From the desk of Patrick Ward...
I have been an agency guy for 20 of my 25 years in PR, the last eight of which I have been an agency owner. I think that’s why I am drawn like a moth to the flame called “Mad Men,” AMC’s sleek and irresistible drama about an ad executive in the 1960s. I find myself at times thinking ‘what would Don Draper do?’ less as a decision process and more as an intellectual exercise.
Anyone who has followed the show — and if you are an agency person and you don’t watch it, you need to, right now — knows Draper is brilliant, but mostly he is impetuous. He is an impetuous philanderer, liar, drinker and parent. Last night, in another seemingly impetuous move that infuriated his partners and may imperil his agency, he took out a full page ad in the New York Times denouncing big tobacco, which he and his firm had represented for decades. There goes Don.
I found myself thinking, what would this guy do with social media? Would he be tweeting about how hung-over he was, posting Facebook photos and status updates about his many romantic indiscretions, joining social networks as Don Draper or Dick Whitman? If he capriciously takes out a full page ad in the New York Times, then keep him away from a blog!
But the beauty about Don Draper is that with his work, few things are under-calculated. In last night’s episode, he talks, perhaps anachronistically, about driving the conversation and that his provocative stance on tobacco was more strategic than anyone thinks. He gets a call from the American Cancer Society to engage him in a public service campaign, which to us today seems normal, but in an era when the ink on the Surgeon General’s warning was still wet, no one had heard of the ACS. Who won that public opinion war over time?
Now Don Draper can be as pragmatic as the next Mad Man, once admonishing his protégé, Peggy Olson, that she is not in the business of advertising auto parts to black patrons of their client, so why should she care whether the client hires them or not; a repugnant opinion in the throes of the civil rights era or anytime. But Don is strategic and I think he would look at typical corporate blogs and their all-too-common happenstantial content as wasted words. He would appreciate the opportunity social media communities provide as a direct channel to a consumer or corporate buyer and cherish it and its potential impact.
When Don Draper fires off a full page ad to the NY Times, or throws a potential client out of his office because they have no creative vision, or tells Kodak that their new slide wheel projector technology is really about memories and lifestyle, he has full strategic intent. Sometimes I wish more people would ask, ‘what would Don do?’ before they hit send or save.
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