Is there a particular reason that the 1960s brought so many movies/TV shows that dealt with ad agencies? “Bewitched” “Good Neighbor Sam” even “Days of Wine and Roses” has some PR personnel attached to it. Even “Mad Men” takes place in that area; Why were ad agencies the subject of stories in the 1960s?
Just a wild guess, but the 60’s were the heyday of advertising - on TV and in magazines and newspapers (no Internet, remember?) and it was a cool job and it paid very, very well to be working on Madison Avenue back then.
So, if you wanted a character to be able to dress well, be rich, look good and not really have to “work” much other than throw a quick ad slogan out there, it was a good job to have in the background of movies and TV shows.
One of the things I love and hate about Mad Men is how they really don’t do much but sit around and ponder, drink, smoke, go to lunch and then throw out a few ideas and get paid oodles of money to do so. Must be nice…
It was more like the late 1950’s through the early 1960’s. There was a common belief that with the proper use of advertising techniques you could make people believe in anything and could sell them anything. Ads before that time mostly look quaint these days. Starting in the late 1940’s there was a lot of research (much of it from university psychology departments) on what really sold things, and advertisements soon got a lot better:
There is actually more scepticism these days about advertising than there was back in the heyday of the field, as it has become clear that you can’t really make people believe absolutely anything.
The modern equivalent is having a character be an architect.
Seems to be a relatively inexpensive profession for a sitcom character. Everything he does is in a office and he can wear normal suits, i.e. no need for unusual sets or costumes - just throw in an easel as the occasional prop when the character needs to make a presentation. Speaking of which, for dramatic purposes he can have a “client” with an unusual request, such client to appear in a single episode and never be seen or mentioned again.
Consider also that the professions of ad man and screenwriter often crossed paths. Back when TV shows had a single sponsor the two would often work hand-in-hand so screenwriters were no strangers to the world of advertising. As the saying goes, “Write what you know!”
Ad men and writers didn’t just cross paths. They were often the same person. Here are some examples:
In addition to what others have already said, the public was particularly aware of advertising and public relations then because of high-profile 1950s books and movies like the Main the Gray Flannel Suit and The Organization Man (Mad magazine titled one of its earlier collections The Organization Mad, with a cover that spoofed that of the book. You only do that wityh things that are extremely popular and well-known. Nobody does cover spoofs of obscure books.)
Well, yes and no. Advertising in earlier eras is certainly more naive and we can chuckle at certain types of “I say it and therefore it’s so” campaigns.
But for all the superficial “skepticism” about advertising, the medium as a whole has completely reconditioned society and reshaped our aims. There’s no one more conditioned than the person who smugly says ads don’t influence them.
We like “Mad Men” because it shows advertising as kindly, human and benign. As it may have been, fifty years ago.
Mad’s entire metier in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the ad game. Their parody of everything and anything Madison Avenue stands as all-time brilliance.
MAD magazine is another case of writers and artists who had put in time writing and drawing ad copy. They themselves never wore the grey flannel, but their old bosses did. Ex-bosses have always been a favorite target of ridicule.
Stan Freburg was another satirist who lived in both worlds (at the same time!) He was the one who figured out that you could sell stuff by making fun of your own advertising.
Where “stuff” = “Stan Freberg.”
Wendell Wagner didn’t claim that advertising wasn’t influential. He pointed out that there was a time period where some were concerned that advertisers could get the public to believe anything. Well, they really can’t. No advertising, no matter how clever, is going to get me to order a Budweiser or a Coors at a bar.
Wilbur Post and Mike Brady were an architects.
In an avalanche, it’s not the individual pebbles you worry about.
Thinking that you are immune to, or above, or smarter than advertising (more specifically, marketing - advertising is just a tool) because a specific ad can’t tell you to buy that specific product may be true, in that very narrow sense, but it’s an almost irrelevant viewpoint.
Advertising is not just “influential” in terms of making you desire a specific brand, or even a specific product - it collectively shapes our socioeconomic worldview, probably to a greater degree than any other information/entertainment/communication medium.
Perhaps part of the appeal is that advertising and architecture are office jobs where the worker’s output is easily understood by the sitcom audience. Contrast this with the character of Chandler Bing from Friends, where the whole joke was that it was never clear what he did for a living. And I think that’s true for many office jobs, but not architecture or advertising.
Also see The Hucksters, 1947, Clark Gable. Returning war vet gets job at advertising agency and assigned to soap account, sleazes dignified widow into doing endorsement. I haven’t read the book, but apparently it was very explicit for the time. For its comedy counterpart, see The Thrill of it All with James Garner and Doris Day.
Before WWII advertising was a fairly minor profession. Newspapers were the big carriers of ads, and they were mostly boring and utilitarian. Magazine ads were more prestigious but still boring and unmemorable, except for a few catchphrases like B.O. and halitosis, neither of which enhanced the image of the profession. Radio started to change this by incorporating advertising right into the shows with the stars delivering the ads, many of them with catchy jingles. The Hucksters is about a radio ad executive - and also about how awful ads and the entire advertising mentality was.
They may have been awful - OK, they were awful - but suddenly advertising started seeming like something that was major league. It affected people. It was creative. It paid well. It brought you close to show business. Early television shows were owned by companies that used all the advertising time on their own products. And television created hysteria. Companies really did have to stop advertising products because they couldn’t manufacture enough to meet demand. It was suddenly hip to be in advertising - the first time ever. And there was little competition. Banking and the stock market were in perpetual doldrums during the 50s; the Depression destroyed their glamor. Corporate drones could be mocked and envied for their money and security, but there wasn’t any glamor there either.
Advertising was smart and new. It attracted many of the best college grads who in other times would go into other industries. They dressed well and lived well in a New York that was still center of the world and fantastically cheap by modern standards. Television and color magazines and billboards made ads hot and memorable. Being in advertising was safe nonconformity. Beatniks weren’t allowed. Beards weren’t allowed. Like James Bond, advertisers looked like everybody else, but led lives just a bit more interesting and dangerous, which was exactly was wanted in the 1950s.
Nobody really understood it at the time. Mad Men gets it right by showing its characters as charming and insecure outsiders, slightly puzzled by a mystique that they know they aren’t living. Ironically, advertising finally became self-aware in the late 60s and began treating itself as the cool and wonderful profession outsiders thought it was for a few years but by then hipness had turned against them. Nobody needed to look at the lives of advertisers to see how the interesting people lived. Wall Street got hot again and could make young men ten times the salary, too. And it all went away just when it got good.
And after Chandler left that job, he went into advertizing.
With enough lack of audience familiarity that the character can go anywhere at any time with only a nominal nod to “the office.” These creative types must be able to set their own office/home/kid/affair hours and not be constricted to an 8-hour office day.