Mad Men: Remembering "The Good Old Days"

The final seven episodes of season 7 of Mad Men begin on Sunday, April 5th.   

Can it really be eight years ago when the folks at AMC came in to see my group (when I was at Magna Global), nervously bringing with them a tape of a new scripted series called Mad Men?  They were wondering how advertisers would react, and how they should market the show.  They were doing the same with other media agency groups all over town.

An Expensive but Brilliant Risk

When Mad Men debuted in July 2007, original scripted programming had not yet enjoyed widespread success in basic cable.  There were just a few sporadic successes. FX was just winding down The Shield, and was a year away from Sons of Anarchy.  USA had some modest success with Monk, The 4400, and Psych.  TNT was two years into its hit drama, The Closer. Lifetime had just debuted Army Wives.  And now AMC of all networks, known among ad buyers for old movies and old viewers, was trying to pitch a new, stylish period piece about the ad industry (a subject that had never done well on TV in the past).  It was an expensive, and ultimately brilliant, risk.

After a group of about 10 of us saw the pilot, there was silence for a few seconds.  Then I said, "I think you might have something here."  A few others agreed, but it was by no means unanimous. That’s not to say I thought it would be the influential iconic series it turned out to be, but I thought it was well worth the effort.  I had long had debates with some of my colleagues about network branding.  My belief has always been people don’t watch networks, they watch programs.  As long as you effectively promoted a new show beyond your own air, a good series can find an audience.

The cast were not well known at the start, but Mad Men continued to prove one of my favorite sayings, “Stars don’t make shows, shows make stars.”

While never a major ratings success, it has had a fiercely loyal audience and a fundamental impact on the medium, becoming the first basic-cable series to win an Emmy for best drama.  It may not in and of itself made that much money for the network, but it paved the way for other groundbreaking AMC series, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, not to mention numerous series on other cable networks.  It may also have been the first series to inspire “binge” viewing, or at least helped coin the term.

Mad Men was fortunate to come at a time when cable networks were starting to look for new ways to re-brand themselves and go after original scripted series.  Had the show received the ratings it got on AMC on any broadcast network, it might have been canceled after it’s first or second telecast.

Was the Ad Industry Really Like That?

A lot of people have asked me if the ad industry was even remotely similar to how it is portrayed on Mad Men. 

Well, I started working in the media department at Ted Bates & Company in 1979.  Unlike the world of Mad Men, media departments were now well established.  It was right before the Reagan era, when Wall Street supplanted Advertising as the glamour job.  But when I started out, there were at least 20 people competing for every entry level advertising position. The great advertising agencies, like Ogilvy and Mather, J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, Doyle, Dane, Bernback,, Ted Bates & Company, Benton & Bowles, McCann-Erickson, and many others, were still intact and independent.. 

But the overall Mad Men environment and attitudes, while starting to change, still existed to a large degree.

• I originally wanted to be an account executive, but was told that Jews had very little chance of getting anywhere in advertising outside of media.  They would let us handle the money, but not deal directly with clients or top agency management.
  

• Many of the hard-core drinkers were being drummed out of the business (at least on the agency side), but some of my bosses had several bottles of liquor in their bottom desk drawers (although office bars as seen in Mad Men were no longer prevalent).

• When I went to a business lunch, if you didn't get at least one hard drink people looked at you like there was something wrong. If we were taken out to lunch on a Friday, we were basically out for the rest of the day. On Friday night, we'd go to the bar downstairs and hang out all night (I was young, single, and living in Manhattan).
  

• At off-site gatherings, executives freely smoked pot and did other things that today would do a lot more than just raise eyebrows.
  

• There were no computers or even faxes, so the business moved much more slowly. During the upfront, a plan would come in from the networks, we'd spend two or three hours analyzing it by hand on calculators, while our bosses would go out to long lunches and health clubs for the afternoon. Then they'd come back around 6 or 7pm ready to work. This is probably how the upfront first became a late night negotiating process.
  

• Women were still treated poorly. There were very few female department heads, and the ones I knew were tough cookies (they had to be). We had one male intern, who swatted a female co-worker of mine on the butt with a newspaper as she was passing by. While he was told that this was inappropriate behavior in the workplace (I guess as opposed to outside the office), he was not disciplined or fired. Many men still assumed that female bosses must have slept their way to the top.  Common language used in the workplace would today lead to a non-stop string of sexual harassment lawsuits.

• I knew several executives who had affairs with, and ultimately married, their secretaries.

• Racism was no longer overt, but was nonetheless rampant.  I actually had a woman in Human Resources (then called Personnel) at one of my subsequent agencies, tell me before sending me a potential candidate, "I just wanted to let you know she's black.  Is that a problem?"  And this was in the early 1980s!

By 1985, much of this had changed. But it changed for good when Ted Bates & Company, then the 3^rd largest ad agency in the U.S., was sold that year for $450 million, and its CEO walked away with a reported $110 million.  A lot of other folks at the company also got a lot of money.  Clients started saying, “What the heck is going on here?  These guys are making too much money.”  Commissions clients paid to agencies started to change, agency margins started to fall, many of the great ad agencies started to merge or be sold, media departments started to spin-off into separate agencies, and giant advertising holding companies were formed.  The fun, to a large degree, was over. 

While the early 1980s, when I started my career, were nothing like the early 1960s portrayed in Mad Men, the environment I experienced when I started out makes me believe the advertising world it portrays on TV was not far off the mark (although certainly exaggerated for dramatic effect).  The good old days were not good for everyone, but it certainly makes for good television. I'd love to see what happens to Don Draper and his crowd (both at work and at home) during the 1970s and 1980s.

While I haven't yet seen any of the upcoming episodes, I'm going to relish the experience.  Shows like Mad Men are few and far between.  While I often DVR and view two or three episodes at a time, since I don't want to have to avoid all the spoilers on social media, I'll probably watch these final seven episodes live (or at least before I go to bed on Sunday night).