Matthew Weiners Mad Men and why we love 1960
March 2nd, 2008, 1:04 am Hobbies Ideas
Click here to watch a trailer
for Mad Men
This place, observes Don Draper, creative director of the Madison Avenue
advertising agency Sterling Cooper, has more failed artists and
intellectuals than the Third Reich. It is 1960, and although the Sterling
Cooper staff may have failed as artists and intellectuals, as ad men they
are masters of the universe. And that is exactly why they were all invented
by Matthew Weiner for his television-drama series Mad Men. It was, Weiner
has said, an amazing year, and advertising was an amazing business. The
truth is, I think an advertising agency is one of the last places in the
world where, if you bring in a big client, you%26rsquo;re in charge. There%26rsquo;s
complete mobility, and it%26rsquo;s a model for the United States.
The year is crucial. Nixon is about to lose to Kennedy, and America is feeling
pretty good about herself. They liked Ike, the paranoia of the immediate
postwar years had begun to subside and the suburbs had become happy havens
of prosperity, and, for when they weren%26rsquo;t, the tranquilliser Librium, the
Prozac of the age, had just come on the market.
Best of all, the year before, the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) had
produced what was, in 1999, to be voted the greatest ad campaign of all
time. It nicknamed Volkswagen%26rsquo;s little car the Beetle and showed it almost
lost in a blank white page, with the slogan Think Small. Everything about
this ad went against conventional wisdom: it wasted space, it sold a car as
small when Americans liked big and it gave it an apparently demeaning name.
Yet it turned Volkswagen into one of the world%26rsquo;s biggest car-makers. The
concept of the ad man as a creative genius, not just a salesman, had been
born.
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