The Myth of Mad Men, Part 1

In one first season episode of Mad Men, the delicious AMC series about the early 1960s Madison Avenue ad men at the mythical agency Sterling Cooper, creative director Don Draper pitches a lipstick company executive with a compelling concept for a print advertising series. After the skeptical client is finally persuaded on the merits of the concept, he begrudgingly acknowledges that Draper “may be right about this thing.”

 

To which Draper responds with a smug chuckle: “Well, we’ll never know, will we? It’s not a science.”

 

Wow. Those must have been the days. Imagine creative with a capital C, a shining lightbulb idea that did little to put light where it was needed most, but instead shone down from its clear blue sky, indiscriminately illuminating everything.

 

Imagine a culture that held creative vision sacrosanct, with no one to counter a creative director’s proposed solution, other than a client’s gut feelings. Imagine no strategic analysis, no segmentation tactics, no performance metrics.

 

In short, no accountability.

 

As a creative director I admit to being, well, if not jealous perhaps a touch wistful. Still, multiple industry studies repeatedly confirm a simple fact:

 

“Blue-sky” marketing solutions, those untested or unsupported by analytically driven strategy, are more than twice as likely to fail as those solutions underpinned with fact and data based planning.

 

This is not to say that inspiration is dead – far from it. Originality and innovation abound, in ever more powerful media. But there’s no denying the value of strategically driven creative, by which I mean the strategic analysis of data that informs, in a highly collaborative way, the tactical creative implementation of a campaign.

 

Sibling Rivalries

 

The marketing profession bears a certain notoriety for competition among its family members. Each focus area protects its silo with a territorial imperative. Copywriters hunker down against art directors, strategists rail against creatives, account managers swear that shared services “Just Don’t Get It”, and of course everyone believes the client will put the kibosh on the proposed campaign that would otherwise surely win next year’s Echo Award.

 

However, the truth is that this type of reputation, while it may make for entertaining TV and movies (and YouTube clips), is not the rule at the great direct marketing agencies. Great DM Agencies understand the drivers of campaign success:

 

The right offer to the right audience, at the right time, delivered over the channel most comfortable and actionable for the customer (or donor), wrapped in a message and package that makes the offer meaningful for them.

 

It’s an integrated, interdependent chain, and a failure of one link undermines the others, no matter how well-crafted they are. Furthermore, the analytic, strategic, creative, production and account management professionals at the Great DM Agencies live and breathe the chain – these success drivers – on a daily basis.

 

The creative team at Sterling Cooper, pecking away at their Selectric I’s and pasting up on their drawing boards, couldn’t cut it today. Not because of their tools, necessarily, but because of their insular, “us vs. them” mentality, and the conviction that today’s blue sky inspiration will single-handedly solve tomorrow’s consumer behavior puzzle.

 

-John Thompson

 

(John Thompson is a Creative Director at Merkle, Inc., and a 30-year veteran of the direct marketing industry. He spends most of his day trying to figure out how that number got to be so large, so fast.)

 

Comments

[Margaret]

I think your headline is wrong, though. Are you saying life in the advertising world WASN'T like Mad Men in the 60s or are you saying it isn't like that now? Of course it's not like that now - just we don't have a credenza stocked with whisky in my office (I don't know about yours...), women and minorities in the workplace don't raise an eyebrow and casual sexism and racism merits a trip to the HR department. Life is a lot different than it was in the 60s, but that doesn't make it a "myth" to portray it.

[Ted Grigg]

Well articulated John.

I work with general advertising agencies regularly in my direct marketing consulting practice. Agencies now understand the concept of accountability and scramble to understand or develop the necessary tools to make their campaigns achieve specific financial goals.

Knowledgeable direct marketers are now crossing the silos of branding, awareness advertising, PR and merging them in the metrics.

It's an exciting new world out there for direct marketers.