting—a far cry from the cynicism of today's sassy young consumers.
Now the American series Mad Men has come to BBC4, featuring the 1960s folk who brought us those ditties. It is created by the writing team behind The Sopranos. "Mad" is for Madison Avenue, where the agencies congregated in a rather grander version of our own Soho. But the series is really about male infidelity, female inequality and suburban psychosis, with a little bit of advertising thrown in for colour. The men look like a cross between Gregory Peck and Cary Grant, with lantern jaws, heavily Brylcreemed hair and chests more luxuriant than the Brazilian jungle. They are all executives—and serially unfaithful to their spouses—while the women are secretaries and preyed upon. And the women who aren't secretaries are Doris Day-lookalike Stepford wives secretly having nervous breakdowns. All good fun.
Mad Men (pictured, below right) pulls off a similar trick to BBC1's Life on Mars, in that it is set several decades ago, allowing an unusual amount of licence for our politically correct days. There's something quite delicious about seeing a father hit someone else's child (let's be honest, we've all wanted to do it). Sexism is rife ("What do women want? Who cares?") and affords the writing team plenty of opportunities: "You can always tell when a woman's writing copy, but she might just be the right man for the job." The intake of toxins is prodigious. Everyone smokes on an industrial scale: in the office, in the car, on the phone, on the job. The office drinks cabinet is open all hours and generous slugs of Jack Daniels are consumed mid-afternoon, at a time when our generation is decorously sipping tissanes. "We drink because it's what men do," says one of the characters. Casual racism is dealt with subtly but to great effect. African-Americans are toilet attendants and elevator operators, unnoticed by the white protagonists. They only show emotion when discreetly laughing in the background at white folks' jokes. All this wickedness is clever in two ways. It makes the audience pleased with itself—proud that we are so much nicer and better behaved today—but it simultaneously gives us the illicit sense of relief that some of our baser emotions have found an outlet. Our behaviour may have changed, but have our attitudes?
Extraordinarily, for another 40 years after the era of Mad Men, the world of advertising barely changed, relying largely on the mass audiences gathered by terrestrial television. Unlike those in the US, however, commercials in Europe have always been heavily regulated. So corrosive were they thought to be when first introduced that a principle of separation was established, with rules governing minutes of advertising per hour and stipulating that it should be kept rigidly separate from programming. (In 1955 the Labour party actually pledged to close the fledging ITV down). Only now is a different principle of transparency beginning to be introduced: as long as viewers know something is a commercial message, they can decide for themselves. Hence the EU's decision last year to permit product placement on television from 2009.
The erosion of nannyish regulation is only part of the revolution under way. And the burgeoning search revenues of Google are not the whole story either. Leo Benedictus argued in the last issue of Prospect that the advertising industry needs to reinvent itself. He's right, and the nature of this opportunity is now becoming clear. In 2007, 37bn pieces of video were watched online worldwide. Much of this was delivered free, but supported by attached commercials. This trend suggests that advertising, far from waning, may be entering a new golden age. When I download a clip or programme from Channel 4's online service, 4oD, or from abc.com in the US, I am asked to watch a short commercial first. In a clear transaction, I am selling my attention in return for a free piece of content. This is advertising by consent. In addition, the technology now exists to target a bespoke message directly at my interests and pocket. This opens up the possibility of far more effective advertising (I may have learnt the jingles by heart, but I never spent my pocket money on Zal). Perhaps the Mad Men, despite their failings, have a future after all.
