What “Mad Men” Taught Me About Targeted Ads

Targeted ads take the art out of marketing

Fashionably late, as I am to most things in life, I fell in love with the hit TV series “Mad Men” three years after its seven-season run came to an end. 

I was swept off my feet by the show’s intimate storytelling and infinitely complex characters. It’s no wonder the series has earned an impressive 135 awards. It’s subtle, believable and beautifully reflective of the 1960s zeitgeist. 

Our budding romance started out as a typical summer fling: fueled by boredom and Netflix. But it quickly turned into something more. Like so many summer romances, our relationship met its heartbreaking end come Labor Day. A pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a box of tissues accompanied my tearful viewing of the series finale. 

“Mad Men” is about a lot of things: existential angst, suffocating workplace sexism, sinful amorality—all depicted through realistic people and their lives, rather than sweeping political statements. In a period of major social upheaval, characters in “Mad Men” struggle with issues of identity and fulfillment. It’s fitting, then, that the show centers around a profession built on fabricating beautiful images: advertising. Main characters sell products promising happiness yet can’t seem to find lasting satisfaction of their own. 

Major plot points unfold at the Madison Avenue advertising firm as we see self-made creative genius Don Draper deliver flawless pitches to clients like Lucky Strike, Kodak and Heinz. 

Watching a believable—albeit dramatized—portrayal of the mid-twentieth century marketing scene 60 years later, it’s astonishing how much this landscape has changed. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the ads pitched in “Mad Men” versus the sponsored content that harasses me in between Instagram stories—Sugar Bear Hair, I’m looking at you. 

In his book “Anti-Social Media,” media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan notes that “marketing has changed from something like poetry to something like engineering.” Marketing, he argues, has lost its soul in the digitized world. I agree. To understand why, we must look at advertising’s changing platforms. 

Creating ad campaigns for a large audience necessitates a high level of creativity. Super Bowl commercials are an excellent example of this trend. 

They have to be memorable and appeal to collective human desires and core emotions. This is what Vaidhyanathan meant when he referred to marketing as a kind of poetry. In the Draper era of advertising, every ad was designed for a larger audience; they didn’t have the technology to do otherwise. 

In our digital world, data-driven marketing has allowed companies to create ads for much smaller audiences. 

Think about where you see the majority of advertisements nowadays—it’s probably online. Over the past decade, digital advertising has skyrocketed. According to a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), total internet ad revenue has increased from $26 billion in 2010 to $107.5 billion in 2018. About two-thirds of that $107.5 billion in revenue comes from mobile internet advertising, a statistic that is likely unsurprising to social media users. 

Since apps like Snapchat and Instagram have shifted their focus from growth to monetization, it’s impossible to log onto the apps without seeing advertisements and sponsored posts. Now think about what these advertisements look like. Like most posts on social media, they are flashy, devoid of substance and lack a unifying message. In short, they’re not memorable. And they don’t have to be. 

Companies don’t need to construct creative ad campaigns because they know who’s already likely to buy their products. All Nordstrom needs to do is show you images of clothes you’ve browsed the last day with a “proceed to checkout” button, and they’re golden. 

Modern-day advertising is about harvesting data about citizens and generating algorithmic tools that, as Vaidhyanathan explains, “focus resources on those most likely to be moved by tailored messages.” 

This is a startling contrast from marketing in the 1960s: advertisements were created to shape consumers’ desires—not merely reflect them. Nothing illustrates these opposing philosophies better than the interaction between Don Draper and Dr. Faye Miller in Season 4 of “Mad Men.” 

A consultant for a consumer research company, Dr. Miller held a focus group with the firm’s secretaries to explore their thoughts on a facial cream for a new ad campaign. Based on her findings, she recommends an advertising strategy linking Pond’s cream to matrimony. Don, insistent on going a different route, thinks her idea is old fashioned: “Hello, 1925,” he said mockingly. “A new idea is something they don’t know yet, so of course it’s not going to come up as an option. Put my campaign on TV for a year, hold another group; maybe it’ll show up.” 

It’s not just the loss of advertising as an art that’s worth mourning. There’s something hopeful about Don’s faith in the power of advertising to change public opinion—and something deeply unsettling about our current attempts to nudge consumers deeper into their regular patterns of buying, thinking and existing.

Carolyn Kuimelis is a sophomore economics major and opinion writer.