Mad Men and the Rise of the Creative Class

"This is America." Bobbie Barrett says to Don in the season two episode "The New Girl". "Pick a job and then become the person who does it." Later in the episode, she offers similar advice to Peggy, "You have to start living the life of the person you want to be."

Although these statements have multiple resonances, they refer to Don and Peggy as people who work in "creative". It is not the same as pure artistic creation (if that exists) -- they are paid to create for clients, within a hierarchy, with the goal of increasing profits for their clients and their own company. And yet, as Richard Florida describes, creative professionals, as compared with those in the working class or service class who are "primarily paid to execute according to plan", are instead "primarily paid to create and have considerably more autonomy and flexibility than the other two classes to do so." (8)

As I discussed here, Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class, opens with a thought experiment to highlight the degree of social change that has taken place in America since the early 1950s. Florida emphasizes the extent to which that change is a product of transformation in the economy as whole, the organization of the workplace, and the style of work which is now dominant. Florida's economic analysis supplements the sociological and political analysis that is a more familiar lens for examining these changes, and he suggests a way in which the economic, social, psychological and political changes may be linked. (I'll have more on that possible causal relationship as a sidebar below.)

Although there have always been creative jobs, the creative professionals' way of working and way of living (for they are difficult to separate) has "moved from the margins to the economic mainstream." (13)  Creative class norms differ significantly from norms of the service and working class and the old norms of the managerial class (which also contributes to cultural and political divisions in the current political climate). Florida elaborates:

Like Whyte's managerial class, which "set the American temper" in the 1950s, the Creative Class is the norm-setting class of our time. But its norms are very different: Individuality, self-expression, and openness to difference are favored over the homogeneity, conformity, and "fitting in" that defined the organizational age.  (9)

Advertising both reflects and contributed to this change, as Thomas Frank explains in The Conquest of Cool. Inside corporations, he argues, many managers were pursuing their own critique of conformity and strict hierarchy in the workplace, starting a "revolution in marketing practice, management thinking and ideas of about creativity". (20) Frank quotes from a popular business guidebook, The Human Side of Enterprise, written in 1960 to persuade business to loosen bureaucratic procedures, reward ingenuity and recognize employees self-actualization needs. (22) Advertising industry management was affected by this trend before the emergence of the counterculture in the late '60s, making "vast changes in corporate practice, in productive flexibility, and especially in that intangible phenomenon known as 'creativity'". (27)

Carrying this line of thought from management practice to the style and content of the ads themselves, Frank describes the DDB campaign for Volkswagen as the vanguard of advertising's creative revolution, inventing ads that "cut through the overblown rhetoric of the 1950s and speak to readers' and viewers' skepticism of advertising" and harnessing "public mistrust of consumerism" and conformity "to consumerism itself". (55) For Frank, this style of advertising was its own critique of mass-culture, "a statement of alienation and disgust, of longing for authenticity and for selfhood." (55)

The ironic anti-advertising of the Volkswagen campaign was not the only face of the creative revolution in advertising. Natasha Vargas-Cooper argues in Mad Men Unbuttoned that Don Draper "would be (or is) a disciple of Leo Burnett's Chicago School of advertising"  in which an emotionally evocative image was more important than rational text and reflected "the consumer's basic desires and beliefs." (3-4)

In Mad Men, Don's creative breakthroughs tend to connect deep feelings of hope and acceptance to themes of renewal. In the Lucky Strike pitch in the "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", Don realizes that government restrictions on cigarette health claims make cigarette previous advertising strategies moot and create a blank slate where "we can say anything we want." In that vacuum, Don suggests an evocative but simple phrase, "It's toasted", which he explains, can be a symbol for happiness and acceptance. "Whatever you are doing is OK. You are OK." Unlike the Volkswagen campaign, Don's concept is not embracing a position of alienation (Don has enough of that in the rest of the episode). It is embracing a longing for authentic emotion and longing for a society that is less rigidly judgmental and divisive.

Don has a thematically similar epiphany regarding the proposed American Airlines campaign in "Four Sundays", in this case talking of renewal for the company following a plane crash in terms of positive visions of the country's history: "There is no such thing as American history, only the frontier. That crash happened to someone else." In Don's philosophy of advertising, individuals, companies, and the country as whole shed guilt and shame over past failures (the episode is full of Easter imagery) and move towards the hope of new future. "We're going to the moon."

"Creative", in this case, not only breaks free of conformity and old ways of thinking, but offers a way to move past the claims of the past and its sorrows. It creates a vision of a new, positive future that may not be realistic or even possible, but is worth striving for. Of course, for the modern viewer, irony attends this vision of the future as well. When Don ends his presentation with, "Let's pretend we know what 1963 looks like," the viewer understands that '63 will bring both "I have a dream" and the Kennedy assassination.

Don is a flawed and complex character who never completely leaves his own past and his own guilt behind. The most cynical among us would say he is simply lying. Don himself may say that from time to time. Yet I think Don believes what he is saying when he says it. It sometimes takes an overly large and positive expression of hope to move past the inertia of disappointment. His vision of a hopeful future requires frequent creative rebirth, but is not crassly cynical. He finds new ways to create.

Sidebar on Florida and Causality in The Rise of the Creative Class

Florida argues that a significant creative class emerges in a culture as economic conditions improve over time. He cites Ronald Inglehart’s quantitative research on the relationship between economic well-being and social values across nations, summarizing:

As nation’s economies advance, the values favored by their people tend to shift along two scales. They move from “traditional” values (marked, for instance, by respect for civil and religious authority) toward more “secular-rational” (free-thinking) values, and from “survival” values (favoring financial and social stability) to “self-expression” values favoring the rights of individuals to express themselves.(xxv)

Why do these correlations exist? Inglehart's theory, based upon psychiatrist Abraham Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs, assumes that people who grow up in conditions of affluence would have different social values and norms from people who grew up in conditions of scarcity. With generational change advanced industrial societies "are undergoing a gradual shift from emphasis on economic and physical security above all, towards a greater emphasis on belonging, self-expression, and the quality of life." (Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, 11) Inglehart's data is cross-national. Education, religion, national culture and other factors may influence this shift in individuals or sub-cultures, but the data shows strong statistical correlations over time.

Journalist Bill Bishop, quoting Inglehart's research in the context of American political and social change in the '60s and '70s, writes the following:

The fulfillment of material needs would generally be taken for granted, and education levels would rise along with incomes, [Inglehart] surmised. And all that material progress, he found, "brings unforeseen changes -- changes in gender roles, attitudes toward authority and sexual norms; declining fertility rates; broader political participation; and less easily led publics. (Bishop, The Big Sort, 84)

I find Inglehart's research compelling as a macro-level, broad-based engine of cultural change in the U.S. at this time. More people, raised in more abundance than ever before, began to desire more autonomy, individuality, and opportunities for self-expression. Early waves of creative professionals in advertising and popular culture created products that reflected this broad desire and demonstrated possible ways (lifestyles, products, rebel role models) that might bring a person closer to achieving their unique individual desires, leaving behind old rules and rigid codes of behavior that had developed in a world of scarcity. It's not the whole story, certainly, but offers an underlying logic, grounded in common human psychology, that gives some shape to millions of diverse individual lives and choices.