"Mad Men" - The Review

Posted on July 23, 2007 | Permalink

By Lane Casteix

We finally got to see the whole first episode. Interesting!

It does portray advertising as glamorous, which is one reason I joined the game. That was then, and "then" seems to be pretty well portrayed in Mad Men. The show does have some technical problems I found troubling, but if you aren't in advertising you might not have noticed.

As someone else pointed out in a review, the agency principal would never have gone into a meeting with a major client like Lucky Strike and not known what creative was going to be presented.

The creative director would never have gone into such a meeting with nothing to present. He would have done anything to get the meeting moved to give himself time come up with something.

The CD would never treat a prospective client the way he did the female owner of the department store. He may have thought or said those things behind her back, but never to her face. The reason: $$$$$$! And the principle would have nailed his hide to the drawing board with a thousand push pins. (That is some of the stuff we used before Macs came along.)

The account executive's admission that he is "not a people person," which was obviously true. Hello? Where is HR? The AE had better be a people person!

Good marketing research even then was valuable.

The last ditch creative effort with the Lucky Strike client that led to the headline, "It is toasted!" was interesting, and as I recall a headline they did use. The client's claim "all brands toast their tobacco" should have received a better answer from the CD. Even though all brands can make the same claim, the first one to stake that claim purposefully and forcefully owns the USP (unique selling point). The others will only come off as "wannabees" when they try to make the same claim.

And lastly, that IBM Selectric Typewriter that "only looks complicated, but they made it simple enough for a woman to use" - we still had two just like that before Katrina. They drowned.

The jury is still out for me. I liked the show enough, in spite of the glaring errors, to come back and view it again.