THE REAL
MADMEN
Copyright © 2011, Elwin Street Productions
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First published in the United States in 2011 by Running Press Book Publishers, A Member of the Perseus Books Group.
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ISBN 978-0-7624-4243-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011926064
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
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PICTURE CREDITS
Reproduction of images authorized by:
Advertising Archives: pp. 98 (bottom right), 99 (bottom)
Alamy: front flap, 123
Amil Gargano: pp. 133, 137, 139
Avis Rent-a-car: p. 128
Bayer HealthCare LLC: p. 189
Bimbo Bakeries USA, Inc: p. 67
Chivas Brothers: p. 127
Corbis Images: pp. 171, 201
Coyne & Blanchard, Inc., DBA Communication Arts: pp. 174–175
DDB Worldwide Communication Group Inc.: pp. 59, 67, 81
Duke University, North Carolina: p. 27
El Al Israel Airlines: p. 81
George Lois: pp. 105, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119, 168, 169
Getty Images: pp. 4, 15, 31, 49, 53, 69, 75, 83, 101, 145, 193
iStockphoto: p. 11
Jon Williamson: p. 19
Judith Wald: p. 157
Kathryn Krone: p. 89
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Texas: p. 163
McCann Erickson: p. 183
McDermott Library, The University of Texas: pp. 205, 206
Ogilvy & Mather: pp. 35 (left), 38, 39 (top right and bottom left), 42, 43, 45
PLR IP Holdings, LLC: pp. 78, 79
Talon International: pp. 152, 153
The Hertz Corporation: pp. 142, 143
The Procter & Gamble Company: p. 197
Viyella: p. 39 (top left)
Volkswagen Zubehör: pp. 94, 95, 98 (top and bottom left), 99 (top)
Volvo Car Corporation: p. 136.
Wisconsin Historical Society: p. 35 (right)
Young & Rubicam: p. 179
Figures featured on the endpapers include: Front—Bill Bernbach, Gene Case, DDB, Amil Gargano, Helmut Krone, Jeff Metzner, PKL, Jack Tinker, Judith Wald, Bob Wilvers, Young & Rubicam, and Bernie Zlotnick. Back—21 Club, Carl Ally, Jerry Della Femina, Carl Fischer, Gilbert Advertising, George Lois Ron Rosenfeld, and Young & Rubicam.
With thanks to the following for supplying endpaper images: Carl Fischer, Amil Gargano, Kathryn Krone, Bob Kuperman, George Lois, McCann Erickson, Judith Wald, and Bernie Zlotnick, 21 Club, DDB Worldwide Communication Group Inc., El Al Israel Airlines, Carl Fischer, Richard Gilbert, George Lois, Judith Wald, Bernie Zlotnick.
THE REAL
MADMEN
THE RENEGADES OF MADISON AVENUE AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF ADVERTISING
ANDREW CRACKNELL
FOREWORD BY SIR JOHN HEGARTY
Contents
FOREWORD BY SIR JOHN HEGARTY
HOW TRUE IS MAD MEN? BY FRED DANZIG
Prologue
The Story So Far
A Growing Respect
The Unlikely Hero
Lighting the Touchpaper
Thinking Small
The Word Spreads
Avis v Hertz
Changing Times
Thinking Big
Women of the Avenue
Epilogue
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CREDITS
INDEX
DEDICATION
To the gentle Dan Levin, my group head at CDP, because he gave me my first break, taught me with immense skill and patience, and set me on the road; because he introduced me to the US advertising of this era and explained its importance; and a little because in 1967 he had an E Type Jaguar and that was all the incentive I needed. Sadly he died in October 2010.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In his 1964 novel The Advertising Man, Jack Dillon makes one passing reference to those then employed in advertising on New York’s Madison Avenue as “Mad Men.” Apart from that, I found no evidence that the expression was in any sort of use until the AMC series of that name. For that reason, and to avoid confusion, throughout this book the phrase will refer only to people, events, attitudes, and images in the TV drama and not the world of 1960s New York advertising.
All quoted material is either referenced directly in the text, or can be found in the sources provided at the back of the book.
Foreword BY SIR JOHN HEGARTY
Advertising is a wonderful business in that it recognizes talent very quickly. It applauds it, rewards it, and promotes it. The only problem is, it also forgets it very quickly.
The word “history” in our industry is almost a dirty word. We’re obsessed with tomorrow and the next big thing. In many ways that’s what makes it so exciting. Constant invention is at its core. Creativity is, after all, about breaking something down and putting something new in its place.
But sometimes this can work against it. I was lucky enough to be taught history by an inspirational teacher who’s mantra was “history isn’t about the past, it’s about the future.” Understanding where we came from, why we did what we did, and how it could influence tomorrow was at the heart of his teaching.
It is this that makes this book so special.
Yes, it is about the past. It’s about a moment in time when everything changed and modern advertising was born. It will make you laugh and wonder at the characters that inhabit these pages, and teach you how to recognize true creativity as opposed to the illusion of it.
It will also give you an insight in how to run a creative company, and make sure it continues to be successful—Bernbach’s brilliantly insightful letter to his staff about the dangers of bigness and conformity should be plastered across the walls of any creative organization. Not that this is a “how to” book. Far from it. But like any great story it carries within it lessons that go beyond the intended narrative.
Andrew Cracknell’s writing captures the passion, madness, and mayhem that is all part of a creative revolution; the courage and determination it takes to succeed and, most of all, how to conjure magic out of nothing.
How true is Mad Men?
BY FRED DANZIG
You don’t have to be an adman to love the Creative Revolution. All that’s required is an appreciation of how Madison Avenue’s ad agencies veered from “hard sell” advertising in the 1960s, abandoning brain-jarring repetition and hyperbole, creating instead a softer, more colloquial “selling” premise. Radiating good taste, humor, “real”-looking people, and down-to-earth copy, their amiable messages began relating more directly to real everyday life in America
.
Cut to July 2007, and the debut of the AMC cable network’s Mad Men series, billed as a serious recreation of Madison Avenue in the sixties, when the Creative Revolution was reenergizing ad agencies. Most admen who survived that decade and tuned in to Mad Men were hoping it would reflect the energy that was coursing through the business during that decade. But the TV version instead focuses on a fictitious “new” agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, that is curiously immune to the energizing creative work going on all around it at smaller, less stuffy “start-ups.”
Mad Men did succeed, however, in opening memory floodgates; veteran Creative Revolution pioneers were asked to reminisce, and now, in these pages, Andrew Cracknell brings them together to provide the real-life details and contrasts to the Mad Men storyline. With the back stories of landmark ad campaigns here, we witness a shift from musty old agency dos and don’ts (i.e., “leave room in the ad for the logo”) to the challenging “fresh ideas only” approach. Agency writers and artists, no longer confined to separate cubicles, would henceforth work together as teams, in one office.
As the new ads won acclaim—and increased sales—young men and women started to take notice. And when they began setting off in pursuit of “real world” careers, many were drawn to the agency business.
How to break in? What about the “social barriers”? This Revolution was breaking down those barriers. Andrew Cracknell describes the paths many future advertising legends had to follow to get their first jobs, and how they would later open doors for others. Many of them bore vowel-rich ethnic names that were notably missing from agency office nameplates. Their stories are universally applicable; learn from them.
Mad Men, to its credit, reflects this aspect of the Madison Avenue world. We see Don Draper take himself from selling fur coats to ad agency partner despite having no family connections or elite school pedigree to ease his way. And we also see his secretary, Peggy Olson, parlay her creative ideas into an office of her own.
WHEN I JOINED Advertising Age in New York as senior editor in 1962, the Creative Revolution’s fresh work was already the talk of the business. These game-changing campaigns had begun transforming the business during the fifties, most notably after Doyle Dane Bernbach’s “Think Small” newspaper ad for the Volkswagen “Bug” came along. Its copy delivered a refreshing sermon about simplicity in life—and this to a nation with a “big-bigger-biggest” obsession. Ironically, Mad Men had a scene that took note of this ad. Don Draper—the agency’s creative leader, remember—reads the “Think Small” ad for the first time. He hates it. Some forty years later, a panel of experts will vote it “Best Advertising of the Twentieth Century.”
To be fair, Mad Men never pretends to be a documentary film. It’s committed to story lines and pure entertainment, smartly focusing on the lives and loves of its central characters and their hallowed clients. While it deservedly wins awards (thirteen Emmys among them, and counting), those awards aren’t coming from Madison Avenue.
Here, then, we have this book to flesh out the story, written by an adman who has lived the life. It traces the tale back to 1949, with the upstart Doyle Dane Bernbach agency’s redefining advertising content. The creative competition that ensued peaked in the sixties, when young writers and artists were saying, “Let’s open our own agency; let’s show ’em how it’s done.”
Prologue
“In advertising, we know how to construct the body, but the real trick is in knowing how to run blood through the veins.”
BILL BERNBACH
Have a read of the letter across the page.
Although written by a man who turned out to be an absolute master of persuasive communication, it failed to persuade. Ironically its subject matter was an analysis of how its recipients, the management of an advertising agency where persuasion should be all, were going wrong, and what they should do to put it right. It was written in 1947 by Bill Bernbach, the creative director, to his colleagues on the board of Grey Advertising, a midsized New York agency. It was, as far as we can gather, totally ignored.
It’s a moot point as to whether Bernbach would have ever been able to wring all he wanted out of an uninspired and uninspiring Grey so we’ll never know what would have happened if they’d bought into his ideas. But certainly no steps were taken to accommodate his beliefs or adhere to his suggested policies. Spurned, Bernbach took matters into his own hands, put into practice what his letter preached and wrought as fundamental a revolution on processes and product as ever occurred in any business activity; and this all spread from one initially tiny organization in one small corner of a very large and still growing business.
It’s worth reading in full. Its dazzling lucidity and heartfelt concerns are not usually the stuff of an interdepartmental memo. And reasonable and emollient though its phrases seem, it’s a catalogue of dynamite heresies, the relentless destruction of all the practices and beliefs held as inalienable wisdom by its addressees at the time. He was a curious man in a curious business. On the receiving end of advertising, as we all are minute by minute, it’s difficult to see how anyone can get really worked up about it. It’s just there, like weather and noise and things made of plastic.
It’s only ads. In their creation, no one dies, no one even gets hurt, apart from the occasional bruised ego and crushed vanity. At best it’s fluffy entertainment, at worst an insulting, mindless assault, a disposable means to a bigger end. Ideologically, depending on your own political stance, it’s the rattling of a stick in a bucket of swill—George Orwell—or a useful tool, but merely a tool, of capitalism. An adjunct. It does not, would not, exist in its own right.
Even within advertising its practitioners often have a morosely realistic view of their role in society. Julian Koenig, one of the key figures in this story, recently expressed his regret that he’d spent his life in its pursuit, happy that he’d done it extremely well but less so that he’d done it at all; a French advertising executive published his autobiography utilizing an old and well-worn advertising gag: “Don’t tell my mother I work in advertising, she thinks I’m the piano player in a brothel.”
It’s not a business inside which you’d expect a passionate battle of competing philosophies and ideas to create volcanic heat and upheaval, still resonating sixty years later. And yet you can see the emotion it aroused in Bill Bernbach, especially when he thought it wasn’t going the way he so strongly thought it should. Strongly enough that in 1949, aged thirty-eight, an age when senior managers should be cozily slipping their feet further and further under their executive desks, Bernbach left his secure and successful job as creative director to follow his utter conviction that there was a better way to do things—and started his own agency.
Perhaps surprisingly in such a competitive business, his beliefs were not just about performance, efficacy, and success, but about the role of advertising as an intrusive force for better or for worse in the life of contemporary society. Although in interviews he would often claim that to make ads more entertaining was simply a better way to get the consumer on your side and thus more likely to be persuaded, his concerns were as much rooted in ethics as they were in efficiency. You can gauge the humanity in the man by this, one of his many quotes respected not just for their content but also their precision of thought and expression:
“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”
And note also the last sentence of the letter. He didn’t have to include “good taste” in his recipe; all advertisers have always been concerned with “what” they say but few ever worry too much about “how” they say it, as long as it achieves maximum results. But he was clearly dismayed by the crassness and soullessness of the advertising prevalent at that time simply because it was crass and soulless, and he saw that as socially corrosive, or at least debilitating.
He believed there was a better way for America’s corporations to treat t
heir customers. Like a good theater playwright or director, he appreciated the audience was not an inert, inactive recipient but a living organism whose very reception of the message affected the message itself. He saw a lighter way, a more humorous, demotic way, that said, “Hey, we’re all in this together; you know we’re going to try and sell you something—let’s both enjoy the process.”
BERNBACH IS AN UNLIKELY HERO. Although not lacking in confidence, he could not be described as charismatic. Perhaps his most commanding asset was a pair of piercing blue eyes; certainly there was nothing else about him that demanded instant respect, short, rotund, and average-looking as he was. And yet more than sixty years later, advertising people all over the world, some entering the business two generations after he died, still talk of him with reverence. After his death in October 1982, Harper’s magazine told its readers he “probably had a greater impact on American culture than any of the distinguished writers and artists who have appeared in the pages of Harper’s during the past 133 years.”
Of how and why he got in to advertising, he said: “I don’t think that everything is measured by definite decisions—one day when I was suddenly going into advertising.… It just gradually happened. I was interested in writing. I was interested in art, and when the opportunity came along to do writing and art in advertising, I just took the opportunity.”
He had an absolute aversion to the notion that advertising could be done by formula. He was very careful to make a strong distinction between philosophy, in which he trusted, and formulae, which he recognized encouraged repetitive situations.
He believed in the arcana of creativity—not just how people worked but even how to select them. In 1964, as reported by Denis Higgins in The Art of Writing Advertising, he was confronted by an interviewer trying to analyze just how and why he was such an original advertising thinker. Asked if there were any striking characteristics unique to talented writers and art directors, he said, “One of the problems here [in this interview] is that we’re looking for a formula. What makes a good writer? It’s a danger… I remember those old Times interviews where the interviewer would talk to the novelist or the short story writer and say, ‘What time do you get up in the morning? What do you have for breakfast? What time do you start work? When do you stop work…?’ And the whole implication is that if you eat cornflakes at 6:30 and then take a walk and then take a nap and then start working and then stop at noon, you too can be a great writer. You can’t be that mathematical and that precise. This business of trying to measure everything in precise terms is one of the problems with advertising today. This leads to a worship of research. We’re all concerned about the facts we get and not about how provocative we can make those facts to the consumer.”
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