And so Mad Men is over, leaving a Don Draper-sized hole in my viewing habits. I’ve been in on it from the start – and even slightly before. I was working on my book Adland, about the history of advertising, when my old friend Jonah Bloom – a former editor of Ad Age – told me about it. We were in Cannes at the time. Jonah had been invited to a premier of Mad Men and related the now-famous scene in the first episode when Draper invents a new slogan for Lucky Strike (“It’s toasted”). I was hooked right there.
It was one of those rare occasions when it seemed as though a pop cultural product had been created specifically for me. I’ve always loved 1960s suits, women who are sharp as they are curvy, and the over-consumption of martinis (blame Sean Connery). And of course I’ve been an advertising addict since my youth.
The finale ended with a Draper creation for another iconic brand: Coca-Cola. You can interpret these things as you wish – and many theses will be written about Mad Men – but it seemed appropriate to me that the series began with a product that ravaged the 20th century, cigarettes, and ended with one that is undermining the health of the 21st, sugar-packed soda.
Ironically, the show’s writer, Matthew Weiner, doesn’t see it that way. He calls the real-life Coke spot he hijacked for Draper, “Hilltop” from 1971 (actually the work of Bill Backer, a creative director at McCann-Erickson), “The greatest commercial ever made.” He even told Time magazine that he found the spot “pure…with a good feeling.”
So Weiner loves advertising after all. Or maybe he just remembers the spot from his childhood, as I do. We are roughly the same age, and probably drank a lot of Coke at the time. Actually, I preferred Pepsi. And I very much remember the TV ad, which had a great tagline: “Lipsmackin’ thirstquenchin’ acetastin’ motivatin’ goodbuzzin’ cooltalkin’ highwalkin’ fastlivin’ evergivin’ coolfizzin’…Pepsi.” Not Don Draper, but Dave Trott of BMP, in 1974. Just don’t ask me to translate.
