'Get Don Draper out of retirement.' Credit: Mad Men

The final episode of Mad Men sees Don Draper in personal and professional crisis. Washed up in a West Coast spiritual retreat, the titan of Madison Avenue has dissolved into a blubbery mess. He takes a meditation class on a cliff overlooking the sea. âOm,â the group intones, and Draperâs lips curl into a faint smile. We cut to the last scene of the series, a real-life 1971 advert for Coca-Cola in which a multi-ethnic group of teenagers, assembled on an Italian hillside, sing about buying the world a Coke to usher in global harmony.
The most common interpretation is that the ad is meant to be Draperâs: he co-opts the hippie spirit he encounters to sell a surgery drink. Similarly, the torrent of creativity in Sixties American advertising, as dramatised in Mad Menâs preceding episodes, is usually seen as a more-or-less cynical appropriation of the burgeoning counterculture for commercial ends. But it might not be. The Conquest of Cool, a 1997 book by Thomas Frank, co-founder of The Baffler, makes the case that the liberal revolution came from within the business world as much as outside it. Capitalists embraced âhipâ, long-haired dope smokers because they recognised them as fellow fighters against conformity. âHip,â he says, âbecame central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.â This deep identification with hip has persisted, and is the ultimate reason why modern multinationals insist, however implausibly, on branding themselves as progressive revolutionaries.
Fifties America is looked back on as a black-and-white decade: office workers in grey flannel suits commuting, in gas-guzzling, chrome-slathered cars, between hierarchical offices and square suburban homes. And the people who lived it knew it. âBy the middle of the Fifties,â says Frank, âtalk of conformity, of consumerism, and of the banality of mass-produced culture were routine elements of middle-class American life.â
Advertising exemplified the Fifties funk. In big Madison Avenue agencies, rote formulas were preferred over creativity. Copywriters would work in separate rooms to art directors, sending their text over in pneumatic chutes for illustration. Their output addressed consumers as if they were small children, or disobedient dogs: âYou can have a lovelier complexion in 14 days with Palmolive soap, doctors prove!â or âFast! Fast! Fast relief!â from Anacin aspirin. Detroitâs big three carmakers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, hawked their latest models by naming them things like âStarfireâ or giving them space-age doodahs such as âJet-Trail Tail Lampsâ.
Then everything changed. Doyle Dane Bernbachâs adverts for the Volkswagen Beetle, beginning in 1959, âinvented what we might call anti advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism [âŚ] to consumerism itselfâ. They were clean, eye-catching and intelligent. They didnât talk down to their audience but shared a joke with them â a joke that was usually on other car companies. A tiny photo of the Beetle, an acre of white space, and the slogan âThink Smallâ â this vehicle would save petrol and get through fewer tyres, because it didnât have the cruise-ship proportions beloved by domestic brands. Another ad had a picture of the car with the caption: âThe â51 â52 â53 â54 â55 â56 â57 â58 â59 â60 â61 Volkswagen.â No planned obsolescence from these trusty Teutonic engineers.
By the end of the Sixties, pretty much the entirety of Madison Avenue was converted to the ways of DDB. Clients were toured around agenciesâ creative apartments to see the blue jeans and miniskirts of the young staff. The long hippie hair of industry stars was discussed as if it bestowed Samson-like strength in selling. Andrew Kershaw, president of Ogilvy & Mather, insisted in 1970 that he had been a Beatles fan âsince before the time they became famousâ.
This spirit suffused their output too. Every brand became anti-establishment. âJoin the Tool Revolution!â declared the radical wrench-makers at Vaco. Clairol cosmetics announced âThe Great Beige-In!â to commemorate the launch of âthree psychedelicious beiges frosted for lips and nailsâ. Oldsmobile started calling their cars âYoungsmobileâ. These were not just clumsy pitches at young consumers: by Frankâs reckoning, at least half of all ads in the mid-market magazines Life and Ladiesâ Home Journal were âhipâ between 1965 and 1970. âMadison Avenue,â he says, âwas more interested in speaking like the rebel young than in speaking to them.â Ironically, given the frugal message of DDBâs original VW ads, hip became the perfect way to stimulate consumerism: valorising the young, the cool and the new leads people to buy more stuff, more often.
Contemporary reviews of Frankâs book complained that he was too hard on the hippies, conflating the Leftist politics of the counterculture with the business-friendly fashions and tastes of youth culture in general. But was it really such a reach? In 1964, five years after its first VW ad, DDB produced a commercial for Lyndon Johnsonâs presidential campaign: a girl picking, and counting, the petals of a daisy, which morphs into the countdown for a nuclear explosion. It helped Johnson convince the country that his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a war-mongering maniac. The election was a Democrat landslide.
In truth, Goldwater would have fitted right in at DDB. When he accepted the Republican nomination for president, he declared his cause was âto free our peopleâ from suffocating big government and promote âdiversityâ and âcreativityâ. Though he lost, he laid the foundation for Ronald Reaganâs libertarian, New Deal-busting brand of republicanism. In The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the historian Gary Gerstle argues that the âneoliberal orderâ became hegemonic because it offered something for everyone: intoxicating social freedoms for the Left and economic liberalisation for the Right. Hip consumerism wasnât an oxymoron, but ruthlessly coherent.
Madison Avenue could never declare its revolution won. The charismatic outlaw stuck around, for there were always new things for him to sell to a public that continued to revere him. âWe believe in the rebel Sixties,â Frank says, âin the uprising against the humourless âestablishmentâ, like we believe in World War II as âthe good warâ.â Such a semi-mystical treatment of the young has continued, too. Writing in 1997, Frank observes the Sixties trope of Boomers being âcynical and savvy about advertisingâ re-enacted âalmost mechanicallyâ about Gen X, who according to one New York Times report had been hardened by âexcessive exposure to glad handing salesmanship early in lifeâ. Combing through modern marketing reports on Gen Z throws up the same kind of stuff: âavoid going straight for the sellâ, âput values firstâ, and âspeak their languageâ. A line in a 2018 McKinsey article could be lifted from the lips of Sixties ad man: Gen Zâs âsearch for authenticity generates greater freedom of expression and greater openness to understanding different kinds of peopleâ.
In 2017, Pepsi released a very bad ad. Kendall Jenner, who has abandoned a modelling shoot to march with diverse protesters carrying generic signs such as âjoin the conversationâ, hands a police officer a can of Pepsi in some supposed moment of anti-establishment subversion. Earlier, a photographer in a hijab scrunches up her work in frustration, then joins the pro-conversation demonstrators as they pass by. Her eyes light up when Kendall whips out her anti-fascist Pepsi: finally, something authentic to capture!
This kind of message was nothing new for the perennially second-placed soda brand: in the Sixties, it used hip consumerism to try to differentiate itself from Coca-Cola, then an icon of the conservative capitalist establishment. Campaigns for the âPepsi Generationâ showed young people riding motorbikes, or amphibious cars. An ad depicting surfers describes them as âBoard members of the Pepsi Generationâ. They were held in such high esteem by their creators that one ad man later confessed his guilt about soft drink-fuelled generational conflict: he felt they âcontributed to some of the rebelliousness that was going on within the countryâ. The 2017 commercial, however, was criticised so heavily it was pulled a day after release.
In 1997, Frank could talk about the contradiction of a market-based society that required you to behave at work, but ritually transgress when spending your wages. âHip and square are now permanently locked together,â he says, âin a self-perpetuating pageant of workplace deference and advertising outrage.â Things feel different a quarter-century later. Though ad agencies still style their campaigns as revolutions, socially progressive causes are accepted to the point where ads such as Pepsiâs 2017 opus canât even plausibly pretend to shock us. Instead, they veer towards the patronising tone of the Fifties: for a British example, see this summerâs âMaaateâ anti-misogyny campaign from Transport for London. Hip has become square. But if hip is how American capitalism understands and explains itself, then its impotency spells trouble. The very first thing the system must be able to sell is itself. Someone get Don Draper out of retirement.
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