“Mad Men” Musings

“Honesty — it’s a good angle.”

This line, by one of the ad agency guys in the early scene in the most recent episode of “Mad Men” when Don and his colleagues are talking about the famous VW “Lemon” ad — which came out around 1960, when the series is set — was easily the episode’s highlight moment. (If you’ve never seen the “Lemon” magazine ad, here it is.) In its time, the VW campaign that this ad was part of was different because it did not engage in overt hyperbole. In fact, it subtly mocked the overt hyperbole of, you know, every other ad in the world. Various other print pieces poked fun at the empty planned-obsolescence style “advances” touted by most car ads, for example.

That’s the honesty part. The angle part is that the campaign gave a new image to a car that, as Mary Wells summarized in her memoir, had previous been seen as “small,” “ugly,” and “a Nazi car, too soon after the war.” This is alluded to in Mad Men; one character mentions that last time he’d seen a VW, he was throwing a grenade into it. (This remark is made at a suburban house party, where the general idea that honesty is just another angle hovers over the somewhat predictable proceeds: We learn, for the umpteenth time, that shiny suburban facades conceal assorted grubby secrets, etc. But as always, I’m less interested in the plot than in the passing mentions of advertising history. So back to that.)
Thomas Frank, in The Conquest of Cool, observes: “That by the end of the decade the [VW] was more hip than Nazi must be regarded as one of the great triumphs of American marketing.” Particularly so given that its “hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass sociaety against which hip declared itself most vehemently ad odds.” Frank argues that the agency that made the campaign, Doyle Dane Bernbach, “invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism — perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age — to consumerism itself.”

Sound familiar? Sure it does. It’s a point of view that’s now so thoroughly built into contemporary marketing, we pretty much expect it. The most scabrous critiques of the culture of marketing, are produced by marketing professionals, on behalf of whoever their paying client happens to be. Transparency, the consumer-in-control, co-creation, etc.: All today’s most progressive-sounding marketing tactics are all about honesty. It’s still a great angle.