In the opening scene of the US advertising drama Mad Men, now showing on BBC4, Don Draper—the strong, silent type of creative director—is alone in a bar, grappling handsomely with a problem. How can he convince people to smoke Lucky Strike despite the recently revealed—this is 1960—health dangers? He begins a conversation about smoking with his waiter. As Draper jots the man's words on to a napkin, we see the seeds of an idea begin to germinate in the furrows of his brow…
In dramatic terms, Mad Men is not quite as good as it is being made out to be. Despite a strong concept and production values to die for, the script cannot stop sabotaging itself with Hollywood set-pieces. Surely the show's creator Matthew Weiner, late of the Sopranos, can find better ways of alerting us to Draper's mysteriousness than making his wife whisper "Who are you?" at him while he is asleep in bed.
Worse still is the show's fixation on the era's many prejudices—a recurring motif which carries more than a whiff of its own bigotry as it enjoins us to sneer at men behaving badly in a world that knew no better. At times, the series itself seems like one big advertising campaign, with Weiner's liberalism as the client. And yet, in alighting upon this time and this place—Madison Avenue, New York, 1960—the series does bring to our attention one of the most important, and least talked about, revolutions of the 20th century.
The meeting with the Lucky Strike board begins, but Draper's brainwave will still not break. An ambitious young copywriter steps in to fill the silence with his own terrible idea. Disgusted, the client stands up to leave. His hand is on the doorknob when Draper, after one last spurt of handsome grappling, saves the day. "We can," he announces, "say anything we want." With a single bound, advertising was free.
Draper has just discovered the central truth about his business: people's relationship with stuff they buy is not primarily practical, but emotional. (His relationships with people tend to work the other way around.) "Advertising," he explains to Mr Lucky Strike, "is a billboard that screams from the side of the road that whatever you're doing, it's OK. You're OK." One day your cigarettes may kill you, in other words, but they will always be your friend. And how do we summarise all this in a phrase that people can relate to? "It's toasted."
"Avis is only No 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us? We try harder. (When you're not the biggest, you have to.) We just can't afford dirty ashtrays. Or half-empty gas tanks. Or worn wipers… Or anything less than self-adjusters that adjust. Heaters that heat. Defrosters that defrost. Obviously, the next thing we try hardest for is just to be nice. To start you out right with a new car… and a smile. To know, say, where to get a good pastrami sandwich in Duluth. Why? Because we can't afford to take you for granted. Go with us next time. The line at our counter is shorter."
This famous ad was written in 1962 by Bill Bernbach, the Robespierre of what became known as the creative revolution. When the ad appeared in the US, Avis was making a loss and had an 11 per cent share of the car rental market. By 1966, the company was in profit, its market share 35 per cent. Still more famous was the campaign Bernbach created for Volkswagen in 1960, which introduced its now familiar pose of perfectionist self-deprecation, as in the "Lemon" ad which enjoyed a starring role in Mad Men episode three. The ads were authentic miracles of marketing that transformed the Beetle—famously designed by Nazis—into the most loved car of all time. "Last time I saw one of those," jokes one of Draper's colleagues, "I was throwing a grenade into it."
The impact of the creative revolution can scarcely be overstated. As Bernbach and Ogilvy's influence spread, the idea of the advertising creative as an artist took hold. Jokes, puns and puzzles began to tumble from the minds of Madison Avenue, drunk on their liberation from the drudgery of "20 per cent off" coupons and product improvements. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the best work now being done in Britain by the Saatchis, advertising left the product behind altogether—and reached new heights of popularity. Tobacco, lager, phones and coffee had nothing to do with the appeal of Silk Cut, Carling Black Label, British Telecom and Gold Blend. Yet people bought their products and services just the same.
And more than just buying them, we talked about them, quoted them, even tuned in specially to watch them. For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, the era's advertising has become as much a part of our shared identity as the programmes it interrupted. Unhindered by a duty to inform, ads were free to become sponsored works of art.
By 1998, however, when I began working as a junior copywriter in the industry's lower echelons, advertising had entered its decadent decline. Executives were more interested in selling their own creative mystique than their clients' products. Initially, I was amazed to be granted two weeks to write a single sales letter, although I soon got used to it. On my first proper brief, writing an insurance brochure, I was ordered by my creative director to go to the pub for the day to think up great ideas.
The industry had become wildly pretentious. One shudders to think what David Ogilvy would have made of Benetton's blood-streaked baby, or Guinness's bombastic "Surfer" commercial of 1999, voted Britain's favourite ad, which contrived to use Moby Dick, Leftfield and Lipizzaner stallions to conjure the experience of waiting to have your pint topped up.
It was at this time that clients also began to notice something rather worrying. Even creatively successful ads, launched at great expense, were often doing nothing for their sales. Or less than nothing. In 2000, the year I was finally sacked, Budweiser's "Whassup!" campaign, created by Bill Bernbach's old agency DDB, won numerous awards and, for a time, changed the way twentysomethings spoke. And yet, during the campaign Budweiser's US sales in barrels dropped 8.3 per cent.
The creeping impotence of mass-market advertising had many causes, particularly the proliferation of digital media, which made large audiences complicated and expensive to reach. And yet there was a deeper problem. Just as consumers who were once happy to listen to sales pitches became bored of them in the 1960s, so today's young consumer has developed a resistance to almost any message they recognise as advertising.
As a result, we are now living in the early years of a new revolution. And this time it is the search for credible media, rather than a credible message, which is important—whether it is in Google searches or in the recommendations of a friend who has unknowingly been targeted by stealth marketers. The Mad Men made us laugh, then they made us wiser. We should thank them for it, and start trying to outwit the next lot.
