Читать книгу Mad Men's Manhattan - Mark P. Bernardo - Страница 8

The other large, real-life firm that plays a major role in Season 3 is Grey Advertising, today called Grey Global Group, now headquartered on 200 5^th Avenue. In the wake of his ouster from Sterling Cooper after arranging the Putnam, Powell & Lowe takeover and subsequently failing to install himself as president, Duck Phillips (Mark Moses) finds a new position at Grey. There, he schemes to poach Peggy and Pete from Sterling Cooper and begins an affair with Peggy that continues through the end of Season 3.

Duck, and the Mad Men writers, could scarcely have found a better company with which to tempt two promising young ad talents in the early 1960s. Grey was founded in 1917 by Larry Valkenstein and Arthur Fatt as Grey Studios, a direct-marketing company. Its name was allegedly derived from the color of the walls in its original shop. It became an advertising agency in 1925. (According to Duck, the décor remained drab for some time; he describes the offices as looking like “a Penn Station toilet with Venetian blinds.”) In 1956, Grey landed one of the major accounts of its day, Procter & Gamble, and embarked on a period of impressive growth throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Some of its most well-known campaigns are Greyhound’s “Leave the Driving to Us,” and its current clients include Canon, 3M, Nokia, Volkswagen, CocaCola, Campbell’s Soup, the National Football League, and the beverage giant Diageo.