Is Mad Men the new CSI?

989 Design is not only a graphic design studio, but we are a boutique ad agency. And by boutique, I mean small, it just sounds fancier. We do the same things most agencies do: prospecting and landing clients, design and copywriting, branding and ad placement, and so on. We'll probably talk more about this elsewhere on the site, but between Laurie and myself, we have nearly 40 years of experience in design and advertising.

I've been watching the new season of Mad Men on AMC and loving it. If you haven't watched the show, you are missing out. As someone with a keen interest in advertising (coming out of college, I was going to go into ad copywriting, but we'll talk more about that another time) and a few years of experience at a large agency working on a few HUGE accounts, I have an appreciation for the history of advertising.

For those who haven't seen it, Mad Men is centered on a small-to-medium-size agency in New York in the early 1960s, they heyday of Madison Avenue. Even though Sterling Cooper is fictional, they reference a lot of actual ads and agencies in the show. One of the first things you notice when watching the show is the dynamic of the agency offices. Everybody smokes...all of the time. At their desks, in meetings, etc. Women are treated like they are children (on a good day) or property of the agency (most of the time). The other thing that jumps out is that everybody drinks. A lot.

My agency experience is that a few people still smoke, but they have to go outside to do it. Women are not only equal, but in the agency I worked at there were more women than men. The one thing that still holds, though, is that the three-martini lunch still exists. Except instead of martinis, they were three-beer lunches. Our biggest client was Coors Brewing Company and when we'd do company meetings and studio lunches and so forth, the beers flowed freely. On many Friday afternoons, the agency would loosen up a bit and start the weekend early—and the Coors Light would be flowing (in my case, substitute Wednesday evening for Friday afternoon because a handful of studio artists worked a three-day week, ending on Wednesday).

Working in an atmosphere like that was a lot of fun, not because they let us drink while we were working, but because they let the creatives pretty much run free as long as we didn't miss deadlines. There's something to be said for that—treating people like grown-ups instead of policing their every move. The things that are acceptable behavior in a design studio/ad agency wouldn't fly most places, but different rules apply when you're working with creative people.


And when I watch Mad Men, I get the same feeling I used to get when I worked at the agency. If you have the talent, just let them do what they have to and trust that the work will get done. It's a little different in a two-person studio (although, in the interest of complete candor, I've polished off a Shiner Bock while writing this entry), but it's really not all that different.

My little trip down memory lane has pulled me away from the point, though. Remember when CSI first came on television? People loved the show from the beginning (I don't really watch the show, but I know that I'm in the minority on that) and suddenly you had this spike in interest in forensic science. There were documentaries and stories on forensic science on every channel. Schools couldn't add forensic classes quickly enough to keep up with the demand. Crime lab work was suddenly sexy.

Is advertising the new crime lab? Is Don Draper the new Grissom? Are advertising programs going to see a jump in enrollment?

And if schools see an influx of future advertising professionals, what will be the net effect on advertising?

Over the past fifty years countless industries have seen advances that nobody could have imagined, yet aside from the development of the Macintosh computer, the advertising industry still operates the same as it did in 1960. Will the next generation of Ad Men and Women bring the revolution with them?

Or will it just be more bikinis and double entendres?