Basket of Kisses

Viral marketing is a recent trend in advertising where companies upload edgy and provocative video pieces on sites like YouTube with the hope that people will forward them on others (spreading it like a virus). The infamous cat decapitation in a Ford ad was one of the first examples of this approach.

Advertising Age reports that Method, the maker of natural cleaning products touted as NOT containing harsh chemicals such as ammonia or optical brighteners, had to take down it’s recent viral video after receiving complaints that the piece trivialized sexual assault. 

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• A terrific article in the Louisville Courier-Journal (thanks, Melissa) looks at our cultural myths about the 50s and the way Mad Men and Revolutionary Road tell a darker and truer history.
• Basketcase dckatiebug sent a list of What’s In and Out for 2009 from the Washington Post. Out: Dressing like “Mad Men.” In: Drinking like “Mad Men.”
• Modern Hobo Code is making the rounds. Funny!
• Nice, extensive interview with Elisabeth Moss from The Improper. One thing, though: I don’t get Elisabeth as “Hepburnesque.” I so completely don’t get it that I can’t even decide if they mean Katharine or Audrey.
• Roger Sterling drinks from Dorothy Thorpe cocktail glasses, and you can too.

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Lance Mannion wrote a fascinating blog comparing Mad Men to The Naked City (which ran from 1958 to 1963).

The main difference is that the New Yorkers of Mad Men are a strangely narcotized bunch. Their basic affect is ennui. Mad Men is set in a nation waiting for Prozac. The Manhattan of Naked City is full of hyper-active neurotics. Even the cops and criminals are tortured and tormented by angst and nameless dreads. Everybody’s nerves are raw. Nobody can relax for a moment. It’s a place where if you accidentally bump into someone on the street that person will either take a vicious swing at you or break down and start weeping or start monologing and blast you with a pseudo-poetic speech about the decline of civilization in words and cadences cribbed from Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets. Mad Men’s Manhattan is a town of sleepwalkers. Naked City’s Manhattan is full of brittle insomniacs jazzed up on caffeine, nicotine, lack of sleep, and their barely contained inner demons. What’s naked in the Naked City is emotion.

Northwest Arkansas News has a very smart discussion of season one (disguised as a DVD review).

Early on, the alpha-male conceit of the show threatens to wear thin; it’s as if Weiner, acting on some bluff creative impulse, assigned himself the challenge of wringing compelling material from the tweedy inner lives of white middleaged businessmen who take the train home to the suburbs at night. But slowly, Weiner pulls back the curtain on Sterling Cooper’s withering Shangri-La: a subversive, successful and non-Sterling Cooper-produced Volkswagen ad here, a fuddy-duddy complaint about Kennedy’s hat aversion there.

The Indiana Journal Gazette focuses on the women of Mad Men.

A blog in my (and the Draper’s) local paper has just noticed the show takes place in Westchester. Go know.

If you missed Slattery and Hamm on Charlie Rose, here’s the video.

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Marti Barletta, author of two books on marketing to women and founding member of the Women Gurus Network, has an article in the current Ad Age about Mad Men and the attitude toward women seen in it. She is not pleased.

I caught one of the recent reruns from the first season, and, just to stay current, tried to watch it all the way through. What raised the bile in the back of my throat was when the ad guys stumbled across the eternal question “What do women want?” and the flippant reply was “Who cares?” I don’t know about Leo Burnett or J. Walter Thompson, but ad legend David Ogilvy rolled in his grave at that moment. Here’s a guy who showed he understood what side his bread was buttered on when he said, “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.”

It’s a shame Ms. Barletta didn’t see that the episode in question (Ladies Room) is criticizing Roger’s attitude. Had she seen it all the way through, she’d have seen Don working and struggling to answer that question; in his own relationships and, concurrently, for the job.

But I’m not dissing Ms. Barletta”when you’re really close to a subject, it’s hard to tolerate bullshit, even when the bullshit is there in order to show, well, that it’s bullshit.

She goes on to say

Until two or three years ago, women as consumers were still thought of as a niche market. When my first book, “Marketing to Women,” was published in 2003, I’d get invited to speak at corporations by their emerging-markets teams — those poor souls charged with influencing 84% of the population (blacks, Hispanics, Asians and now women) with 5% of the budget. They brought me in to explain to their management that women are not an “emerging” market. At 51% of the population, they’re actually the majority market and make fully 80% of consumer spending decisions.

Now, this is stunning. “Niche” marketing to women may be fading into the past, but women are still relegated to the Fashion/Style section in mainstream media. I could give a thousand examples, but most recently is this article in the New York Times about the BlogHer conference. An article about female bloggers is (of course) “niche” and is relegated to Fashion/Style, whereas an article about the health of male bloggers back in April was in the Technology section. Because that’s hard news, dontcha know. No pun intended.

So, back to Ad Age. Ms. Barletta is peeved that women are so marginalized on Mad Men, and she wants us to know that 1962 was not the good old days. But you know what? We’re still marginalized, and talking about it through the medium of 1962 is a way of talking about it today. Mad Men is promoting, not denying, her mission.

This one’s cool”it intersperses Mad Men quotes with real quotes (and continues longer than a clear screen capture can show).

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Advertising Age has this absolutely amazing Mad Men-themed 16-page insert. (Thanks to Basketeer/Basketcase Peter G. for bringing this to our attention.) (And yeah, that means we haven’t finalized the voting.)

The brainchild of Initiative Media, the insert mimics an issue of Ad Age from 1960. Now, in case you don’t know, Ad Age is the industry insider magazine for advertising professionals. Adam mentions it in 5G”it’s where he saw Don’s picture and recognized him as his brother.

The sixteen pages are a mixture of real articles from Ad Age in 1960, fictional articles talking about Sterling Cooper and Don Draper as they’d be talked about if they were real in 1960, and some “then and now” articles; like comparing prices and wages, or Ad Women: How Agency Life Really Was.

Because printing out these pages shrinks the font, I’m reading it kind of slowly, but I’m enjoying it. There are spots where it’s too coy by half, and other spots where it’s just perfect. The important thing for us Basketeers/Basketcases is that everyone everyone everyone in the advertising industry will see it. And then, we hope, tune in.

Read it here, or find it on C-6 in the Business Day. It’s just huge, this Season Two launch.

Okay, first nugget.

“People in the business are talking about it, gathering to watch it,” said Mary Warlick, chief executive at the One Club for Art and Copy, an organization in New York that honors creativity in advertising.

Really? WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY WATCHING IT? But I digress.

The club is presenting an exhibition intended to “bring back the real-life men and women” on whom “Mad Men” is based, Ms. Warlick said, like Mary Wells Lawrence, George Lois and David Ogilvy. The exhibition, at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library, runs from Tuesday through Sept. 26.

Emphasis mine. Cool as shit, right?
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Speechless.

Well, not entirely.

Linda Schupack, AMC’s Senior VP of Marketing, is being considered one of the “Entertainment Marketers” of 2008.

You know, the ideas were great. They talk the talk just right:

(The)… approach was applied to the show’s TV spots, which played up “Mad Men’s” frequent boozing and smoking (this was the era of the three-martini lunch, after all) and scandalous intra-office affairs as Amy Winehouse’s retro-sultry single “You Know I’m No Good” snaked along on the soundtrack. Ms. Schupack says the song perfectly summarized the show’s goal to make its period trappings modern, relatable and sexy.

“It gave people the feeling that this is not a musty, fusty period drama by any means,” she says. “It’s a very contemporary, edgy drama that also has a cheeky sensibility about itself as well.”

As we know, the problem didn’t so much lie in the campaign, but in the disappearance of it, and of the show and kind of all signs of its existence!!!