Madison Avenue - how the Mad Men came to be

Although advertising agencies had begun to flock to offices in Madison Avenue, New York, before the war, it was only in the heady days of post-war prosperity that this street became the de facto headquarters of the US advertising industry. A lot of new, 20+ storey office buildings were constructed there in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and these prestigious skyrise workspaces attracted agencies who wanted to exude glamour and panache, and take advantage of all the fine restaurants that thronged the street level.

By the 1950s, advertising was considered a profession in its own right, not just the remit of failed newspapermen or poets. It attracted both men and women who wanted the thrill of using their creativity to make some serious cash. Hard-working (early heart attacks were common), hard drinking (those legendary three martini lunches), unconventional and often amoral, the flannel-suited Ad Man became a recognizable archetype, the epitome of a new kind of cool. Cary Grant even played one in North By Northwest (1959). For many, Englishman David Ogilvy embodied this quintessential type. He started his own ad agency, and from the very beginning, parlayed his charm and personality into the agency brand, using his British accent to stand out from the crowd.

Ogilvy's advertising ethos involved bold creativity and risk-taking, but he understood that advertising's main - indeed, only - function, was to sell. To that end copy and pictures had to be clear, simple, and provide a direct connection between customer and brand. He specialized, in the early days, in attention-grabbing campaigns that relied on a clever idea rather than a huge budget. One of his earliest, most successful campaigns was for Hathaway Shirts. Like the Arrow Shirts team almost half a century before, he latched onto an image that suggested a lifestyle, rather than just a clean collar. He added a rakish eyepatch to the model (and to 25 years of subsequent Hathaway models and the logo to this day), he intrigued the audience, who would then read the copy to find out what was going on. Hooked. The 'Hathaway man' appeared in a variety of scenarios (buying a Renoir, at the Opera, driving a tractor etc), and was in fact Baron George Wrangell, a Russian aristocrat with 20/20 vision. Ogilvy only ran the ads in The New Yorker magazine, adding to their allure. The Hathaway brand became the #1 best-selling dress shirt in the world.

Much has been written about David Ogilvy, especially as he was one of the first ad men to recognize that if you create a story around an ad campaign, you're getting a lot of free advertising. He made his agency part of the story-telling process of a campaign. Although he disliked the label, Ogilvy was hailed as a genius in his day, and more than a decade after his death, is still very much considered a guru of modern advertising.

However, not all the ad industry archetypes being generated in Madison Avenue in the 1950s were positive ones. In 1957, sociologist Vince Packard published his exposé of the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard accused the entire ad industry of psychologically manipulating the public into buying products they didn't want or need, usually via embedded or subliminal messages in ads and images. He also suggested these techniques were being imported into politics, and were used to persuade voters to accept politicians and policies they would otherwise have objected to. As a conspiracy theory, it convinced, especially given the Cold War paranoia of the era. People were used to the concept of 'the enemy within', on the alert for subtle Communist propaganda, leery of the concept of mind control. The Hidden Persuaders became a best-seller, and has colored attitudes towards the advertising industry – painting them as villains, out to exploit and brainwash the public – ever since.

In the 1960s, campaigns featuring heavy spending in different mass media channels became more prominent. For example, the Esso gasoline company spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a brand awareness campaign built around the simple and alliterative theme Put a Tiger in Your Tank. Psychologist Ernest Dichter and DDB Worldwide copywriter Sandy Sulcer learned that motorists desired both power and play while driving, and chose the tiger as an easy–to–remember symbol to communicate those feelings. The North American and later European campaign featured extensive television and radio and magazine ads, including photos with tiger tails supposedly emerging from car gas tanks, promotional events featuring real tigers, billboards, and in Europe station pump hoses "wrapped in tiger stripes" as well as pop music songs. Tiger imagery can still be seen on the pumps of successor firm ExxonMobil.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of cable television and particularly MTV. Pioneering the concept of the music video, MTV ushered in a new type of advertising: the consumer tunes in for the advertising message, rather than it being a by-product or afterthought. As cable and satellite television became increasingly prevalent, specialty channels emerged, including channels entirely devoted to advertising, such as QVC, Home Shopping Network, and ShopTV Canada.

With the advent of the ad server, marketing through the Internet opened new frontiers for advertisers and contributed to the "dot-com" boom of the 1990s. Entire corporations operated solely on advertising revenue, offering everything from coupons to free Internet access. At the turn of the 21st century, a number of websites including the search engine Google, started a change in online advertising by emphasizing contextually relevant, unobtrusive ads intended to help, rather than inundate, users. This has led to a plethora of similar efforts and an increasing trend of interactive advertising.

The share of advertising spending relative to GDP has changed little across large changes in media. For example, in the US in 1925, the main advertising media were newspapers, magazines, signs on streetcars, and outdoor posters. Advertising spending as a share of GDP was about 2.9 percent. By 1998, television and radio had become major advertising media. Nonetheless, advertising spending as a share of GDP was slightly lower—about 2.4 percent.^[11]

A recent advertising innovation is "guerrilla marketing", which involve unusual approaches such as staged encounters in public places, giveaways of products such as cars that are covered with brand messages, and interactive advertising where the viewer can respond to become part of the advertising message. Guerrilla advertising is becoming increasing more popular with a lot of companies. This type of advertising is unpredictable and innovative, which causes consumers to buy the product or idea. This reflects an increasing trend of interactive and "embedded" ads, such as via product placement, having consumers vote through text messages, and various innovations utilizing social network services such as Facebook.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 958