“ADVERTISING IS BASED ON ONE THING: HAPPINESS. AND YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPINESS IS? HAPPINESS IS THE SMELL OF A NEW CAR.” – DON DRAPER
The cast of AMC’s Mad Men were the darlings of this year’s Television Critics Association summer press tour. Set at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960, fawning critics have hailed this drama as the second coming of The Sopranos, much to the delight of creator (and former Sopranos producer) Matt Weiner.
Many critics have credited the show’s success to his carefully nuanced characters and obsessive attention to period detail. The acting is electric, the writing is phenomenal, and the production design is superb.
The show is stacked to the rafters with wonderful subtext about gender and family dynamics, about race and class, about work and social status — about pretty much every aspect of American life at a pivotal time in our history. And, as the occupation of the show’s central characters, it also has a lot to say about advertising.
Despite the drama of chronic drinking, smoking, and sexism at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, it’s more fascinating to see how the series portrays the actual work of the “mad men,” a ’60s-era nickname for Madison Avenue ad men.
The cavalier manner with which they conjure the hopes and dreams of a newly affluent nation romanticizes their profession. Their job was to look at the world around them and figure out what people wanted — or, more accurately, what people didn’t even know they wanted.
Scrawling ideas on cocktail napkins over whiskey, throwing the latest research in the trash, and waxing philosophical about the “emotional connection” to a product, these men acted like cowboys and lived like kings.
The best of the best weren’t crunching numbers; they were gliding along on intuition, creativity, and guts, living and dying by their next great idea. It’s an understatement to say that advertising has changed a lot since then. In the first episode of the series, up-and-comer Pete Campbell refers to “the burgeoning field of research,” and oh, how the field did burgeon.
Since then, the media landscape became more crowded, consumers more jaded, and production much costlier. Companies were increasingly interested in quantifying the results of their ballooning ad budgets.
Advertising, once a cunning game of guile, became more like a giant math problem. The influence of calculated audience impressions, focus groups, and market research became dominant. For example, in the days of three networks, audience share reigned supreme.
Less than a third of the total TV viewing audience meant that things were bad. Later, cable fragmented the audience dramatically, which lead to a further increase in the importance of demographics.
Today, advertisers are less interested in how many people watch and more concerned with who those people are and how much money they have. The most recent development in this saga is the adoption of “C3” ratings.
DVR recording systems like TiVo have become more common in the last few years, but until recently, ratings were based on who watched a show when it was broadcast. This obviously began to erode ratings, because no one counted viewers who recorded a show and watched it later. Networks argued that advertisers must recognize playback.
Ad agencies argued that those people fast-forwarded through commercials and shouldn’t be counted at all. Thus the C3 standard was born.
Ratings now factor in three days of DVR playback, but are based on how many people are actually watching the commercials rather than the show itself. Networks certainly want you to watch their shows, but their bottom line is primarily concerned with whether you watch the commercials as well.
Today, networks and advertisers face new problems. In addition to attracting audiences with quality programming, networks now pay increasing attention to retaining audiences through commercial breaks.
This is why you see more bits of show content during commercial breaks and emphatic product placement. Still, advertisers aren’t doing much to keep viewers tuned in to watch their commercials.
Though there is plenty of demand from Madison Avenue for different kinds of advertising opportunities these days, the fact remains that people tune out during commercial breaks because they don’t want to watch commercials. And, let’s face it, most commercials aren’t very good.
Agencies spend billions of dollars buying media to target the precise viewer they want to see their product, and what you see if you pause your DVR for a moment is apparently the best they can do with that investment.
From the network point of view, there are two solutions. If bad commercials are affecting ratings, then either advertisers should pay a higher price for ads that drive away viewers, or higher standards of quality must be applied to ads that networks accept.
Because the first option leaves no one happy, the answer seems obvious: we need better ads. I’m not saying that we should bring back the misogyny and three-martini lunches portrayed in Mad Men, but perhaps there were once elements of passion, boldness, and creativity to advertising that are missing today.
At its best, advertising should be art and science, and it seems that there is less emphasis on the former today than in years past. Though research has come a long way in pinning down exactly who advertisers want to reach, it can’t reach them all alone. After all, can you really quantify the smell of a new car?
Tom Hoban works in cable television in New York City. Ask him why he thinks Aristotle would have loved “Saved by the Bell.”