A few lessons from Mad Men

As is so often the case with popular TV shows, I’m a little late to the game, just having started watching Mad Men last week when they began marathoning last year’s episodes in anticipation of the start of the year. For those who haven’t seen it yet, Mad Men is about a fictitious Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960. (I think the coming year’s episodes will take place in 1962.) The show is a lot of fun, and crammed with loads of great period detail, even if there’s an occasional slip up: I really don’t think that, in 1960, people were saying “I’m so over 1960.”

The show may be somewhat over the top - was there ever really this much drinking on the job? not to mention that much hanky-panky? But this is TV after all.

Much of the show takes place in the office, and shows the ad guys putting together pitches, brainstorming creative, and meeting with their clients. Some of the products are real - the Nixon campaign; Lucky Strikes; Right Guard; the VW Beetle. Others appear to be made up.

What’s really interesting is thinking about what lessons us marketing types can take from it. Here are a few that I’ve picked up:

• Today’s technology breakthrough is tomorrow’s buggy whip: In one of the episodes I watched, the ad guys are looking through some of the ideas for ads for Right Guard deodorant’s snazzy new aerosol. I’m sure that when aerosol cans were introduced - for hair spray, deodorant, oven cleaner, whipped cream - people thought: this is the way we’ll do things from now on. Yes, in this case the technology turned out to have a nasty side effect that accelerated its obsolescence, but it sure did become obsolete. I think the lesson here is that even if we have bang-zoom technology, someone out there is no doubt coming up with something that’s bang-zoomier. In this day an age, the technical edge just doesn’t last that long - if it ever did.
• Question “the givens”:  There’s one scene if which some folks are critiquing the now-famous “Think small.” ad for the VW Beetle. The Mad Men ad men are completely astounded that there’s all this wasted white space in the ad. Pretty funny, huh? None of us would make that mistake, would we? Well, maybe not that one, but think of how many things you do on a regular basis that you may be doing just because they’re the way you’ve always done them. Sometimes it’s a good idea to ask why you’re still doing something the way you’re doing it. Are you just hanging on because it’s the way things have always been done? Is there something that could be more effective. Let the small thinkers among us occasionally think big; let the big thinkers among us occasionally think small. And maybe we should think medium occasionally, too. 
• Sometimes marketing people face ethical dilemmas: I’m old enough to remember when cigarette advertising was all over television, and like most Boomers, I can easily call up the Marlboro Man, Take a Puff - it’s Springtime (Salems), and Sold American (Lucky Strike - which at one point used a tobacco auction in its ads). What’s interesting here is to watch the team strategize about the looming threats of the Surgeon General’s report and the prospect that there’ll be a warning label on cigarette packs. Needless to say, they don’t cover themselves in any glory - and when you consider that one of our greatest exports to the third world is the cigarettes that fewer and fewer Americans are smoking, the advertising industry still doesn’t. But sometimes even us B2B tech marketers have to face down little ethical decisions. No, our applications software won’t kill anyone (and is unlikely to be addictive, unfortunately), but we do have to carefully weigh what we say about our products. Sure, we want to put them in their most favorable light - but do we always stop short of the exaggerated claims? Do we occasionally leave things out there that may be interpreted a bit too favorably? Something worth thinking about, no?
• The truth will out: This is just an extension on the lesson above, the point being that if there is something wrong with your product (or your company), it will get found out somewhere along the line. Unfortunately, this mostly holds for bad things. You can have great products and a wonderful little company, but - let’s face it - you can still fail in the market. That’s where us marketing people come in, no?

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