Via.

EDIT: Hm, apparently they took the video down. Here it is.

In the first ever episode of the television show Mad Men, the creative team at the fictional advertising firm of Sterling Cooper, headed by Creative Director Donald Draper, is faced with the end of an era: medical science has proved that smoking cigarettes is bad for the health, so no longer can cigarette advertisements feature "doctors" propounding the health and lifestyle benefits of, say, Lucky Strikes.

Of course, the reason they can't just keep doing what they are doing is that to do so would be to make a promise that consumers would understand as unkeepable, which would presumably be more than the brand can withstand. Again, advertising is based on trust, or, to put that another way, at least the illusion of coherence with reality.

The end of an era at Sterling Cooper.

Draper's brilliant bit of advertising is to promise less from Lucky Strikes. (I bet you thought I'd never get back around to this, didn't you?) Draper's plan: Since his client can't promise that their customers will have a healthier life, promise anything else that's true.

The moral of the story? Any keepable promise is better than any unkeepable one. If your company can't promise, e.g. that you're no longer a gas company, promise that you have clean floors in your bathrooms. Hence, "It's toasted."

The Lucky Strike executive protests: "But everybody else's tobacco is toasted."

Draper: "No. Everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strikes' is toasted."

I’m going to have to apologize for what is going to seem like a non sequitur in the midst of Paul’s BP posts, but I ran into this the other day and I wanted to seem timely.

A while back, we posted a Twitter taxonomy which included the bot, “a character that spams non-original content as part of a larger kind of humorous or pithy zeitgeist”. Excuse of the Day is one example. But what about a character played by a person to similar effect?

The Mars Phoenix probe was the first one of these I followed, so although another name might be more appropriate, I'm going to stick with calling them bots. Phoenix was notable because instead of a quote-a-day it was used as a marketing/ educational tool of sorts. The probe would give updates on itself and answer questions. The gesture of Twittering gave what could have been a dry scientific mission some personality.

Until the mission ended, the identity of @MarsPhoenix was not widely known. I’m glad that they did this as it kept some of the magic alive. If you didn’t know who it was, then it might as well be from a robot on Mars. It was understood, however, that the Tweets were coming from someone at official at NASA. When you’re marketing something, accountability is important.

But what if you are marketing for someone, presumably as them, and they don’t know about it? That’s what happened over the summer as a group of fans pretended to be the characters of Mad Men on Twitter, without the okay from AMC.

On the web, anyone can be Don Draper, but should they?
Image from SNL short: Don Draper's Guide to Picking Up Women.

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Mark Greif lambasted the television show Mad Men this week in the London Review of Books, admonishing us all for allowing ourselves to let Mad Men use the past to congratulate a largely non-laudable present. I won't take up Greif's systematic point, but I do advise fans of the show (as so many of us are in the design industry) to give yourself a moment this week and take what he says seriously.

Regardless of whether you agree with Greif, one facet of the show that is meritorious is the occasional opportunities it provides for us to analyze advertising strategies which, despite their putatively dismissable content (cigarettes, or say, Richard Nixon), are still at very much at play in our current landscape. Witness, for example, Lucky Strikes.

All through the first episode, Draper, as creative director, is racking his brains for the right pitch to sell Lucky Strike cigarettes. Unable to bring even a single good idea into the meeting with his client, Draper asks the company president, who’s come all the way from Winston-Salem, to describe how tobacco is made. ‘We plant it in the South Carolina sunshine,’ the old man drawls, ‘cut it, cure it, toast it – ’ ‘There you go!’ Draper says, and writes: LUCKY STRIKE: IT’S TOASTED. When [Draper] pulls the stunt, you don’t know whether you’re supposed to be impressed or to feel that the whole advertising industry is unconscionable and stupid.

Behind Greif's rather contentious phrasing, there's a real question, one that's still relevant today. Namely, why is it that advertising seems to be able to "say anything it wants," not just in an ethical sense, but also in the sense that seemingly arbitrary taglines, slogans, and brand names?

Draper: "We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want."

Basically, I want to know what part of our collective psyche things like "Budweiser: Whaaaasup?" or "It's Toasted," appeal to, and whether or not we can employ that knowledge in the service of a less heinous goal than, say, flatly undeserving corporate advertising. That's what I'll be pondering this weekend, and I invite you to do the same.