Mad Men Musings

The primary client in the most recent installment of Mad Men was, of all companies, Bethlehem Steel. Since this follows Lucky Strikes and Right Guard in an aerosol can, I’m getting the feeling that the show’s creators like picking brands and products and firms that seemed mighty in 1960, and are irrelevant, marginal, or gone today. (Bethlehem Steel dissolved in 2003.) Anyway, protagonist Don makes one mildly interesting comment – about advertising’s frequent role of telling us something we already knew but hadn’t thought about lately.I thought maybe that would be the subject of today’s Musings, but this turned out to be Pete’s episode. He’s the junior agency guy with big ambitions and all that. We learn that he’s from some kind of blueblood family, and his cartoonishly WASP pop sneers at the ad business as a disgrace to the family name.

Later, we can kind of see Pop’s point. Since the initial pitch meeting sputtered, Bethlehem’s honcho is staying in New York overnight to give the agency another crack at new ideas. Pete is given the job of entertaining the codger – an assignment that, so far as I could tell, boiled down to lining up a couple of hookers. It’s never quite made clear that that’s what the young women are, but I’m not sure what other conclusion we’re supposed to draw. It’s all handled rather matter-of-factly.

Now, I’m not in the ad business, and never was. So I don’t know. But was this standard operating procedure at one time?

In any case, later in the episode when Don wants Pete fired, the move is blocked because the agency can’t afford to alienate the old-line power families of New York.

What’s interesting about all this is that it suggests 1960 was not, perhaps, the moment of ad-agency all-powerfulness that some observers of the show have suggested. Instead, maybe, it was a time when admen were still trying to shake their image as sleazy hucksters. Maybe they were trying to become respectable members of the professional class, but — suits and posh offices and suburban homes and fancy martinis aside — not quite making it yet.

Footnote: Clearly my Mad Men musings have had little to do with the show as, you know, a show. Basically, I’m not sure I’d be watching if I didn’t happen to have an interest in advertising, and how that business/practice/cultural form changed over the course of the 20th century. However, Time’s James Poniewozik makes a fairly convincing case for the show as pure entertainment, “showing an intriguing ability to change itself up from week to week.”