Читать книгу Mad Men's Manhattan - Mark P. Bernardo - Страница 9

Which of the real-world ad agencies most closely resembles Sterling Cooper itself? One inspiration for the fictional agency is Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), today known as DDB Needham Worldwide. DDB is mentioned most often as Sterling Cooper’s rival for accounts both real and fictional, and the parallels between the two agencies are many. The reallife firm was established in 1949 and named after founders James Edwin Doyle, Maxwell Dane, and Bill Bernbach. Bernbach and Doyle met while working at Grey; Dane had owned his own small firm. Although a successful company with some big-money accounts, Sterling Cooper is often portrayed as a young, small firm in a David-vs.-Goliath relationship with giants like Grey and McCann-Erickson. In reality, DDB played a similar role, gaining acclaim for its stylish, edgy ideas that emphasized wit and humor over simple repetition (even self-deprecating humor: the agency won the Avis rental cars account with the slogan, “We try harder because we’re Number Two”) and “soft sell” over “hard sell.” DDB became one of the most influential agencies in history, changing the way many creative people think about advertising.

This theme develops in how the young lions of Sterling Cooper—Harry Crane, Ken Cosgrove, Paul Kinsey, and Peggy Olson— approach their work under the tutelage of the older, but forward-thinking, Don Draper. Don himself seems to invite comparisons to Bill Bernbach, widely regarded as the ad industry’s most influential figure of the twentieth century. Bernbach, like Don, was a creative visionary who approached his work with a hint of arrogance. Also like Don, Bernbach presented himself as a conservative, old school “square” among increasingly younger, more hip coworkers and subordinates, but was widely regarded as the engine that made the creative department run. One could imagine some of Bernbach’s famous quotations about the business coming from the mouth of Don Draper. “Rules are what the artist breaks,” he said. “The memorable never emerged from a formula.” He warned, “Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It’s like love—the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.”

Sterling Cooper’s main rival for ad accounts, Doyle Dane Bernbach, is now part of the Omnicom Group, headquartered at 237 Madison Avenue.

A Season 1 episode of Mad Men drives the comparison home, along with some of the series’ themes, when the Sterling Cooper crew discusses one of the controversial 1960s campaigns that put DDB on the map, the “Think Small” campaign for German automaker Volkswagen, which debuted in 1959 and was voted as the number one ad campaign of all time by Advertising Age magazine in 1999. Another very memorable, and controversial, campaign was the notorious “Daisy” television commercial for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential reelection bid in 1964, depicting a young girl in a meadow, picking petals off a flower, only to be interrupted by the mushroom cloud of a Soviet nuclear strike. The ad is widely credited with sealing Johnson’s victory over challenger Barry Goldwater and landed Maxwell Dane, its likely creator, on Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” (In Mad Men’s first season, which takes place during the presidential campaign of 1960, Sterling Cooper had handled the ads for Nixon’s first presidential bid four years previously.)

Many of a certain age will remember other award-winning and genre-challenging DDB ad campaigns: Life cereal’s “Mikey” commercials, Chanel’s “Share the Fantasy,” and the “Gorilla” spots for American Tourister luggage.

Also like Sterling Cooper, DDB became part of a larger corporation after years as an independent firm: in 1986, it merged with Needham, Harper & Steers, a Chicago firm that had several coveted accounts, including General Mills, Continental Airlines and McDonald’s, and was a pioneer in the fast-growing segment of television advertising. The new DDB-Needham then joined another large firm, BBDO (also referenced several times on Mad Men) to form the huge Omnicom Group, whose offices are still located on the advertising industry’s most famous boulevard. The modernist office tower at 437 Madison Avenue, with its black marble plaza, granite benches, and ornate lampposts, is also the headquarters of CNBC, the Rockefeller Bros. Fund, Nixon-Peabody, and the Carnegie Corporation, among others.