The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  The Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, which erupted in vicious riots and bloodshed with a mayor and a police force out of control, had brought mainstream political life to a corrupt and homicidal low, a sickening contrast to the high on which the decade had started with the election of a new young president.

  Any validity the hippy and drug-oriented alternative society could have claimed was disintegrating fast. The deranged August 1969 Manson family killings and the escalating violence at the Altamont concert in December 1969, which ended with the murder of a fan by the Hell’s Angels “security force” at the feet of the Rolling Stones, had eclipsed the dreamy peace and love of Woodstock only four months earlier.

  The simultaneous realization of the futility, the disgrace, and the horror of the Vietnam war, with the apocalyptic escalation of US casualties in 1967 and 1968 was creating endless antagonisms and self-doubt throughout American society. And right on Madison Avenue’s own doorstep, New York City itself was becoming drug-ridden, dangerous, filthy, and desperately broke.

  US business entered a mini depression, and advertisers began to cut back. So the renegades were beginning to have a tougher time in a harder, more cynical environment. And if following a revolution there is no counterrevolution, the new state becomes the status quo. It wasn’t quite like that with the Creative Revolution, for although the new ways of thinking and working took hold across the business, the old ways weren’t by any means vanquished.

  So here, at 1970, with the initial skirmishes over and no clear winner, it would seem to be a good time to take stock of the situation.

  FROM AMONGST THE CAST of Madison Avenue, the previous twenty years had thrown up plenty of huge characters; acclaimed for bringing a very high standard to existing roles. But those roles were redefined by Bill Bernbach and the framework within which they were performed was redesigned by Marion Harper. It’s therefore no surprise that in their “1999 Review of the Advertising Century,” Advertising Age cited these two as the most influential figures of the entire twentieth century. They put Bernbach first. But—and as a lifelong copywriter who has just about worshipped Bernbach since the day I first became aware of what he stood for, this is not easy to say—I’m not so sure.

  Undoubtedly, the overall standard of creative work around the world improved. Yes, there was, and still is, absolute dross and plenty of it—not until the twenty-first century did P&G take the least notice of anything Bernbach had said—but overall there was a greater attempt to meet the consumers halfway. And it was a lasting improvement. Tiresome arguments with clients about whether or not humor sells or the wisdom of portraying women as anything other than attachments to household appliances became easier to win when there was the example of DDB and other agencies’ commercial success with a wittier, cleverer strain of work.

  But would this have happened anyway? The social pressures were so powerful at the beginning of the sixties and the simple youthful majority were so voluble and irresistible that surely, sooner or later, the forces would have been marshalled and brought about a revolution in the way agencies communicated with the public?

  And there were negative outcomes to the revolution. Amongst those new agencies there were a lot of failures in both structure and output. Creative idealism was proving to be a far from adequate sole qualification for agency momentum and when it came to the work, too many of the young creative pretenders understood all of the fun and none of the discipline of Bernbach’s style. They knew how to grab attention and entertain, but they forgot that the whole point was to persuade.

  This was not Bernbach’s fault, far from it. The silliness and the self-indulgence hiding behind “creativity” in some of the newer work was the despair of DDB and other new agencies like Carl Ally. According to Bob Levinson, Bernbach said, “Our job is to sell our clients” merchandise… not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product.” Old school detractors of the new creativity could point to this lack of discipline as evidence of flaws at the heart of the new creative ideal. And frequently, it was a flaw.

  Further, the revolution itself was far from total. The so called “creative agencies” spent approximately only 8 percent of the total US billing through the decade, almost insignificant in commercial terms. Remove DDB from that equation and the figure becomes negligible. Yes the takeover was total in advertising award shows and internal regard—advertising has always been narcissistic—but the big, old agencies powered on much as they always had.

  As to the detail of Bernbach’s innovations, there had been precedents. As long ago as 1902 a New York agency set up by Ralph Holden, an account man, and Earnest Elmo Calkins, a copywriter, was promoting the role of the art directors and teaming them with the copywriters in meetings described by the agency as “The Composite Man.” It was to achieve what Calkins described as “that combination of text with design that produces a complete advertisement.”

  Calkins gained a reputation as a great shepherd of creative people, unusually for a copywriter, sponsoring photography and new and original illustrators. He was the first true creative director and the agency’s softer, more considered approach gathered plenty of admirers from within advertising circles, Printer’s Ink magazine praising them in 1904 for producing “the finest art work of any agency in New York at the time.”

  Although almost certainly accidental, it is a template for the DDB of nearly fifty years later and it shows that the marriage of art director with writer was not entirely new. It seems that Bernbach also had a philosophical model in Raymond Rubicam, as Y&R in the years up to World War II produced a stream of intelligent, imaginative, and honest work. Bernbach wouldn’t deny this—he once told Rubicam, “I don’t think I could have quite made it without your influences,” Rubicam having personally articulated much of Bernbach’s credo. He elevated the creative people within his agency, respected the art director and championed original creative work. Like DDB later, a place in Rubicam’s creative department was so prized that one writer earning of $9,000 per year at Y&R turned down an offer of $25,000 from a rival agency while another said, “We were Y&R and that meant the best there was. It was more of a religion than it was an advertising agency.”

  Across the century there were plenty of industry leaders making sensitive observations about a need to raise the respect shown to the consumer in the quality of advertising. Emerson Foote, Albert Lasker, Theodore MacManus, Leo Burnett all spoke Bernbach’s language. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, Minnie Maude Hanff, the writer in an all-female team creating ads for Force Breakfast, had shown a realistic appraisal of the public’s relationship to selling by saying, “Goodness gracious! A breakfast food isn’t all life is it? People are not going to take it nearly as seriously as the advertiser wants them to.”

  So Bernbach’s philosophy wasn’t entirely new. The difference is that he was the first one to take these ideals and do much of anything about them—and make an impact that lasts to this day. That gives him his monumental place in history.

  HARPER’S INFLUENCE, unlike Bernbach’s, is indiscernible to the lay person. But whether we like it or not—and I don’t for reasons I’ll try to explain—his shadow is sharper and further reaching than Bernbach’s. You need look at only one fact to get the point: what is DDB today but a part—a very large part but a part nevertheless—of exactly the sort of conglomerate that Harper dreamed up? Indeed, where are any of the Creative Revolution agencies now? Those enterprises started with such passion and vision, PKL, A&G, Scali McCabe Sloves, Ammirati and Puris, WRG… Gone, all gone, sold to the conglomerates that were the gleam in Harper’s eye.

  No one had had Harper’s idea before and nothing else has changed the organization and operation of advertising as much. From what was largely a cottage industry of small privately owned shops competing in local markets with a personalized service delivering advertising only, the business has been through the equivalent of its own industrial revolution.

  Employing any one of
the squadrons of specialist companies owned by the massive global conglomerates, a client can now buy any and every conceivable service remotely connected with marketing, from research to strategic planning, from social network promotions to brand design.

  Today, more than two-thirds of total US marketing services revenue goes to one or other of the advertising conglomerates, vast companies like Harper’s own Interpublic, WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, Aegis, Havas, and MDC Partners. Of course, Harper is not responsible for the precise ways in which his vision has evolved or the business is now conducted but his template is the template from which the bulk of the industry now operates.

  It is rare now to find any major agency in any country that is autonomous; major decisions are usually made thousands of miles away. And as all the major groups are publicly quoted, their emphasis is very much on the bottom line. With the quarterly reporting periods that are the death of coherent long-term planning, and a top level of management who were once absorbed in clients and their problems but are now hypnotized by Wall Street and the stockholders, you have a business with its priorities in the wrong place.

  Almost without exception the leaders of the Creative Revolution agencies at some time or another expressed regret at going public. Both Grey and Mary Wells bought their companies back quite soon after selling stock, Wells saying the flotation was a waste of time. Papert and Lois certainly wished they could have recovered theirs but it was too late. We can be cynical and say these principals were happy to pocket the conglomerates’ or investors’ money but that’s apart from the point to be made.

  The quality of their work stuttered and fell away as they stopped being what they were good at and tried to be something else. Even the saintly DDB went through extraordinary contortions once they saw themselves as a “grown-up” business in 1970, acquiring Snark Products Inc., a small New Jersey-based manfacturer of plastic-hulled sailboats, believing the Snark would become the “VW of the sea.” It didn’t. They also tried to buy Frose-Mar Corp, an ice cream company. James Madden, senior VP, of DDB’s Diversified Services unit, once said that in a six-month period he had looked at 300 potential acquisitions.

  Of course, it is a business—does any of this idealistic handwringing matter? Yes, it does; creative endeavor will never fully flourish when the only imperative is profit. It loses sight of the fact that, as this tale shows, advertising is entirely about people. There is nothing else, no plant and equipment, no raw materials—it’s just people and their ideas. And people, especially creative people, are not always fuelled by money alone.

  Further, the contemporary advertising business has painted itself into a corner where there is no financial or emotional tolerance for failure. A creative endeavor without room for mistakes is a contradiction in terms; it’s almost inconceivable that you can be as original as Bill Bernbach demanded without occasionally failing.

  There has been another unforeseen consequence of the mass flotation. The propensity for the conglomerates to buy has created a supply, from the seventies onward, of agencies set up with the sole purpose of growing as quickly as possible, by any means, and then selling for a quick kill. Contrast that as a mission and a motivation with the zeal for advertisments of a Bernbach, a Lois, or a Carl Ally.

  Can the two ideas live side by side? Omnicom worldwide can probably lay claim to having best combined Bernbach’s creative vision with Harper’s business idea. When they were building their network from the seventies onward they bought carefully, picking up local agencies only with proven creative credentials and allowing them reasonable autonomy. It is not insignificant that it is Omnicom who today own BBDO—and DDB. As a consequence, like the DDB of the Mad Men era, the Omnicom agencies tend to produce the better work and they do good business.

  AND WHAT OF THE REAL Mad Men and Women? How do they view that curious era, an era that now seems like a sabbatical between conformity and uniformity?

  In the fifteen months I took to write this book I interviewed or consulted well over fifty veterans of Madison Avenue, men and women. Admittedly I did concentrate mainly on those involved in the newer exciting agencies, for that is where the story lies. With only one mild exception not one expressed any regret about the time they’d spent and the work they’d done—far from it. Funny, witty, entertaining, sharp, and articulate, they looked back with enormous fondness and even respect for what the era had brought them.

  What they brought to the era was a new deal on advertising. With their inbuilt aversion to phoniness and hype, they found it deeply difficult to concoct advertising on the basis of its accepted but shallow appeal—aspiration. You didn’t drive a VW or a Volvo, smoke B&H 100s, holiday in Jamaica, eat at Horn and Hardart, or rent a car from Avis because you aspired to it or because it got you the girl or made you the envy of your neighbors. You did it because it was the clever thing to do. Advertising still told you that to be seen doing these things flattered you, yes, but where it used to flatter your status or your apparent wealth, now it flattered your intelligence. And it did this in an intelligent way, without treating you like an automaton or a fool. DDB and PKL and Carl Ally and the many that followed removed banality and aspiration from advertising.

  That fifty years later those veterans still argue passionately over who should be credited for which ads can be read either as a sign of senior grumpiness or lasting pride and passion. I shall take it as the latter—and at least it was usually done with style and humor, as with one copywriter warning me off what he saw as his former art director’s attempts to steal all his thunder: “paraphrasing Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman; ‘everything he writes is a lie, even ‘and’ and ‘but’.’”

  Their reaction to their portrayal on Mad Men is a different matter. Uniformly, they loathed the first few episodes so much so that many have not returned to the series. They were offended more at the portrayal of the dishonesty and double dealing than they were at the drinking and fornicating. In the summer of 2010, George Lois wrote a furious piece for Playboy magazine that was openly hostile to everyone involved in the production. But others, like Mike Tesch, a one-time art director at Carl Ally, changed their minds as the series developed: “I hated it… then I loved it.”

  One thing of which they are all equally contemptuous is the output of Sterling Cooper. But then they have every right. None of them would ever have wanted to work for Draper and none of his department would have got a job at any of their agencies. Particularly Draper himself. Too phony.

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