Tag: mattcreamer@gmail.com (Matthew Creamer)

It’s the evening of April 4, 1968, and a ballroom full of New York City advertising executives has just received word that Martin Luther King Jr. has been shot to death. The program they’ve assembled for, naturally, has ground to a halt. But after just a few minutes, the lights are repeatedly dimmed, beckoning the ad folk back to their tables.

Can this depiction on “Mad Men” possibly be how the ad industry really dealt with one of the most horrifying moments of the 20th century, a murder that threatened to destroy the civil-rights movement and push an already-fragile country toward the brink? Did they really think it was enough to have a half-assed assassination intermission, as though on a break during “Bye Bye Birdie”?

Actually, yes.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

via Advertising Age – Homepage http://adage.com/article/media/mad-men-recap-yep-ad-biz-reacted-a-1968-tragedy/241169/?utm_source=Media&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AdvertisingAge/Media

It seems almost unfair: Big brands like Lincoln Motor Co. and Johnnie Walker laid out big bucks for commercial time during the season premiere of “Mad Men,” but Koss Corp. slipped into the script without paying a cent. And there was no DVR-powered skipping through the headphone-maker’s airtime, either.

The downside for Koss, of course, was a total absence of control.

Koss, the Milwaukee-based company, only learned it was being used at the last minute and had absolutely no say on the matter. Like other brands written into “Mad Men”‘s universe, its executives didn’t see the episode before it aired or have any input on a script that used Koss in a central way: to allow Peggy Olson to show off her creative and crisis-management chops.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

via Advertising Age – Homepage http://adage.com/article/media/koss-headphones-capitalized-mad-men-role/240796/?utm_source=Media&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AdvertisingAge/Media