Mad Men and the Work of Advertising

In my last post, I touched on the fact that Don Draper and his team have not produced (so far) the kind of advertising identified by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool as emblematic of the creative revolution that took place in advertising in the '60s -- the DDB Volkswagen campaign that Frank calls a kind of "anti-advertising".

Although the series is (obviously) set in an advertising agency, it is not as much about advertising as you might expect. Here's what I mean. Firstly, the show is not a procedural -- we don't follow professionals (police detectives, doctors, lawyers, etc.) as they work cases through to their conclusion. Secondly, compared to many other kinds of shows set in workplaces that are not procedurals, we spend a great deal of screen time with our characters in non-work settings, particularly with Don, Peggy & Pete.

Think, as a point of comparison, about The West Wing -- a show which Matthew Weiner says in this interview that Mad Men could have been like if he hadn't worked as a writer on The Sopranos and gained confidence in telling subtle psychological stories. Although West Wing is not a procedural, the characters spend a great deal of screen time discussing work-related problems and trying to find solutions. Work storylines are A stories; personal storylines are B stories. In fact, the characters are so immersed in their work that their personal lives suffer or don't exist at all. Also, like many of the MTM influenced workplace dramas, West Wing characters treat their co-workers like family.

Mad Men is different is a number of ways. Although we see work bleeding over into the personal life of the characters -- Don working at home, the creative department working on weekends, and accounts guys socializing with clients -- Mad Men characters have more fully realized non-work lives and interests than characters on workplace dramas. I suspect that this is partly a stylistic choice by Weiner, and partly a reflection of the time in which the series is set -- a time in which professionals spent fewer hours at work than the do now. Secondly, Mad Men is more focused than other series on the way in which work pressures -- financial pressures, hierarchical pressures, social pressures -- impact who people "are" in the workplace and restrict their choices. Again, I suspect that this is partly a thematic choice, and partly a reflection of the more rigid social codes of the workplace in the early '60s.

Collectively, this creates a series that is more concerned with how people "act" in the workplace vs. who they "are" outside of the workplace (and how those identities clash or coincide) and less concerned with their work product -- the advertising itself. The advertising we see in show is largely used symbolically (as we discussed with the Lucky Strike campaign and the American Airlines pitch) or used as a platform for character development.

There is a third difference between the way Mad Men treats the work of advertising and the way many other serialized narratives treat characters' work that is worth exploring in more detail. Let's go back to the West Wing comparison as an example, and consider a first season episode titled "A Proportional Response" (the script is included in The West Wing Script Book). In the A story of this episode, there has a been an attack on an unarmed air force jet and the staff must decide the appropriate military response. Much time is spent explaining the merits of and debating the morality of various military responses while weighing the practical and political impacts. The audience is brought into this complicated moral debate and invited to consider various sides of the question as members of the staff debate the question. The work problem is given public moral stakes in additional to practical stakes, and audience is included in the moral deliberation. (I can think of lots of other dramas where this is the standard operating procedure -- the second half of Law & Order as the lawyers debate the morality of  a prosecution, many episodes of ER and House where doctors debate what degree of medical intervention is appropriate to save a life.)

Advertising, of course, does not provide the same platform to pursue questions of life and death or complicated ethical questions of justice and retribution as dramas set in different kinds of workplaces. Even so, where Mad Men does raise ethical questions in terms of the advertising itself (cigarette advertising, Abe's questioning of Peggy over the boycott Fillmore Auto Parts in season 4) the ethical questions are not given as much storytelling time as they are in other workplace dramas. Mad Men more often sets up a dilemma between the freedom of creative expression and the limitations of commerce than it explores the ethics or morality of different advertising strategies.

As I noted in the last post, those "creative" solutions to advertising problems are attached to moral questions differently in Mad Men -- as with Don's breakthrough on the American Airlines campaign, they provide a symbolic commentary about the power of creativity itself, they are symbolic of rebirth and moving past tragedy. Mad Men's moral dilemmas are situated more in the personal sphere of their character's lives than than the professional, and the dilemmas revolve around questions of aspirations, happiness, hope and acceptance. These questions of personal happiness and self-expression have bearing on questions of social and political ethics and the social history of the '60s (the idea that the personal is political), but in a different way than they do in workplace dramas like The West Wing.

I want to make one more pivot on this topic of the work and morality and advertising.

In the late '50s and early '60s, the question of the morality of advertising as whole was topic of cultural conversation, due largely to the impact of Vance Packard's 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard, researching techniques of psychological "depth" research into consumers unconscious needs and desires and the resulting advertisements that attempted to manipulate those desires, declared advertising that did not appeal to rational thought as morally suspect, if not a completely unethical attempt at subliminal "mind control". Packard's obituary in the New York Times outlines the impact of his work on the public consciousness, and Lizabeth Cohen, in A Consumer's Republic, argues that the reaction to Packard's book was one of the forces that led to efforts to teach consumers (and schoolchildren) about the persuasive techniques of advertising in an attempt to inoculate the public against manipulation at the hands of these powerful media forces. Thomas Frank notes that Packard's book was part of the mass society critique than many advertisers addressed and embraced through the creative revolution in advertising. (41) Cohen notes that the psychological depth research chronicled by Packard eventually led to market segmentation, as advertising began to understand that there audience was not only differentiated by gender and income, but also by psychology. (299-302)

The advertising techniques of mass manipulation (though never as pervasive as Packard's book would lead many to believe) declined at nearly the same as they were being identified. In fact, reading Packard today, the arguments and examples seem naive, and somewhat histrionic. But this reaction, I believe, says more about the way that society has changed than the validity of Packard's arguments at the time. We do know more about how advertising works than the culture of the late '50s. We've been immersed in mass media advertising for our entire lives and have developed techniques to deal with onslaught -- consumer education as Cohen notes, "anti-advertising" ironic distance as Frank notes, and the development of psychological defenses that come from repeated exposure. We are more aware of living our lives as the constant target of advertising.

Perhaps this is another reason why Mad Men narratives do not concern themselves as directly with the work of advertising as we might expect. As an audience in 2011, I suspect we know more about advertising and the way it works than the ad men of the early '60s did.