Читать книгу Mad Men's Manhattan - Mark P. Bernardo - Страница 10

The only other agency referenced on Mad Men that retains a Madison Avenue address today is Young and Rubicam, at 285 Madison Avenue, at 41^st Street. When Duck first interviews at Sterling Cooper in Season 1, we learn that he has recently worked in Y&R’s London office.

Cofounder Robert Rubicam, regarded along with Bernbach as one of the twentieth century’s most influential ad men, made his name as a copywriter for his former employer, the N. W. Ayer Company, penning the hugely influential “Instrument of the Immortals” ad for Steinway Pianos. Passed over for the copy chief job he had hoped for when the company’s ownership transferred to the founder’s son-in-law, Rubicam partnered with another disgruntled Ayer employee, John Orr Young, to form a new agency in 1923 (the same year Sterling Cooper was founded).

Like the Sterling Cooper offices depicted on Mad Men, the atmosphere at Y&R was famously loose in its structure. Employees arrived late in the morning and worked long into the evening. Like Bert Cooper, Sterling Cooper’s eccentric cofounder and senior partner, who doesn’t bat an eye when he learns about Don Draper’s secret past, Rubicam hired and promoted people based more on their talent and creativity than on their educational background. He cultivated a team atmosphere, with copywriters, artists, and photographers huddling together at marathon creative sessions at odd hours—another trait of Don’s team. The unorthodox methods produced impressive results: the agency landed such coveted accounts as Bristol-Myers, Gulf Oil, and Packard automobiles. Along with DDB, Ogilvy and Mather, and Leo Burnett, Y&R helped usher in the explosive growth of the ad business in the 1960s. (Ogilvy’s book Confessions of an Ad Man is referenced in Season 3.) In 1979, Y&R merged with the huge Marsteller agency, expanding its reach into the growing public relations business and accelerating its growth into the industry leader it is today. Its current roster of clients includes Kraft Foods, Miller Beer, Colgate Palmolive, AT&T, and Citibank. One of its most memorable campaigns was the series of TV spots with comedian Bill Cosby pitching Jell-O Pudding. In 2000, Y&R was taken over by a larger British agency, WPP Group.

Although you cannot generally get a tour of these famous firms’ offices, a visitor to the city can still get a sense of Madison Avenue’s historic cachet as the hub of the ad business. Take a stroll up the sidewalk alongside Madison, starting at the corner of 42^nd Street and heading north to 50^th (ending, appropriately enough, at the Omnicom building), and you’ll see a tribute to that history flying on flags above the street. The Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame was established in 2004 as part of the city’s first Advertising Week, a now annual gathering of North American advertising, media, and marketing professionals. The flags exhibit tributes to ad campaigns, icons, and slogans both recent and historic, all of which have been inducted into the Walk of Fame in an annual public vote conducted by Yahoo and USA Today. The inductees include classics like Tony the Tiger, Colonel Sanders, Orville Reddenbacher, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and Mr. Peanut, as well as modern favorites like the AFLAC duck, the Geico Gecko, and AOL’s “running man.” The flags on the lampposts feature recent inductees.