Mad Men's Advertising People

AMC’s Award-Winning Series Recalls the Ad Business in the 1960s

Jul 29, 2008

Here's a look at how television's highly successful Mad Men series portrays Madison Avenue and the advertising profession of the 1960s.

Complimentary or not, the advertising industry now has its own award-winning television drama series drawing millions of viewers. AMC’s "Mad Men" recalls the culture, sophistication, boozing, smoking, philandering and attitudes of Madison Avenue’s glory days in the 1960s. It even mentions the advertising.

The series opened its second season with an estimated 1.9 million viewers, more than double its 2007 opening episode. It has become what Marisa Guthrie of Broadcasting and Cable called "the darling of the awards circuit," winning 16 Emmy nominations and a couple of Golden Globes.

Mad Men was created by Matthew Weiner, the writer and producer of the fifth and sixth seasons of the Sopranos. He has won Emmy, Peabody and Golden Globe awards.

Weiner has admitted that recapturing the advertising culture of the 1960s was difficult since he was not born until 1965 and he does not take all the media and Hollywood impressions of that period at face value. But as one survivor of that period will testify, Weiner has done a fairly good job of recreating the 1960s American advertising world.

Small Markets Mirrored Madison Avenue

Madison Avenue, while much larger in scale, was mirrored in smaller markets across the USA. In the 1960s, it and advertising communities across the nation, sported, with more than a smattering of snobbishness, what is now called "attitude."

That feeling of superiority is voiced in the second season opener by Don Draper, the feared creative director of the Sterling Cooper ad agency played by Jon Hamm. It came in a brief admonishment to junior copywriter Peggy Olson, played by Elizabeth Moss. She had just tried to defend her short skirt art suggestion with the old "sex sells" cliché.

"The people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this," Draper tells Olson. "They’re completely unaware that their success depends on something more than a shoe shine." A moment later he adds: "They can’t do what we do. And they hate us for it."

Peggy Olson an Authentic 1960s Copywriter

Understandably, that’s about as deep as the series gets into the hows-and-whys of advertising, which is more blah-blah-blah than an action-packed profession. Mad Men does show what an ad storyboard is and what a creative staff meeting might resemble.

Peggy Olson also demonstrates how a talented young copywriter in the early 1960s had to carefully balance her position between the agency’s professionals and its female clerical staff, offering a bit of creativity here and there without stepping on the toes of the mostly male colleagues.

Weiner remains true to the era by not showing any African American professionals, who were seldom found in early 1960s ad agencies. He goes out of his way to recall the office drinking and chain smoking, both very hip in those days.

The rest of the show reminds one of a 20th Century soap opera, although the Hollywood Reporter column says it is "painstakingly building its way to genuine greatness" rather than "devolving into soapy Madison Avenue pablum."

However. the show is well fueled with gossip, rumors, guilt, office romances, beautiful women, pregnancies, petty fighting, office politics, after-hours drinking and lingering love affairs, all of which could occur in an accounting firm as well as they can in an ad agency. Mad Men’s continuing success, and its legacy, may come more from that part of the show than from any of its pure advertising moments.

If the series leaves viewers with a negative image of advertising people, the profession can always say that’s just the way it was way back in the 1960s.

The copyright of the article Mad Men's Advertising People in Advertising Agencies is owned by Carroll Trosclair. Permission to republish Mad Men's Advertising People in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.