Don Draper: old-school marketing

Draper means nostalgia, pure longing for the world that once was – and isn’t coming back. We’re not talking about a character from some obscure TV series, nor a blockbuster followed by millions of teenagers around the world. At its height, Mad Men drew about 3 million viewers, nostalgic marketing, sales and advertising executives who have seen things you wouldn’t believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

 

Don Draper represents the world as it was, that world of advertising and marketing that we saw as young people, that we learned about at universities and business schools and admired at advertising festivals. It is the professional world that attracts and repulses, a world of opportunities and great failures. A world that the show’s creator, Matt Weiner, summarised in the definition of Don Draper’s appeal: “identify[ing] with the dark parts of yourself”.

 

Don Draper is pure emotion. He cheats on his wives, but they love him; he deceives his clients, but they want to keep working with him; he drinks and smokes too much, but he never loses his composure despite four dry martinis per meal; and although he uses the strategy of fear with his employees, he knows how to explain that his infinite gratitude is their paycheck.

 

Don Draper embodies marketing as art, an activity based on intuition, a sixth sense, passion and conviction. He has his own management manual, his own style, which has been used in various academic studies and publications for professionals. He knows that success in business requires always controlling the need behind the need – what the customer really wants, even if this need is not included in the briefing. He defends and prioritises the notion that advertising is here to give consumers a chance to be a little happier. He always knows how to use emotion and his best weapon is the feeling of nostalgia: the episode where Don Draper, at his advertising agency, explains the true meaning of the carousel slide projector to Kodak executives will go down in marketing history. And he always – always – tries to think like his customers: “If I were the consumer, why would I want this product?” 

 

 

Don Draper ultimately embodies the chief skill of an executive: face-to-face, personal communication; the elevator pitch; the ability to improvise in while communicating. Let’s go over Don Draper’s communication “commandments”, a compilation of his best practices, which should be a required overview at any personal communication seminar. He always stands up to speak. Famously, he always communicates by telling stories. He is always unpredictable, because he knows how to scan the crowd and use the skills that are most relevant to his particular audience. He always incorporates this customers’ ideas so that they come to perceive the project as – in some way – belonging to them; as a result, they know how to defend it within their company. He always chooses the right words for the right moment and, when necessary, he listens to his customers. And he is always positive. He knows how to hide his disenchantment when necessary. He’s self-assured and knows how keep his reflections concise so that his audience doesn’t get bored.

 

But Don Draper is now retired from professional life. A group of geeks – young mathematicians and physicists – are now starting to become ubiquitous in the world of marketing and advertising. Whereas Don Draper attracted 3 million viewers, the paradigm of this new wave is Sheldon Cooper, who, with his troupe of millennials on The Big Bang Theory, attracts more than 25 million viewers each week.

 

Sheldon Cooper is the paradigm of the new marketing: science wiping out art. His profile as a theoretical physicist is starting to become the new rarity that does obtain results: he develops marketing analytics, he requires key performance indicators (KPIs), he makes no moves without first conducting an MROI, and his natural habitat is not face-to-face communication but counting yottabytes in big data. They are human, but their holy grail – their dream – is to have software that allows them to automate marketing, to make fully effective decisions with no need for emotions. From Ralph Lauren suits and Oxford shoes to “bazinga” and Superman shirts. From the endless one-night stands of our idolised Don Draper to the gynophobia of Rajesh Koothrappali, which prevents him from even talking to a woman without drinking. Bad times for poetry.

 

In one episode of Man Men, Don Draper talks about the meaning of nostalgia: “[A friend] told me that, in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. [...] It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around, and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.” To paraphrase Lou Reed, I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine. Whereas a detailed website calculated Don Draper’s annual salary at about $360,000, the actor who brought him to life, Jon Hamm, made about $250,000 per episode. This is just one more indication that we – the 3 million professionals who followed every minute of the series – are the ones reflected in his wounds as we are replaced by young American-trained doctors and mathematicians who don’t drink scotch but do enjoy a good database. In time, all this knowledge will be lost, like tears in the rain.

 

 

 

Acting, script, setting... many aspects of AMC’s Mad Men have been highlighted by critics and audiences since the show premiered in July 2007. Mad Men was created by Matthew Weiner, a writer and producer of The Sopranos in its last two seasons. The show became a cult hit after its very first episode thanks to the quality of its execution, and it maintained this spirit throughout its entire run, which ended last year after 92 episodes.

Set in New York in the 1960s, Mad Men depicts the vicissitudes of an advertising agency, initially called Sterling Cooper, located on Madison Avenue (hence the title of the series). The story revolves around Don Draper, the agency’s creative director, a character who embodies both the light and the dark, as well as his colleagues and friends, including his secretary, the curvy Peggy Olson (played by Elisabeth Moss), and the womaniser Roger Sterling (John Slattery).

 

Although it can be described as a period drama and is closely linked to this genre, Mad Men does not stop to explain well-known events in recent US history; instead, it reveals them through the characters’ experiences. These experiences are a reflection of society and the way people thought at the time, especially when it comes to racism, misogyny and homophobia. Addiction to drugs (especially tobacco and alcohol) and adultery are other issues that the series addresses from the perspective of the 1960s. 

 

Mad Men was never a ratings hit; its last episode drew just 3.3 million viewers, a record for the show. But its fans – many of them communication, advertising and marketing professionals – remained faithful even after the finale. The show lives on through Mad Men conventions, auctions of costumes and scenery, advertising terminology guides, and even a line of action figures. 

 

As for awards, Mad Men became the first cable production to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series. The show went on win this award a total of four times, as well as ten other Emmys in other categories. Lead actor Jon Hamm was nominated for the top acting award every year throughout the Mad Men’s run, although he didn’t win until the show’s final season. The series also received four Golden Globe Awards.