SEK has finally started to watch “Mad Men” and has some interesting thoughts about the show and Don Draper as a literary character here. The review touches on an issue that I don’t touch on much while blogging about the show here, but was actually the focus of my piece in The American Prospect on the show—-the way the show depicts advertising as an industry. When I wrote about it, I was noting the way that the 60s were very inspirational in terms of imagining new possibilities, and this had a strong effect on the way that advertising worked. What SEK touches on is how the show depicts the transition of advertising as something that became more scientific-feeling, where the agency relied on market research to find out where the consumer was at and meet him there.
In the subsequent years, the story of the near omnipotence of advertising has really attached itself to the American psyche. Liberals and conservatives both speak fluent anxiety about the feeling of loss of will and control in the face of the marketplace that, we believe, instills desires in us, and has to be kept out of our heads through force. The walls we erect are different. Liberals implore you to throw out your TV, flip off the radio, and to reject anything that seems to reek of the corporate marketplace. (Alas, the corporate marketplace has grown adept at mimicking signals that appeal to this mindset—-places like Whole Foods come to mind.) That some of these things might give you pleasure is considered evidence of their inherent evil, and all the more reason to toss them out. Conservatives erect the family as a protective device—-Father Knows Best, and will keep the bogeyman out with a mixture of piety and submission rituals. That advertising is so all-powerful is taken as a matter of faith by liberals and conservatives alike. Ask any feminist blogger who writes about a sexist ad campaign, and she will tell you that the comment threads under those have 100% certainty of someone—-from the right or the left—-denying that the sexism is something the feminist should worry about. Why? Because the world-weary commenter will say, “They do it because it works to sell (fill in object for sale),” as if this somehow means the conversation is over. (Of course, even if sexism sells, I fail to see why that makes it any less sexism, which is why that comment has always puzzled me.) The marketplace is so all-powerful that even acknowledging its existence outside of talking about that power is considered dangerous, like uttering the word “cancer” used to be.
The use of market research by advertisers is extremely important to this image of them as having this intoxicating power to create desire where none existed, even over the thoughtful. They have numbers that show them how to get to you! No wonder they have so much power! What’s interesting to me is that the public seems to perceive marketing as scientific to the degree that no guesswork or whimsy is assumed to be part of the work of creating advertising. Or that personal prejudice or preference on the part of the marketers or the clients might have as much to do with advertisements as the market research. On “Mad Men”, we get to see carefully researched campaigns thrown in the trash because clients are persnickety or because the ad men feel the research lacks depth, but we’ve convinced ourselves that this kind of thing has disappeared. Or we had convinced ourselves—-I think nowadays, with more people creating content (albeit usually just creative content for its own sake) and trying to push it, people are beginning to see that it’s more guesswork than you’d think.