Was advertising _the_ occupation to be in during the 1960s?

Factual Questions
1

Many of us here are familiar with the television series Mad Men, which takes place at an advertising agency during the early 1960s. In sitcoms from the 1960s, many major characters work at advertising agencies, while in later years characters that take the train from Connecticut or Westchester County to work on Madison Avenue are quite rare. Mad magazine features from the era seemed to have a disproportionate fascination with Madison Avenue, as compared to later years. Even my father went to business school for advertising courses in the late 1950s.

My question: was advertising really the occupation to be in during the late 1950s and early 1960s? If so, why?

2

It wasn’t so much that is was the occupation to be in, so much as it seemed to typify the post-war period.

Advertising was (and to some extent still is) seen as a high-paying occupation where the people involved don’t actually DO anything. They sit around in meetings, throw ideas around, but don’t manufacture, don’t directly relate with customers, don’t produce.

A lot of the perception probably came from the book and movie The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. The protagonist was in public relations, not advertising, but it was close enough.

3

This is only an opinion based on my reading of history.

Advertising became a hot and sought after industry in that one period purely by default.

Where did bright young men go in other eras? The really bright ones went into the professions or academia. The ambitious or well-connected went into finance. In the 1920s, everybody was buying stocks. In the 1980s those in finance became Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe.”

In between you had an interregnum when Wall Street just wasn’t much of an option. The 30s had the Depression, so there were no good options. The 40s had the War, and that drew off all the talent.

The stock market did rebound through the 1950s so at first glance it should seem like it would attract people. That’s misleading. The market improved but volumes were low and it still hadn’t recovered from the previous 20 years. It was stodgy and wouldn’t make you rich, a fatal combination.

Television changed everything in the 50s. It was as obviously the place to be as computers would be in the 90s. But television was a much smaller industry then. There were few slots open and they called for a particular kind of creativity that not many people had.

This gave advertising a slot to draw people into. It was much larger than television and so could absorb more talent. The number of true creative people remained low - read the histories and you see it’s the same few names for a decade dominating the companies, only one or two each. But again that’s misleading. The vast majority of the jobs were in sales, and selling ad space isn’t that much different than selling stocks and bonds. The salesmen were the ones out drinking with the clients, not the creatives.

Advertising benefited from glamor by association as well. Ad agencies owned and controlled most of the TV shows of the 50s. When so-called “magazine” style ads came in by the late 50s and early 60s - different companies each buying a minute of advertising all through the show - there was even more work. Fashion got hot and those magazines got thick with ads. Music got even hotter and “hip” advertising was required to fill those pages. Everything was hot and different and new in the 60s and advertising reflected and created that image.

Which means that advertising faded when the hipness did. There was still money to be made in the 1970s in advertising rather than stocks - look at this Dow Jones chart and see how flat it is until the 80s - but the glamor wasn’t there. And a backlash against advertising was part of 60s counterculture, which meant that the people who went into advertising to be hip had to leave advertising to not be tainted by its new anti-hipness.

Just an oddity of the times is all, although it took time and hindsight to realize it. Most people in the field didn’t know what hit them when the fall came. I’ll bet that if the series stays on long enough you’ll start seeing that fall in Mad Men.

4

Or, if you ever saw “The Graduate” from 1967 . . .

“PLASTIC”

5

That’s “plastics,” plural. Plastic doesn’t make any sense.

Not that it has anything to do with advertising.

6

I think Advertising people were the yuppies of their day. Good money, glamorous jobs,and taking part in the Next Big Thing .
American society was changing, as the standard of living skyrocketed. And Advertising led the way. Fins on your car were cool.