How The Mad Men Lost The Plot - FTimes

How the Mad Men lost the plot 08/11/16 13:00
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How the Mad Men lost the

plot
The arrival of Facebook and Twitter appeared
to threaten the advertising industry’s very
existence. So what happened next?
NOVEMBER 6, 2015 by: Ian Leslie
Even admen have souls, and some of them are enduring

dark nights. Jeff Goodby is co-chairman of Goodby,
Silverstein & Partners, a San Francisco advertising
agency responsible for some of the most famous
campaigns of the 1990s, including ones for Nike and
Budweiser. On his return from this year’s annual ad
industry awards festival at Cannes in June, Goodby
wrote a rueful piece for The Wall Street Journal. In the
past, he said, the only true measure of success was
whether the public knew and cared about your work.
“You could get into a cab and find out, in a mile or two,
whether you mattered in life, just by asking the driver.”
Now, “No one knows what we do any more.”
https://www.ft.com/content/cd1722ba-8333-11e5-8e80-1574112844fd Page 1 of 15
Cannes, said Goodby, used to be a showcase for some of

the most famous ideas in the world. This year, it felt
more like a convention of industrial roofing specialists,
discussing the latest in fibreglass insulation technology.
Sure, there was ingenuity on display: content delivery
systems, co-ordinated interactive installations. But when
he got home and tried to tell friends from outside the
industry what he had seen, they looked bored, even
pitying.
An industry that used to compete with Hollywood is

starting to wonder if it has become a colonial outpost of
Silicon Valley. The prime spots on the Cannes beachfront
this year belonged to Facebook and Google. A recent
report from Accenture said that “marketing is so
inextricably linked to technology that, by 2017, chief
marketing officers are projected to spend more on
information technology and analytics than chief
information officers.”
Ten years ago, ad agencies thought they had hit on a new

formula for success: move on from the blunt instruments
of conventional advertising and embrace the laser-sharp
selling tools of digital media. The industry’s about-turn
was made partly out of an instinct for self-preservation,
but also from a yearning to be aligned with the zeitgeist,
in a world where glamour has migrated from Madison
Avenue to Palo Alto. To some, however, it feels as if they
have given up the ghost.
Goodby’s cri de coeur echoed the anxieties of others. In

April this year, Giles Hedger, chief of strategy for Leo
Burnett Worldwide, wrote a polemic for the industry’s
UK trade journal, Campaign, bemoaning the domination
of advertising by technology: “The belief that [the]
marketing contract can be stripped of all its joyful
subjectivity until all that remains between consumer and
brand is transaction … is the fallacy of our time.” Hedger

described his views as “heresy” but said he believed “the
voices of sanity are growing around us”.
There is a schism in the church of brands. Ad agencies

have fervently embraced the digital gospel. But by doing
so, say the doubters, they lost sight of what made the
industry valuable in the first place.
Coca-Cola’s 1971 “I’d like to teach the world to sing” ad marked a switch towards
advertising that aimed to “lift the heart”
The series finale of Mad Men ended, fittingly, with an ad.

A multiracial group of hippyish young people stand on a
hilltop and sing a hymn-like song, while holding bottles
of Coca-Cola. “I’d like to teach the world to sing”, which
first aired in 1971, was the perfect ending to Mad Men for
several reasons, but one of them is that it ushered in a
new era of advertising.
Until the 1970s, advertising was regarded as a branch of

sales. It was thought that ads existed to persuade the
consumers you couldn’t meet in person of your brand’s
unique attributes: Persil washes whiter. Then, Coke and
others started to find success with ads that didn’t try to
persuade anyone of anything. “I’d like to teach the world

to sing” said nothing about how the drink tasted or
whether it was more refreshing than its rivals. It simply
lifted the heart a little and got everyone singing its song.
From the 1970s onwards,

the ad industry entered a
creative golden age,
making ads which
millions enjoyed, quoted
and sang. When I started
in advertising in the
A mid-1980s Levi’s ad: the blend of sex,
music and Americana made each new one a
1990s, the industry was
national event still confident. It had
passed the point of peak
hubris (which we can date to 1987, when the Saatchi
brothers, bored one afternoon, tried to buy a bank) but it
knew what it was for. We made famous stuff, and we
made stuff famous. Every ad in the Levi’s campaign, for
instance, with its combustible blend of sex, music and
Americana, was a national event.
Early in the 21st century, the digital era arrived and the
fame factory was repurposed. Big TV campaigns
suddenly came to be seen as inherently inefficient and
primitive. Finance directors, who had always regarded
the money spent on advertising as suspicious — it
seemed to work, but they couldn’t quite see how — seized
the opportunity to hold ad agencies more accountable.
Online, it was possible to measure exactly how many
“impressions” an ad received, and (in some cases) which
ones led to a sale.
Best of all, the internet appeared to solve what was

known as the wastage problem. Put an ad for your coffee
brand in a Coronation Street break and you’ll
immediately reach a large section of your target
audience. But not

everyone who
watches
Coronation Street
is thinking of
buying coffee, or
even drinks it —
yet you’re paying
for them anyway,
since the bigger the
audience, the
higher the cost of the airtime. Online, you could just
target the people who had bought your brand before, or
were in the market for it; if you sold tents, Google’s data
allowed you to target 18-year-old festival-goers.
Marketers could even tailor their messages for different
consumers, so that each selling claim was never less than
relevant. No more wastage.
As if that weren’t enough, social media offered new ways

to talk to consumers. The buzzword was “engagement”, a
concept that Google and Facebook began assiduously
promoting. Advertising is conventionally a one-way
communication, unless you count shouting at the TV.
Social media allowed marketers to co-opt consumers by
inviting them to share ads, enter competitions, and tweet
or blog about the brand. Every self-respecting brand
outfitted itself with a Facebook page, YouTube channel
and Twitter hashtag. Accountability, efficient targeting
and free media: it was almost too good to be true.
Marketing directors, cheered on by CFOs, management
consultants and analysts, boasted about the increasing
percentage of their budget devoted to “digital”. Ad
agencies scrambled to reinvent themselves, hiring data
scientists and social media specialists.
Everyone agreed that TV ads were not just wasteful, but
crude and intrusive, and that viewers would use new

technologies to avoid them (an undercurrent of self-
loathing is never far from the industry’s surface). The
entire edifice of mass marketing seemed to be crumbling.
Why would you want to send the same message out to
millions of people at a time, via a technology that first
became popular when Dwight Eisenhower was in the
White House? Why would you want to teach the world to
sing, when you could offer your most cherished
customers a personal encounter with your brand?
In 2010, Pepsi embarked on an audacious new marketing

strategy. Foregoing its slot in the Super Bowl, America’s
annual showcase for lavish TV ads, it diverted its TV
budget into a social media campaign: the “Pepsi Refresh
Project”. Consumers were invited to propose ideas that
would have a positive impact on society, and Pepsi
promised to fund the ones that gained the most votes, via
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. “We wanted to explore
how a brand could be integrated into the digital space,”
Frank Cooper, then Pepsi’s “chief consumer engagement
officer” explained.
The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social

media campaign is supposed to accomplish: millions of
Facebook likes and thousands of new Twitter followers.
But it didn’t sell Pepsi. Pepsi Cola and Diet Pepsi both
lost about 5 per cent of their market shares over the
course of the year — a calamitous decline. The brand
returned to TV. Bob Hoffman, a veteran American
adman who blogs as the Ad Contrarian, has gained a
large following for his savage critiques of digital hype.
After Pepsi Refresh, he concluded, “only zealots and fools
will continue to bow down to the gods of social media.”
The Pepsi debacle emboldened the ad industry’s other

contrarians to point out that, despite the dazzling
promises of digital, nearly all brands in mature

categories still rely on conventional media. At the risk of
being labelled Luddite, they suggested that although the
internet has changed how the game is played, it has not
changed its fundamental rules: mass marketing works;
fame works; emotion works — and “legacy media”,
especially TV, still do all of this better than the new.
…
Like many insurgencies, this one has been fired by a

book. How Brands Grow (OUP, 2010), is by Professor
Byron Sharp, of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the
University of South Australia. Most marketing books are
long on airy assertion and short on rigour. How Brands
Grow is the opposite. It is empirical, closely argued and,
in its sober way, incendiary. Sharp marshals a vast array
of evidence from many different categories — soft drinks,
motorbikes, concrete mixers — and identifies universal
laws of brand purchasing. To date, nobody has seriously
challenged his findings, though plenty have ignored
them.
Sharp’s first law is that brands can’t get bigger on the

back of loyal customers. Applying a statistical analysis to
sales data, he demonstrates that the majority of any
successful brand’s sales comes from “light buyers”:
people who buy it relatively infrequently. Coca-Cola’s
business is not built on a hardcore of Coke lovers who
drink it daily, but on the millions of people who buy it
once or twice a year. You, for instance, may not think of
yourself as a Coke buyer, but if you’ve bought it once in
the last 12 months, you’re actually a typical Coke
consumer. This pattern recurs across brands, categories,
countries and time. Whether it’s toothpaste or
computers, French cars or Australian banks, brands
depend on large numbers of people — that’s to say, the
masses — who buy them only occasionally, leave long

gaps between purchases and buy competing brands in
between.
If you work for

a brand owner,
The industry yearned to be aligned the implications
with the zeitgeist, in a world where are profound.
glamour has migrated to Palo Alto First, you will
never increase
your brand’s
market share by targeting existing users — the task that
digital media performs so efficiently. The effort and
expense marketers put into targeting their own
customers with emails and web banners is largely
wasted; loyalty programmes, says Sharp, “do practically
nothing to drive growth”. What seems like a prudent use
of funds — focusing on people who have already proved
they like the brand — is actually just spinning wheels.
Second, and paradoxically, a successful brand needs to

find a way of reaching people who are not in its target
market, in the sense of people who are predisposed to
buy it. The brand’s advertising must somehow gain the
attention of people who are not interested in it, have
never bought it, or who bought it so long ago they can’t
remember — so that when they are ready to buy, it
automatically springs to mind. In the wastage is the
value.
Advertising, says Sharp, works best when it doesn’t try

and persuade, but merely makes us remember the brand
at the point of purchase. He call this “mental
availability”. Human beings have powerful spam filters:
we screen out nearly all of the 30,000 or so brands in a
supermarket. Advertising opens people’s eyes; you are
simply more likely to notice a product in a store, or on a
webpage, if you already know it. Gordon Brown, founder

of market research company Millward Brown, suggested
that advertising’s role is to make a brand “interesting” as
it sits on the shelf.
The most effective ads don’t sell, but they do make

people buy. By keeping the brand alive in your mind,
Coke ads change the probability of you buying it in the
next year by a minuscule proportion, a nudge so small
that you almost certainly won’t notice it, which is why
people often say that advertising doesn’t affect them. But
that tiny effect adds up to millions of cans.
The John Lewis Christmas ads, which put emotion centre stage, have proved a
particularly eﬀective use of TV
Brands are not the rich sources of differentiation

marketers like to think of them as, but short cuts through
the complexity of decision-making. Most consumers
aren’t aware of, or interested in, the difference between
Nescafé and Kenco and don’t want to spend longer than
they need to thinking about which they prefer. They just
want to get coffee and get home. Marketers are usually
surprised to hear this and find it hard to accept — they
like to imagine that people who buy their brand are
deeply attached to it. But the data show that even people
who regularly favour one brand over others will pick a
competitor if it happens to be more easily available or
cheaper that day. In the words of Sharp’s mentor,
Professor Andrew Ehrenberg: “Your customers are
customers of other brands who occasionally buy you.”
All of this
makes
Brand advertising, at best, does “engagement”
something very different to a search largely
result, an email or a Facebook pointless. Light
update buyers aren’t
fans of your
brand. They don’t think of it as special or even unique.
They aren’t much interested in whether your vodka is
from Russia or Sweden, or how many times it has been
distilled. No surprise, then, that they almost certainly
don’t follow your brand on Twitter or visit its Facebook
page, or that they can think of a thousand things they’d
rather do than share a “digital experience”, let alone sign
up to a “project”.
Even the people who do join brand pages on Facebook

hardly ever click on them. The US company Forrester
Research has found that the rate of engagement among a
brand’s Facebook fans is seven in 10,000; for Twitter it is
three in 10,000. People might watch ads on Facebook or
YouTube, but that’s about all the interaction they want
(Facebook itself recently conceded this point). A senior
marketer at the drinks company Diageo, where Sharp’s
book has been influential, put it to me bluntly. “After 10
or 15 years of f***ing around with digital we’ve realised
that people don’t want to ‘engage’ with brands, because
they don’t care about them.’
What if you were to invent a way of getting light buyers

to recall your brand just as they are about to choose?
Ideally, it would reach millions of people who aren’t
particularly thinking about your product. You’d want
them to see the same thing at around the same time, so
that they can talk to each other about what they’ve seen,
reinforcing each other’s memories of it. You would need

to sneak up on them, since they have near-zero interest
in hearing from you, indeed don’t want to. You’d need a
form of content requiring negligible mental effort to
process: one which comes in bite-sized chunks, but
which is still capable of moving and delighting. It turns
out there is an app for that: the TV ad.
TV is in healthier condition than anyone predicted 10

years ago. The average viewer watches nearly as much
TV, on TV sets, as he or she always did, and now they
watch programmes on mobiles and tablets too. We aren’t
skipping ads any more than we used to: 87 per cent of
viewing in the UK is “live”. A recent US study found that
ad-skipping is declining; people are too distracted by
their phones to bother. The passive nature of TV turns
out to be its hidden weapon: it facilitates a détente
between viewer and advertiser. The best ads make us pay
attention and look up from our phones.
In the past few years, the success of the retailer John

Lewis (http://next.ft.com/content/92c95704-6c6d-11e5-
8171-ba1968cf791a)has gone some way to restoring the
status of TV advertising. Few marketers have failed to
notice how effective its Christmas ads have been. In one,
a boy’s impatience for the big day turns out to be caused
by his desire to give his parents their present. John Lewis
largely forgoes persuasion for emotion, and for good
reason. In the past 30 years, scientists have shown that
we are much more likely to retain something mentally
when we have a strong emotional response to it. Ads
imprint themselves on the cortex when they touch the
heart.
Les Binet, from John Lewis’s agency Adam & Eve DDB,
is one of the industry’s most respected experts on
advertising effectiveness. In 2013, on behalf of the IPA,
Binet, along with Peter Field, conducted an analysis of

the most successful UK campaigns of the past 30 years.
They found that “the most effective advertisements of all
are those with little or no rational content”, and that TV
is the emotional medium par excellence. An online
banner ad, however smartly targeted, is unlikely to make
anyone grin, gasp or weep.
John Lewis ads are instantly recognisable, as are those

from, for instance, the long-running campaigns for
Walkers crisps or Jack Daniel’s. Since the amount of
cognitive energy that people expend on brands is so tiny,
they generally stick with what they know and reach for
familiar things: a name, a pack, a logo. The challenge for
any brand, then, is to be both interesting and consistent.
Lucy Jameson, the CEO of Grey London, told me that her
agency creates “long ideas”: tightly defined themes that
are endlessly varied and refreshed.
…
Marketers consistently undervalue consistency. Diageo

recently carried out an audit of all the endlines that it
had attached to one of its biggest brands, Guinness, and
were embarrassed to discover it had used more than 20
different slogans in 15 years. What’s more, when it asked
people to recall an endline, the only one they
remembered was “Good things come to those who wait”,
which hadn’t run since 1999. Vast sums of money had
been spent on campaigns which probably had short-term
effects but barely left a trace in consumer memories.
The fame of a brand takes years of investment to build

but, properly maintained, it becomes a gusher of cash,
cascading down the generations — Warren Buffett, one
of Coca-Cola’s biggest shareholders, has earned billions
from this principle. But in the short term, the effects of
advertising on consumer memories are very hard to
measure. No wonder
marketing directors get
addicted to what Martin
Weigel, of Nike’s agency
Wieden + Kennedy, calls
the “crack” of instant
data: likes, shares,
impressions.
Laurence Green, of
London agency 101,
distinguishes between
two classes of
advertising. There are ads for when you know what
you’re looking for — if I want to find a plumber, I used to
look in the local paper. Google is unbeatable at this,
which is why it has wreaked havoc on the newspaper
business. Then there is advertising which burnishes the
aura of a brand in the minds of people who don’t yet
want to buy it, by imbuing it with meaning. A soft drink
can come to represent optimism, a chain of stores the
warmth of middle-class homes. Google and Facebook,
says Green, still haven’t shown that they can do this.
Don Draper’s successors instinctively understood the

commercial value of fame, emotion and consistency. But
they never quite defined it. We now know that brand
advertising, at its best, does something very different to a
salesperson, a search result, an email or a Facebook
update. It injects a brand into the cultural bloodstream
and, by doing so, books a spot in the most important
media of all: people’s brains.
The question is whether this revelation has come too late

to save the ad industry. The admen have allowed their
lunch to be eaten by a host of specialists in digital, social
media and data management. According to a report on
the industry from the accounting firm Kingston Smith

W1, ad agency profits averaged 10.7 per cent in 2014,
their lowest level for seven years.
The contrarians are gaining ground, however. The

vaunted efficiency of digital marketing has been
undermined by the prevalence of fraudulent data. It is
estimated that 50 per cent of online ad impressions are
from “non-human traffic” — that’s to say, digital robots.
The introduction of adblocking software (http://next.ft.c
om/content/c84a647e-d3af-11e4-99bd-00144feab7de)
to Apple’s latest operating system is talked of as a
potentially fatal threat to online ads. Meanwhile, TV
adspend is at a record high, boosted by the campaigns of
digital businesses like Amazon, Facebook and Google.
If TV is in good shape, that is partly because it has given

itself an upgrade: HD, bigger screens and better content
— such as Mad Men. In fact the only part of the TV
package that hasn’t improved is the ads. According to
Kantar Media, in 1986, 28 per cent of people in Britain
said they enjoyed the ads more than the programmes.
Today, only 12 per cent say so.
Perhaps there is a moral here for any industry threatened

by technological disruption. In the rush to reinvention,
don’t forget your USP.
Ian Leslie is a writer who also works as a freelance

strategist in the advertising industry. Twitter:
@mrianleslie (https://twitter.com/mrianleslie)
Illustrations by Francesco Ciccolella
Letter in response to this report
Making ads stay long in our consciousness / From Trish

Evans (http://next.ft.com/content/0dd19fee-87c9-11e5-
90de-f44762bf9896)
Print a single copy of this article for personal use.

Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to
others. © The Financial Times Ltd.
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How the Mad Men lost the plot 08/11/16 13:00

How the Mad Men lost the

NOVEMBER 6, 2015 by: Ian Leslie

Even admen have souls, and some of them are enduring

Cannes, said Goodby, used to be a showcase for some of

An industry that used to compete with Hollywood is

Ten years ago, ad agencies thought they had hit on a new

Goodby’s cri de coeur echoed the anxieties of others. In

brand is transaction … is the fallacy of our time.” Hedger

There is a schism in the church of brands. Ad agencies

The series finale of Mad Men ended, fittingly, with an ad.

Until the 1970s, advertising was regarded as a branch of

persuade anyone of anything. “I’d like to teach the world

From the 1970s onwards,

Best of all, the internet appeared to solve what was

audience. But not

As if that weren’t enough, social media offered new ways

Everyone agreed that TV ads were not just wasteful, but

crude and intrusive, and that viewers would use new

In 2010, Pepsi embarked on an audacious new marketing

The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social

The Pepsi debacle emboldened the ad industry’s other

promises of digital, nearly all brands in mature

Like many insurgencies, this one has been fired by a

Sharp’s first law is that brands can’t get bigger on the

masses — who buy them only occasionally, leave long

If you work for

Second, and paradoxically, a successful brand needs to

Advertising, says Sharp, works best when it doesn’t try

webpage, if you already know it. Gordon Brown, founder

The most effective ads don’t sell, but they do make

Brands are not the rich sources of differentiation

customers of other brands who occasionally buy you.”

Even the people who do join brand pages on Facebook

What if you were to invent a way of getting light buyers

reinforcing each other’s memories of it. You would need

TV is in healthier condition than anyone predicted 10

In the past few years, the success of the retailer John

Binet, along with Peter Field, conducted an analysis of

John Lewis ads are instantly recognisable, as are those

Marketers consistently undervalue consistency. Diageo

The fame of a brand takes years of investment to build

Don Draper’s successors instinctively understood the

The question is whether this revelation has come too late

the industry from the accounting firm Kingston Smith

The contrarians are gaining ground, however. The

If TV is in good shape, that is partly because it has given

Perhaps there is a moral here for any industry threatened

Ian Leslie is a writer who also works as a freelance

Illustrations by Francesco Ciccolella

Letter in response to this report

Making ads stay long in our consciousness / From Trish

Print a single copy of this article for personal use.

Promoted Content BY Siemens

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