This story is a part of our Mad Men Takeover. Season four of the series premieres on AMC this Sunday, July 25.
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There’s a lot of information on Mad Men that the advertising-uninitiated of us might not understand. The show has been lauded for its accuracy, but if you don’t know the first thing about advertising, how can you tell? It seemed that there was a lot we could be taught by the pros. So we turned to The Creative Circus, an Atlanta-based school that trains for the creative side of the advertising, interactive development, design and photography industries. Working industry professionals—the people actually behind the ads we see each day—teach the classes at The Creative Circus. To help us understand Mad Men in the context of the actual ad world, we recruited the help of Dan Balser, Advertising Department Head, who talked to us via telephone, and Brittany Poole, a recent graduate now employed at Crispin, Porter and Bogusky who we contacted via e-mail. Their responses to some questions below have been combined for the ease of reading.
Paste: Are you a fan of Mad Men because advertising is your thing? Does someone have to be into or understand advertising to be into Mad Men?
Dan Balser: There are a lot of advertising stories in there that resonate and one of them was there was this one particular episode when Don Draper presented an idea to Kodak… They named the slide tray the carousel, and the way he set it up was with emotion, and since you were invested in his character and you understood his life, you could see how peoples’ individual lives informed their creative expression and how the work that they do reflects their lives. So in a way, if you have the patience to sit with the show and invest yourself in the characters, you can see how people in creative fields apply their personal lives to their profession. That, to me, is pretty profound.
Brittany Poole: If anything, I think it’s the opposite. It’s definitely helped my family and my friends finally understand what I do. I can just say, “I’m Peggy” (without the whole giving away bastard babies thing), and they get it.
Paste: Blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, the internet: All are more or less integral to advertising (and most professions, nowadays). How would Mad Men benefit or be different with technology like we have today?
Balser: I think what’s happened now, and I speak partially as an advertising instructor and head of the department of an advertising school, agencies need a much wider skill set than they did when I entered the industry and Mad Men was happening. When Mad Men was happening, you had stories like Peggy’s, where someone who was working in the agency ends up becoming a copywriter. Those kinds of stories happened a lot in the ‘60s, ‘70s, even in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But in the ‘80s and ‘90s, ad schools started and you had to show that you could write, and agencies stopped training people, stopped taking people in and making them into creative people. They would hire them pre-trained, which is why there are ad schools now, to basically pre-train people to work in the industry.
What’s happening now is that the skill set that we have to train people for is so much wider than it used to be. They have to understand that the majority of the advertising is no longer traditional media. In Mad Men’s time it was radio, TV, newspapers and magazines. Now it’s just completely blown apart. I think that the actual discipline of thinking creatively and communicating with people is the same but the way that you reach people is so fragmented and so different that I have to have a Twitter account and a Facebook. I have to, because I have to understand how to comunicate to people, and it has evolved and it’s still developing. I don’t think anyone really has the answer of what it means and where it’s going.
Poole: I think that’s a hazard in advertising right now. In Mad Men, they just have ink and paper. Visuals and copy. So the message has to resonate with people to work. There has to be an idea. But a lot of times today, you see brands just trying to do cool shit for the sake of doing cool shit and it doesn’t lead back to a real message about the brand. It’s forgettable. But when you take a clear message and use new technology to highlight that message, that’s when you end up with something cool and effective. I feel like people in Mad Men would be just as affected by all the new internet toys as we’ve been. Also, they might respect younger people a little bit more. You can’t get too cocky with stuff changing so fast, because chances are there’s a 20-year-old who could get hired tomorrow and would know more about technology than anyone in the agency.
Paste: Dan, you have a Podcast called “Don’t Get Me Started” where you interview people in the ad industry. If you had Don Draper on the show, what would you want to ask him?
Balser: Well, I would ask him the same thing I ask every guest, which is, “Knowing what you know now, in this stage in your career, what do you wish you would have gone back and told yourself?” I ask everyone the same question…and some of the answers are predictable, and some of them are surprising and wonderful. Like, this guy, Paul Keister, has an ad agency called Goodness Manufacturing in California, and his answer was, “I would have told myself to stay in better touch with my friends,” which I thought was a great answer because the industry can really eat up your time and ruin your life. I would probably ask Don that, I would ask him what lessons he’d learned, I would ask him what does he look for in people that he’d want to hire. When you watch a TV show, you know the character often better than they know themselves, so I would ask him, “What personal traits of yours do you think have served you well in your career?” and see if his answer is in alignment with what the viewers see.
Paste: What do you, as a viewer, see?
Balser: His personal traits are he has a lot of self-confidence and he’s extremely handsome. [laughs] So if he could say, “You know I think that being handsome has helped me,” I think that’d be a good answer.
Paste: Would you have any advice for him?
Balser: Would I have advice for Don Draper? Well, it’s interesting, because he’s so good at selling on the show, but one of the things that actually impressed me about him was that he could actually sell an idea through, and he’s patient and… Advice for Don Draper, that’s a great question. Let me think about it for a second. [pause] I would probably just tell him what I’d tell any creative director or creative: Stay true to your instincts, and don’t worry about what people are saying.
The thing is, Don Draper doesn’t worry about what people say. He doesn’t really need my advice. That’s probably my answer: Don Draper doesn’t need my advice. I learn from Don Draper. I think advertising people could learn from him to be confident and believe in yourself and not to worry too much. His lesson he could teach young creatives is not to worry so much about what you think other people think of you. Draper doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t give a shit what people think of him… I’ve also felt like there’s people who are successful in their professional life [who] often have damaged personal lives and vice versa. He hasn’t found a balance, I can tell you that, on the show. So maybe my advice for him is, “Maybe you want to work on your balance so you don’t have any regrets when you’re older on your personal life.” His whole life is almost like an ad. His whole life is contrived, so his life is a metaphor for advertising, which I think goes over a lot of peoples’ heads.