'Mad Men' and Lucky Strike: It's Very Difficult to Keep the Line between Fact and Fiction
Am I just missing something here? There is a short piece about Linda Schupack, the advertising woman in charge of advertising Mad Men, a show about advertising, in the New Yorker. It goes: "Schupack, who has an Entertainment Marketer of the Year award from Ad Age on her windowsill, said that, as someone in the business, she'd been particularly impressed by [main character Don] Draper's campaign for Lucky Strike tobacco ('It's toasted'). 'Sometimes I think, What would we have done with that assignment?' she said." There is no further clarification. Are they just mucking with us? Or with Miss Linda Schupack, advertising award winner?
Time, in 1938, recounting testimony of the advertising man George Washington Hill:
But the most interesting irrelevancy of the trial was the following story about the origin of the Lucky Strike slogan: "My father [Percival S. Hill, whom George succeeded in 1925] was anxious to put out the brand of Lucky Strike cigarets, and I was not willing to put it out because I was sales manager and responsible to him for the success or failure of it, and I didn't have a reason for it. I went over to the factory one day . . . and when I got within three blocks of the factory it was very apparent to me the delicious odor and aroma of the tobacco as it passed through the toasting machines. … I said to my father, 'There is something to that process and I cannot express it.' He says, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'He cooks it, cooks the tobacco.' My father says, 'That doesn't mean anything, he cooks the tobacco, that doesn't mean anything; there is no sense in that.' . . . A man by the name of Gerson Brown came in the room at that same time and father turned to this fellow and he says, 'Gerson, what do you have that is appetizing to which heat has been applied?' And Brown says, 'I always have toast in the morning.' My father says, 'That is it-It is toasted.' And my father created the phrase that way."
Ad movies/TV about "ad men" have a way of incorporating a central (real) brand that the (fake) ad men advertise. Think about Mel Gibson and Nike in What Women Want or Bruce Willis and Victoria's Secret in (the near unwatchable) Perfect Stranger. Mad Men work a fake campaign for real brand Lucky Strike. Ad types spooge their pants over this stuff. I mean, seriously, when do ad execs EVER get the kind of awesome, filmatically-legendary, protagonists that, say, cops or even Gordon Geckos get? (of course, the fact that a screenwriter basically comes up with fake campaigns indistinguishable from real ones says something about the ad industry.)
Anyway, Mad Men has worked the edges before. There was a (interesting) Ad Age issue totally "entertainmented" (read" product placement!) last year. Link to digital edition of "throwback" Mad Men ad age
http://regmedia.co.uk/2005/11/28/dalek_cover.jpg
Yes! Totally!
Um, but like, in this case, and I know I'm being uptight, but the Lucky Strike slogan is straightforwardly being presented as of the television show?
I mean, I know "irony" and "sarcasm" don't read in print. Which is why, when reporting, one makes them obvious so as to prevent confusion. But, here, as told….???
I think the error here is the probably 25 year-old marketer person and an even younger fact checker who didn't know to look that up. Don't know what the excuse of the writer is.
She's an "entertain,ent marketer" of the year. That means she's a product placement expert.
The key word here is the preceeding line's "as someone in the business." This means she by wondering about what it would be like for HER t get such a campaign she is complimenting the show's writing staff for their selection of a fictional Draper campaign by basically comenting on it like it is a REAL thing from an agency she might be competing with. (Very Meta.) Then again, she very well might be responsible for that "period" product placement Ad Age I linked to earlier.
More importantly, she is in charge of promoting Mad Men (and, I suppose, the rest of AMCs varicose line-up). So talking to the Nyer ABOUT mad men she can;t say "Watch Men!" because they'll cut it. S she says, "As an advertising exec, I wonder what it would be like to compete against Draper." Lends creditability… etc.
Oh, man, fuck you. I just finished that and was in the midst of a super-witty, pulling together the McKinsey Conde story from Gawker, making a joke about how much Doree gets paid post. Smokers. Grrr.
No, no, take your time, come back when you get it right!
Feh. There is no more happiness. I sit, glum in my Mets color banded Fedora as water slow rises and I realize I'm just always going to be a day late, etc. Here.
As I re-read the quote again, I wonder if the NYer has entered the era of snark. Maybe the writer juxtaposed the award with a misunderstanding of the lineage of one of the best known slogans in advertising and we're all supposed to chuckle contentedly?
This is my preferred take on it. Oddly, I just re-viewed this episode last night with decidedly non-ad biz friends, and they all recognized the slogan as being real.
I prefer the Walter Raleigh Pipe Tobacco slogan heard hallucinogenically at the end of this fantastically cruel piece of work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCwrDgw088o
I wish I'd been toasted when I read this.
Choire, do you have Prince Albert in a can?
"It's toasted" is a lot better than "They cook the tobacco"
"It's toasted!" is a lot better than "They cook the tobacco!"