Prompt 10: Recognizing Truth

By Jen Mylett

If you watch Mad Men, a popular TV show on AMC, you will see a glorified job that only benefits form the creative and clever tagline in a given campaign. The hard work, measurement, customer relations, and personalization are significantly less evident. In addition, the show is about marketing around the 1960s, so it’s important to note the changes that have occurred since then. In the analyzation of the show, it can be suggested that the agency is resisted to adapted its strategy to a changing media landscape, underestimating the actual impact of the television, new products and ever-changing culture. Time has altered the marketing field is such a way that we have now emerged out of the stone age and data is critical in a successful marketing program to benefit both the company and the customers.

Mad Men tends to create a false illusion about the marketing industry. Creativity becomes cliché strategy and soap operas are much more interesting. In addition, Mad Men glorifies substance abuse with hard drinking and smoking. The audience is amused with their minimal effort to provide great results in the business. It wouldn’t be unusual for a character to get a brief from the client, go away and work their magic, and then come back with unique ideas to wow the client, which is not usually the case for the real world.

In today’s world, good marketing work requires ongoing collaboration with their clients. Ideally, client and agency basically work together as one big team to create results. In addition, those traditional marketing techniques used in Mad Men would be overpriced, unaccountable, ineffective, and unnecessary. While their techniques would be expensive, those traditional avenues like billboards and TV commercials produce fairly questionable results that are essentially unmeasurable.  A lot of what gets done in the office is a long way from glamorous. But none of the hard work actually matters for marketing in the long run because it’s really not about you, it’s about the client and what they want achieve with the company.

Swystun, Jeff. "Why the Agency World Loved 'Mad Men'." Where Marketers Go to Grow. HubSpot, 12 Apr. 2015. Web. blog.hubspot.com/marketing/mad-men-influence#sm.000ub84qos6mcnn11e91foy1if42u. Accessed 6 April 2017.

"Marketing Professionals Shape the Way We See the World." All Business Schools. All Star Directories, Inc, 2017. Web. www.allbusinessschools.com/marketing/job-description. Accessed 6 April. 2017.