The Real Mad Men Read Online Free

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 admen 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.
    To be fair to Packard, these people and their ideas (among them Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist with a Freudian-based résumé, who setup shop in a Manhattan suburb to promote his newly created “science” of motivational research) did exist, and in trying to get business from clients and agencies they probably were making the claims he reported. But that doesn’t mean they were actually being implemented, let alone the least bit effective or successful. As most people who have ever worked in an agency for any length of time will