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.”