Real London Fog Adman Not Happy About 'Mad Men'
Those Things Did Not Happen That Way
We received the following correspondence from Richard Gilbert, whose book "Marching Up Madison Avenue," was previously written about in this space. Richard's got a bone to pick with the creators of "Mad Men" and, instead of translating his frustrations, we figured we'd just run his commentary as is. Richard writes:
"I believe, quite strongly, that Advertising Age should always advance editorial opinion, particularly when others are attempting to tell the story of our industry. The current well-acclaimed series 'Mad Men' is a perfect example.
"London Fog was not a tired, 40-year-old brand at the time, as it was launched in 1954 when it changed from Londontown Clothes, a Baltimore men's clothing manufacturer, to its current brand title and rainwear emphasis. Gilbert Advertising handled the brand through the '60s and built a body of work that was acclaimed for its creative brilliance and brand dominance. London Fog's 65% Dacron/35% cotton fabric was the soul of the rainwear industry, and in 1960 the company was at the beginning of its advertising ascendency.
"It is also questionable whether a warm, traditional, avuncular Jewish tailor like Israel Myers would ever be seen in the halls of a Sterling Cooper. From a chemistry, personality and sociological point of view, it was an impossible match. Further, in 1960, magazine censors would never accept such a 'flashing' image. We did an ad at the time for After Six Formals with a model unfurling the bow tie of a male model under the headline, 'The next affair you have, make it formal.' The New Yorker accepted the ad, but the woman's hand had to go.
"The show's producers claim that they did meticulous research, and they obviously did -- on girdles, cigarettes, clothing, furnishings, art work, etc. But they seem to have done little or none on advertising for an advertising-themed show.
"All our ads were available, many in art-director annual collections. My memoir, 'Marching Up Madison Avenue,' was also in print [and contained] a lengthy chapter on the history of London Fog and its advertising. It is also personally depressing to hear from some of the incredible young talents who worked for me asking, 'Do they have a right to do this?'
"Even more shameful is that 'Mad Men' concentrates on a decaying era of American advertising at a time when we were actually experiencing a great creative revolution led by the incomparable Doyle Dane Bernbach. The industry also benefited from an exciting infusion of new talent with Jewish writers and Italian art directors bringing refreshing humor, warmth, irreverence, entertainment and believability to the printed page and TV screen. 'Mad Men,' in truth, is locked in the '50s, and by the early '60s, the men portrayed were dinosaurs on their way to extinction.
"But give Matthew Weiner and his Emmy-award-winning writers credit. They're turning those dinosaurs into rock stars."
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So get off your moral high horse of self-glorification and deal with the fact that you're just a bunch of snake-oil sales men in suites.
Mad Men is high art compared to the repetitive drivel people are assaulted by in TV ads, billboards, print media, and anywhere else you can fish- to satisfy your lust for money. I'd like to run over the gecko, Get real.
To claim, then, that Mad Men is somehow appallingly inaccurate for getting the style of the era wrong is a great testimony to the ill-focus of your craft, Mr. Gilbert.
Lowell Thompson
http://buythecover.com
Mad Men doesn't purport that advertising as a whole is decaying; rather, that Sterling Cooper is decaying. The times are changing rather quickly, certainly not just in advertising but in the entire nation, and dinosaurs like Don Draper, Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling will not be able to (nor will want to) keep up. Which is where the true tension of the series lies. Bernbach is referenced multiple times on the show, always disparagingly, despite (or perhaps because of) his revolutionizing work in the ad industry. To miss this tension is to miss the entire point of the show.
Similarly, "Baltimore Fog" as a brand wouldn't move a lot of raincoats, would it?
While fiction is all around us, I would think television drama has less of an obligation to scrupulous accuracy than advertising itself.
Next you're going to tell me that we can't build a simple bicycle generator using coconuts and vines.
Limit your exposure was used by the writers and Draper's character as a way to send Sal a don't ask, don't tell type of message regarding his sexuality. It was not meant to be an example of Sterling Cooper's work for London Fog.
The show is set in an ad agency, but it's about the lives of people living in early 1960s America. It is not a docu-drama of the ad industry.
I'll be looking for a copy of Gilbert's memoir, it sounds interesting. Hopefully season four will reflect some of the creative energy of the era that he mentions. I agree that the show so far is stuck in the 1950s. Although I wasn't alive back then, I've always had the impression that the fifties really came to an end with Kennedy's assassination. The sixties as a time of upheaval and massive social change seemed to kick into gear in the second half of the decade.
The story remains to be told on screen, and when it is, it'll be a dilly.
Bill Way
New York NY
"Knock your socks off," "The medium is the message", and (my fave) "I'm in a really good place right now" are just some of the post-'63 locutions used recently. How much work does it require to edit these anachronisms out? Don't they know anyone over 40?
I used to think "thirtysomething" had an iffy take on the ad biz, but in retrospect, that show's makers evidenced a genuine interest in the setting they chose, and they used its nuts and bolts to comment on the society at large. Conversely, the men behind "Mad" stick to easy retro-targets like sexism, racism, and smoking and drinking in the workplace. But how much difference does Madison Avenue really make to what they are saying?
My favorite little snippet of Draper's irrelevance was the day he dismissively mocked the ground-breaking VW bug ad -- touting the car's ugliness -- completely missing the irony, and the future. He's a farce. But a studly one.
second Draper clearly states in his meeting that there is no reason for The owners of London Fog to be worried because they have 65% of market share.
If you want reality, watch American Experience.
Cheers/George
Which is what?
And here was me thinking it was all about an ad agency in the early sixties.
Cheers/George
was happening. And, of course, we never drank at 10 in the morning, we always waited at least until noon.
I don't know that anything other than the use of names of actual people companies and products bears any relationship to reality. They are elements to storytelling and some of the storytelling has been quite brilliant.
The point of that "limit your exposure" campaign was to advance the story of Don and Sal sharing confidences, about Sal's homosexuality and Don't adultary. The use of London Fog helped illustrate a culture gap between Sterling Cooper and their new British owners. And the jewishness of the London Fog owner showed a certain amount of progress from two years earlier when a Jewish owned department store seemed to alienate Draper and his cohorts.
I doubt Mr. Gilbert is really that angry, only wishing to remind us all that he and his agency played a role in the real life London Fog story.
Duely noted.
If this article had been written a couple months ago when this episode aired and if Mr. Gilbert had just used it as a segue to discuss his own real life London Fog story, I would have found it more interesting than this feigned expression of outrage.
The article articulates few concrete objections, and one of them is based on an inapposite analogy. It is hardly surprising that the New Yorker would reject the image of a woman's hand unfurling a man's tie -- not, as Wheaton suggests, because it is a racy image in itself, comparable to the "stripping" image proposed by Mad Men, but because it eliminates the safe ambiguity in the text: "The next affair you have, make it formal." The text and image together fairly screams Fornication with no plausible deniability -- a situation that is miles beyond the racy but age-old stripping gesture imagined (but not implemented) in the television show.
But, yeah, other than that, you really showed me!
--Ken Wheaton
sethblink even signed off with "Duely noted".
Wonder who will be having the duel, though.