Free The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell

DRAPER MAD MEN
    T he clients, big and small, national and local, flocked in. All were taken on DDB’s terms, which included a tacit ethical standard; the product must be honest and worthy of the money that the agency would be asking the public to pay for it.
    Jim Raniere, an art director who joined DDB in 1961, contrasts the ethos at DDB with agencies that friends had joined: ‘Never lie, never never say anything about a product that it can’t do’.
    The account for The Book of Knowledge , a children’s encyclopedia, came and then went when a new copywriter found it was too complicated for his eight-year-old daughter. On those grounds he refused to work on it. The rumpus was elevated to Bernbach who took the book home with him. The next morning he pronounced that the product was flawed and the client was told the agency no longer wanted to advertise it.
    High-minded, yes. It wasn’t just posturing, it was in reaction to the generally bad name that advertising had around town. And it was driven by the new breed of people that Bernbach and his managers were employing, people of a completely different stock with a completely different mindset.
    Up until the late 1950s, advertising had been seen by account people mainly as an alternative to Wall Street, with good salaries at a fairly earlyage and a respectable life dealing with upper levels of client companies in an influential milieu. Copywriters, too, tended to be from comfortably educated backgrounds. You might get the odd Italian as a visualiser but who cared? The client never knew who he was, let alone got to meet him. In the late 1950s, Jerry Della Femina, a young copywriter, was told in an interview at JWT that on the basis of his name alone, Ford Trucks ‘wouldn’t want your kind on their account’.
    But beneath the well-shined Oxfords of the comfortable WASP account executives patrolling the Madison Avenue sidewalks, the world was turning and several elements were beginning to coincide to make the Creative Revolution almost inevitable.
    AS ITALIAN-AMERICANS like Della Femina were demonstrating, there was a growing confidence among the second and third generation ethnics, people born from the mid 1930s onward. Their Ellis Island parents and grandparents, perhaps cowed from the oppressive experiences in the Europe from which they had escaped, were desperate to conform, to assimilate and become American. Deference was their watchword, but as familiarity and security came, so too did self-assurance, and this new generation no longer ‘knew their place’.
    Very few had any reservations about applying for white collar jobs in advertising agencies, an aspiration that probably would never have occurred to their parents. Although there were the occasional setbacks, increasingly foreign names were appearing on doors along the agency corridors, and ethnic origins were a matter of pride.
    George Lois remembers his interview with Lou Dorfsman at CBS Radio in the fifties; Dorfsman, son of Polish Jews, rolled George’s name around his mouth and said, ‘Lois, Lois – is that a Jewish name?’
    â€˜I’m not a fucking Jew’, countered Lois, ‘I’m a fucking Greek!’
    A key Bernbach remark, ‘You always have to work in the idiom of the times in which you live’ could be applied to the people most appropriate to produce that advertising. This group of creative people had none of the cultural inheritance of the older guard, the pre-war New York. And they certainly didn’t respect the creative legacy of the existing inhabitants of the agencies; quite the reverse. They felt alienated and appalled by it,responsible as it was for so much of the general antipathy towards advertising. It was neither their language nor their imagery. And one word above all others crops up over and over again, with deep disdain, in the contemporary interviews and records of their views.
    Phony.
    It was the one thing they did