The Real Mad Men Read online

  To Madison Avenue of that era, fixated and engorged on facts and numbers, viewing and audience ratings, this was a heresy close to madness. But it was also music to the ears of generations of creative people who felt that all their lives their ideas, thoughts and talent, the very things they believed they were hired for, were prescribed and proscribed. And it’s that sort of thinking that changed so much of advertising as then known.

  1The Story So Far

  “Somewhere in this industry this has happened before.”

  ROGER STERLING MAD MEN

  It was the best of times, it was the best of times. To be white, male, and healthy in New York in the 1950s was to be as blessed as any individual at any time in history. The booming wartime economy had given way to a booming peacetime economy, fuelled by full production to meet the voracious demand from buyers nourished by the innovation and choice now available in their bounteous new “supermarkets.”

  One almost unbelievable statistic indicates just how the city experienced its own stampede by the business community; between 1950 and 1960 more new office space was added to New York than existed in the rest of the world at the time. In one decade that one city more than doubled the world’s available office space. And all of it went upward, transforming, for example, midtown Park Avenue from a sedate backwater of domestic brownstones into a vast glistening river of glass and steel.

  While Europeans still shivered, exhausted, in their damp monochrome deprivation in the aftermath of the ruinous war, New Yorkers assumed world leadership with a cool sophistication that they’d previously granted to Paris, Rome or London. In the excited, urgent chatter in the new air-conditioned offices, in the packed bars and increasingly worldly restaurants, in the crammed theater lobbies and Fifth Avenue stores there was a new confidence gained from global domination. New Yorkers basked in the health and wealth reflected back at them in the glass and chrome of their elegant, bustling streets. They revelled in their status as citizens of the busiest, noisiest, fastest growing, most advanced, most cosmopolitan, coolest, most desirable, and most photogenic city in the world.

  As “the highway between those two most powerful forces known to man, supply, and demand,” advertising was on the crest of a wave too. Between 1949 and 1959, total advertising spending more than doubled, from $5.21 billion to $11.27 billion. As a measure of what mattered to people, the top twelve advertisers mid decade included three car manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler); three hygiene and personal grooming companies (Proctor & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers); two food marketers (National Dairy Products, including Kraft, and General Foods); two electrical goods giants (RCA and Westinghouse—mainly producers of radios, television sets, and radiograms); and an alcohol producer (Seagram).

  The money was split more or less equally among magazines, newspapers, and radio. Television wasn’t a serious contender for advertising spend until later in the decade, the proportion of households with a television set rising from 10 percent in 1950 to 90 percent in 1960.

  WITH THIS MASSIVE expansion in media activity, advertising came under public scrutiny more than ever, and plenty of the comment was not favorable. Arthur Schlesinger, Special Advisor to President Kennedy, had called advertising “awful.” Arnold Toynbee, a British historian, complained, “I cannot think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.”

  Advertising’s own practitioners seemed only too happy to stick the boot into the business. Nearly a dozen novels published in the fifties featured hollowed-out advertising employees, filled with self-loathing for what they did, including Aurora Dawn, the first novel by Herman Wouk (featuring a fictitious ad agency, Grovell & Leach—there’s a giveaway). All but one of these novels were written by people either in, or closely allied to, the advertising business.

  The Hucksters, written by copywriter Frederic Wakeman, is a typical example. The novel was filmed in 1947 with Clark Gable in the starring role of advertising executive Vic Norman, working on the Beautee Soap account. It chronicles dirty tricks, flesh-creeping client obsequiousness, and all-encompassing contempt; contempt for the consumer, for colleagues, for the advertising business, and for himself. Initially Gable didn’t even want the role, describing it as “filthy and not entertainment.”

  Vic Norman’s client is the unspeakably vulgar autocrat Evan L. Evans. He was based on George Washington Hill, the Lucky Strike client of Foote, Cone & Belding where Wakeman worked when he wrote the book. At one point, in a demonstration of his advertising philosophy, Evans spits on the conference table and says, “You’ve just seen me do a disgusting thing—but you’ll all remember it.” To make the same point Hill had once pulled out his dental bridge in front of Raymond Rubicam, his account director on the Pall Mall account. He told him this was how he amused his granddaughter, and that engaging the public was no different.

  In Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a title which for at least two decades supplied a shorthand to describe admen’s dress (inaccurately, as it happened, as in the 1950s they preferred the more buttoned-down, dark-suited Wall Street look of Brooks Brothers), Gregory Peck plays Tom Rath, a PR man and mentally scarred World War II veteran who leaves a job in the charity sector to work for a TV network. Increasingly disillusioned with the job, the politics, the surrounding inertia, and the suspect morality, Rath leaves the business to lead a less pressured, more family-centered life.

  ADVERTISING WAS ALSO fair game for a kicking as screenwriters jogged by on their way to bigger themes. In the 1957 Sidney Lumet film Twelve Angry Men, the cheesily handsome juror who seems least in touch with reality and most prepared to change his mind just had to be in advertising; even in lighthearted mode, the husband in the long-running early sixties TV series Bewitched was a permanently bewildered advertising executive, with an obsequious client-pleasing boss, while the romantic romp Lover Come Back sees Doris Day trying to get even with rival agency head Rock Hudson for his unethical tactics in stealing a client.

  Elements of these portrayals must have been true. Certainly, advertising was wearing and mentally draining; apart from anything else, ad men worked extraordinarily long hours, often with detrimental effect on their health; an Advertising Age survey reported in 1956 that senior advertising executives died at an average age of 57.9, ten years under the national average. In addition, the unpredictable nature of the business generated constant anxiety over client loss and the immediate brutal consequences. In return, the rewards were high, with admen earning anything up to 50 percent more than their equivalents in other businesses. But that of course is a double-edged sword: the more you’re paid, the more you have to lose. “Ulcer Gulch” became a sardonic way of referring to Madison Avenue.

  Acres of crunchy gravel, miles of smiles; there was the real world and there was the world of auto advertising.

  The fabled expense account lifestyle, too, was often anything but glitzy for the agency man. It wasn’t always a boozy lunch or night with his friends and colleagues from around the business. This genuinely was the era of the three-martini lunch and five-course dinner, and the ad executive ate and drank them whether he wanted to or not. It all depended on the client, who frequently viewed a trip to his agency as light relief from what was often a humdrum life somewhere in middle-America, far from the bright lights of the most fabulous city on earth.

  He could look forward to a couple of days in a swanky New York hotel, a visit to the agency with the opportunity from reception onward to ogle some fine legs and even finer busts. There would be a well-catered meeting in the agency’s sumptuous conference room, maybe enlivened by the presence of some of the menagerie otherwise known as the creative department, in which he could beat up or lift up the agency depending on his mood. Business out of the way, there’d be a big lunch at Nino’s or Rattazzi’s—where the standard martini glass was eight ounces—followed by an afternoon spent shopping, then cocktails with the agency at the Algonquin, a show, and dinner at 21 or Copacabana. Then a club—
perhaps a clip joint—before heading back to the Midwest or the South the next day, and all without so much as a glimpse of a bill at any time, day or night.

  Great for the client once in a while—but four days a week for the account men with their fixed smiles, ready jokes, and the ever open wallet, it was liver-destroying purgatory.

  Obsequiousness and double dealing are sadly inevitable in an unregulated service industry, and advertising was never going to be an exception—at least until the end of the fifties. Unprotected by guilds or freemasonry or professional codes, it was still a free-for-all less than sixty years from its raw-boned frontier days as a media broking business.

  AS AN INDUSTRY, advertising had waxed and waned with national events. Its first great boom came after the Civil War, another was induced by World War I; helplessly tied to the market it slumped in the Depression, then picked up with the growth of mass production and greater availability of goods. The subsequent introduction of self-service, when the housewife could no longer necessarily take advice and comfort in the words of the storekeeper as her personal shopper, created a demand for more paid-for public advocacy. Which is as good a definition of advertising as any.

  Early advertising agencies in the 1800s simply sold space in newspapers to advertisers, buying column inches from the publishers either directly for their customers or for themselves to sell later on. Few, if any, rate cards were published, and ignorance abounded—ignorance of the true prices, value, readership, reach, influence, even of how many newspapers there actually were.

  What made it even more unruly was the fact that while the agencies charged their customers a commission, they also regularly took kickbacks from the newspapers, or at best didn’t pass on discounted rates. From their point of view it wasn’t so much a conflict as a confluence of interest. While ostensibly acting in pursuit of a better deal for their customers, it was clearly to their advantage to spend as much as they could of their customers’ money; the customer-derived commission, based on a percentage, was higher, and their “reward” from a grateful newspaper was greater. What appeared on the space the agencies were broking was none of their business—the actual content of the ads was usually supplied by their customer.

  But gradually, order emerged from the chaos as common and business sense combined to bring clarity to the practice. In Philadelphia, in 1869, George P. Rowell brought out the first ever comprehensive guide to media rates. Rowell’s American Newspaper Dictionary enabled a client to plan and buy their media from a substantial choice of publication styles, locations, and readership profiles. It included circulation figures, and the immediate availability of such information undermined the hucksterish behavior of the contemporary advertising agencies. Worse for them, such transparency threatened their very existence as a client could now do for himself what he’d previously needed their “insider knowledge” and “expertise” to achieve.

  To survive the agencies had to offer more, and this took the form of creative services—advice on how to prepare and write the ads. They would charge for the space plus the costs of creating the ad, and thus the model for the advertising agency of the twentieth century—an organization that will advise you on not just where to place your advertisements but what to say in them, and then produce those ads—was created.

  It would contain media specialists, creative people (both writers and artists), and account managers or executives to liaise between the clients and the agency staff. Those early agencies employed quite a few of their copywriters from a field force of freelancers that had grown up working directly for clients. They cut their teeth on retail store advertising, some toiletries and hardware products, and particularly patent medicines—quack remedies sold in vast numbers throughout the United States.

  The market for these remedies was huge, partly assured by the fact that many of the potions included alcohol or even opium, a legitimate way around temperance for those who were pious enough to be claiming abstention. The inventiveness of the manufacturers and the copywriters in coming up with increasingly vague scary diseases and afflictions that only they could fix was unbounded, preying on the fears of a simply-educated and gullible public. And the margins on these potions, which were often, apart from the alcohol, little more than colored water, were so vast that the producers could afford to spend large sums on promoting their products. They had found that the reassurance and promised salvation in the advertised testimonials from “doctors” and the “cured” proved highly effective. As Stephen Fox reports in The Mirror Makers, one such patent medicine proprietor claimed, “I can advertise dishwater and sell it, just as well as an article of merit. It’s all in the advertising.” It’s hardly surprising that, with ethics like that, and with the reputation it had gained in its early days, advertising was still seen as a far from respectable activity.

  HOWEVER, THE INDUSTRY was maturing, though that was not always driven by the agencies. In 1892, the Ladies’ Home Journal had banned patent medicine ads, and growing organizations like P&G and Kellogg took pride in their probity. They were selling wholesome products for wholeseome families and they simply would not tolerate suppliers of ill-repute. So by the 1950s many agencies were fiercely honorable, renowned for watertight integrity, J Walter Thompson (JWT) being a prominent example. In 1955, Jeremy Bullmore, a young copywriter from JWT London was sent to the New York office to learn about making TV commercials—in the run up to their first appearances on UK television in 1955 no one there had any idea how to write or make them. Before he left for the fourteen-hour flight, the only advice he was given by his boss was “get your hair cut and don’t wear suede shoes.” Apparently the British thought that, to New Yorkers, suede shoes were a sign of gayness.

  He found the Lexington Avenue office in the Graybar Building an austere place, far from the image of Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper.

  “There were a lot of very serious account people, all highly intelligent but serious; they were grown-up, they didn’t have a lot of fun. They were very well-educated but it was much more like an agreeable law firm, not an agency. Nobody questioned the fact that you were there to use your brains on your client’s behalf, that absolutely didn’t need to be said. They took the business very seriously; I mean it, I’m not sure the word creative was used at all. There was the art department and the editorial department, which was the copy department, showing its origins in journalism. And the lady copywriters sat in their own compounds, wearing hats.”

  Hats seem to have been big, particularly with the women at JWT. Wally O’Brien, an account man, recalls the midweek queue outside the New England Room (a boardroom that resembled the kitchen of a New England farmhouse, a JWT feature dating back to pre-war days). “Wednesday was ‘Women’s Day,’ when only women could eat in the room, and they’d vie with each other to wear the most outrageous hat to lunch. We’d stand outside to see them go past on their way in!”

  The agency wouldn’t accept an alcohol or cigarette account and they’d never pitch for new business competitively or speculatively, on the argument that they couldn’t put forward responsible recommendations until they had a real, deep understanding of the client’s market.

  Alcohol consumption in the office was almost unheard of. And ever since Reader’s Digest published its 1952 “Cancer by the Carton” article, examining possible links between tobacco and cancer (long before the 1964 Surgeon General’s report on the effects of smoking on health), several agencies refused to handle tobacco, extraordinarily lucrative though it was. Several prominent figures called for it to be banned and plenty more dropped it on the announcement, including both Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy. Indeed, the head of McCann-Erickson, Emerson Foote, resigned because his agency continued to handle cigarettes.

  So the business wasn’t without its principles and principled people. Nevertheless, the novelists were right in their portrayal of a group of people who, rightly or wrongly, were riddled with low self-esteem. Reported in a lengthy essay in Time magazine, late in 1962, only 8 percent of a
dmen polled believed that their fellow admen were “honest.” Indeed, so much self-examination and self-flagellation was going on that the president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies urged his members to stop “staring into the mirror to count the pimples, broken veins, and wattles on the serene, handsome, and competent face we hope to present to the public.”

  IN 1957, one book, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders probably did more damage to the reputation of advertising than any other single tangible factor. It claimed to expose practices within the advertising business of subconscious coercion, subliminal advertising, and wonderful and weird techniques that either forced us to surrender our innermost thoughts, fears, and desires, or got us all buying products without ever realizing why we were doing it.

  Clearly a sensation-seeking writer—Time magazine in 1962 described Packard as “one of the nation’s most talented self-advertisers”—his book promoted the discomfiting notions, wheezes, and theories of the quack psychologists and pointy-bearded analysts who were besieging agencies with quick-fix nostrums derived from consumer motivational research, depth psychology, and other psychological techniques.